Change of Plans

Rating: 10/10 (16 April 2008)

When the United States entered World War I., Americans became somewhat enthusiastic at the titillating involvement for national emergency that our nation was ready to emerge in!! Removed from the tumultuousness of combat in central Europe, the United States had manufactured a conception of WWI as a scenario of glamorized heroics!! Once defense and attack initiatives commenced in Germany, as well as many other battleground nations in Europe, the entire plethora of unfriendly combat zones now evoked an onslaught of many visceral displays of distasteful reality!! World War I was known as one of the bloodiest wars in history!! Relentless in the pursuit of patriotic cause, the United States marched through Europe during WWI with rose colored glasses on!! These elements of apocalyptic miscalculation were what articulated some fatal delusions of grandeur!! This complicated rancor was the primary focus to the film "All Quiet on the Western Front". "All Quiet on the Western Front" is considered by movie experts to be one of the greatest films ever made!! This website ranks this film 207th best film out of the top 250 films ever made!! AFI (American Film Institute) ranks "All Quiet On The Western Front" one of the top 100 American films to ever hit the cinema!! Such accolades are largely due to the fact that the emotional revelations of WWI which this film necessitates, presented themselves with a very disconcerting premise; in turn, it became something that served as a stark awareness to the American public!! Lewis Milestone directs this film, he directed "Pork Chop Hill" and was very involved in the making of "I Want You"; Both of these films are Korean War films, Lewis Milestone pinpoints the dismal realities of the cerebral repercussions of American military conflicts!! A bittersweet concept emanating from the film "All Quiet On The Western Front" is that there is always a tragic price paid for getting involved in a war!! All three of these war films delve into the devastating aftermath of battling in the trenches. These acts were veritable nightmares which resulted in killing the enemy for survival!! The desperation to comprehend such remorseful consequences, which initially started out as a preconceived camaraderie, that eventually became a line of logic which was thoroughly vitiated in every conceivable manner, wound up being a ubiquitous form of psychological disarray for all the American soldiers coming home. The aggregate tragedy from WWI which this film "ALL Quiet on the Western Front" depicted, left the movie audience spellbound!!!! Bear in mind, in 1930, American movies were all about escapism, not about the scathing moral drawbacks to wartime combat!! The movie "All Quiet on the Western Front" is based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, and, the film expedites the same candor as the novel does about what the acrimonious truth to what World War I was actually about.. The end of the film depicts how the guise of national omnipotence, which translated to the loss of thousands of young lives for questionable motives, became something that the United States government was peccant for!! "All Quiet on the Western Front" won for best picture in 1930, deservedly so too!! This movie encompassed many components of a devastating interruption to a glossy and stilted mendacity which the American movie goer was accustomed to accepting!! I do not think that any other movie up until 1930, the year that "All Quiet On The Western Front" was produced, had accomplished such an unprecedented feat!! THIS IS AN ABSOLUTELY MARVELOUS MOVIE!!