If you love gritty war stories that totally reek of death with gruesome, violent action scenes, then you will be severely disappointed with “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
Originally released as a book written by Erich Maria Remarque in 1929, converted into a film the following year, then remade in 1979. “All Quiet on the Western Front” details the events of the First World War from a German soldier’s perspective. We follow Paul Baumer as he is pressured by his teacher to go into the depths of the harsh, death-filled battlefields of World War I as he watches various members of his platoon meet their demise one by one.
Despite the fact this movie was released in the late seventies, the acting was atrocious. Watching the actors attempt to act out their characters’ deaths was both overly dramatic and long.
It appeared as if their characters’ last instinctual action to do before dying was to break out and start dancing while on fire. It was humorous to actually watch a character die. If watched closely enough, you could see most of the dead soldiers still breathing.
The way they would transition from one sequence to the next was awfully confusing. It would begin with a struggle on a battlefield during the middle of the war then jump back to when they were told to join the army and jump back to watch someone die. It became easy to get lost after the third leap back and just continued to go with the film.
The movie was very “bi-polar” when it came to sound. During the battles, the sound of mortar shells being fired into the air and colliding with the ground drowned out most of the dialogue. It was explosions and gunshots right to left, and right after these battles you would be watching these extremely quiet scenes which involved only quiet talking.
While this was supposed to detail the hardships faced by the German soldiers of World War I, it was just excessive explosions and monotone voice overs. The plot was butchered with the odd time-jumps; this movie doesn’t deserve more than two or even one star.
Frankly this film was not enjoyable and hopefully the book was much better.
