When a man stand face to face with death surviving is not an adventure.

Rating: Null/10 (12 July 2006)

It's not easy to recognize the artistic value of this movie without reading Remarque's original book version first so I suggest you read the book first before seeing the movie.All Quiet on the Western Front is a unique work of art because above all it is not a war movie where you find heroism,bravery or undaunted warfare deeds.This is the story of Paul Bäumer-a young man of nineteen who fights in the German army on the French front in World War I with his classmates Tjaden, Müller,Albert etc...They are actually enlisted in the army voluntarily after listening to the passionate over-patriotic speeches of their teacher, Kantorek. But after experiencing brutal training at the hands of the unassertive,ignorant, and authoritarian Corporal Himmelstoss and the inconceivable brutality of life on the front,Paul and his friends start to question the value of nationalism and patriotism. Thay start to ask how the war started anyway and who the major provoker of this meaningless brutality was?Among the monotony of the artillery fire,the difficulty of finding some decent food,their pushing their luck for fleeing from the inescapable death shows them they are fighting the war for a few persons whom they have never met and most likely never will. They are the only people that can gain anything from this war, not Paul and his friends. The movie displays the brutality of the war not by means of one-to-one combat in the field. The director regularly shows the bombardment fields and how soldiers are trying to flee from their death not they are running to fight.The after-amputation scenes in which soldiers presume that their legs just hurt as if they really had their legs,the difficulty of finding food in the dugouts surrounded by artillery bombardments,the struggle to survive in the trenches depict the cruelties of war and how these soldiers are disconnected from emotions like grief,benignancy,and fear and each being turned into a robotic mechanism who tries to survive under these circumstances.
The bombardment scenes in the movie are purely realistic even by today's standards.To shot such warfare scenes which look realistic even today must require a lot of cinematic skills but the acting is merely melodramatic and gushy at some points like Paul's crying out "Oh Albert I've come back". The soldiers who are supposed to be isolated from their humanly emotions are not supposed to display such acting I suppose.It just spoils the perfection of the movie. That's only fault I could see in the movie.One note for those who both read the book and saw the movie: Definitely read the sequel of the book: The Road Back which details the post-bellum life of young men in Germany who have returned from the trenches of World War I and are trying to sort their life out back into the society.