What is it about anyway

Rating: Null/10 (3 August 2004)

I just rented it and was completely astonished. I had seen everything Kubrick did after this movie and never imagined it could top all the others so distinguishedly. It has ten times the human content any other of his movies has.
SPOILERS
Another reader said what comes through most is the absence of hope. I think he kind of felt the same I felt, but I think it is more precise to talk of inevitability. Every little part of the plot makes you think of it: you just try to figure out HOW the poor men can be saved - and the fact is that they have a lot going on for them, such as the great lawyer, and the general's embarrassment - but somehow they don't even get close. They must die. Why? Because the assault was a failure? Why was it a failure? Because it was impossible to succeed anyway. Then why was it attempted? Because the target was there, and the army must go for the targets. What if they had advanced? They would die from German bullets. Deserted? Fire squad too. Not enlisted? They were probably drafted. Could at least that war never have happened? You get a feeling that, no, it was also inevitable, as long as there are countries. And the movie does not suggest that countries are things that can disappear. As long as human beings exist, and as long as there is society, the three soldiers must be executed.
In the film, there are people in power, making decisions, you despise them, but you don't really feel that those generals killed the 3 men. The feeling you get is that the country killed them. During the trial there is an opposition between membership in the human race and membership in the army - if you look at them as soldiers, they must die; if as humans, they must live. The audience takes the second position, the court, being military, takes the first. That means that the film is about the most fundamental truth about human condition - the inevitability of death.
That truth is so simple and fundamental that it may be too obvious, and therefore superficial. But the film focus on something more specific - the fact that the inevitability of death, being universal, puts us in the same condition. On one hand, it makes us all brothers, and human brotherhood is portrayed beautifully in the last scene. France is in war w/ Germany, but you don't see any German in the film except from the beautiful and frail girl in the end singing words they do not understand but with feelings every soldier there knows - the beauty and fragility of life. It is no coincidence that the melody is so incredibly simple. That fellowship is not unknown to the judges, and Kirk Douglas appeals to it. But they just have to overlook it.
On the other, there is the fact that each of us dies his or her on death, and each of us do not want to die. Somehow the film says that such condition throws us against each other, because we want others to die before us (in the case of the general, he has so much to lose that losing his post is the great men's equivalent to death for the simple - in this film, officers don't get killed, period), and therefore we will never be truly brotherlike to the other - hence, perhaps, the inevitability of the war you feel in the film. In one sense, "Paths of Glory" is not anti-war because it definitely does not imply that war is something evitable. The movie reminds us that war is an inhumane situation, but does not suggest we can abolish it. In another sense, it IS anti-war in the sense that there is NO reason for us not to lament war. There is no reason for us to find anything glorious or dignifying in war. Nothing, nothing in war is great - the title is definitely ironic.
Conclusion: despite all Kubrick's technical marvel of his later movies, nothing in his other works comes as deep as "paths of glory".