A young Kubrick delivers a stonecold war movie classic

Rating: Null/10 (15 November 2008)

Who'd have thought that at such a young age, and coming after the decent but largely unremarkable heist noir of THE KILLING, Kubrick had it in him to deliver a flat-out, stonecold war movie classic? Had Kubrick decided to renounce the aesthetic grandeur and epic scope of his later films, he could always have had a brilliant and successful career as a genre director. His visual sense is certainly competent at this point but his directing is still very much that of a genre director.
He's not trying, possibly not even caring or daring to at this point, to break the norm but rather work inside it the best he can. It is however the mark of a director well on his way to greater things that he nails the themes, conflicts and most striking images of the movie with just five tracking shots - General Mireau inspecting the shellshocked soldiers inside the trench, Col. Dax moving through the trenches before the attack, Col. Dax and the division moving through the wartorn battlefield full of ditches and old fenceposts, the guests of General Broulard dancing, and finally the three soldiers being escorted to their deaths.
Interested more in the moral dilemmas pertaining to war and those who wage it as opposed to the physical act of war itself, emphasizing the absurdity and futility of sending out men to die by the thousands for a couple yards of shellshocked dirt, perhaps the best observation on the human nature Paths of Glory has to offer is that idealism has no place in the act of war. War is so far removed from notions of decency and common sense that bringing idealism in it as an afterthought appears out of touch with reality.
Although Kirk Douglas portraying Col. Dax, and doing a formidable job at it, is presented to us as the hero in a conventional sense, the selfsame idealist in the heart of darkness that has been the driving force of many a war movie, and he does raise some interesting questions, he is essentially a man deeply contradictory to his own nature and his own choices within it: can a man sworn to service in the army call issues of a moral nature? At what point are any and all such questions deemed completely irrelevant? Is for example Col. Dax in the end any less responsible for the deaths of his men than the generals who ordered this futile attack?
I believe some answers are to be found in the philosophy of Judge Holden from Blood Meridian, perhaps the most frightening of literary antagonists ever to be summoned on paper. What this gnostic archon, war everlasting, tells us is that war is the ultimate form of divination because it allows for the individual to be completely susbumed in the whole, the obliteration of will and ego. Reading the scanned pages of an old book from the Civil War-era, written by a Confederate army surgeon, I remember coming across a passage that referred to amputations to be carried out at the field of battle; as the surgeon explained from his own experience, not only are even the most coward of men consumed in the pandemonium of battle and capable for the most heroic deeds, but wounded soldiers will more easily sit through amputations when the battlefield is sight or the sounds of battle can be heard.