All Quiet on the Western Front – 7.9

As movies showing the horror of war go, this is hard to beat–more realistic and thus more powerful than 1917. In fact, that is perhaps the sole purpose of the film. There are characters, but we are told nothing about them, any more than we know about the pawn or the knight on a chessboard. The wastefulness, uselessness and stupidity of World War I trench warfare hits even harder when we have read that morning of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers locked in similar combat. What a species are we! My only complaint, and it’s not insignificant, is that the 2-1/2 hour film is a half-hour too long. I kept identifying welcome and appropriate endings, only to have the camera find one more battle, one more wound to the gut to show. [Although a Netflix film, this needs to be seen on the very wide screen of a movie theater.]