The generation that lived through the First World War in Europe was destroyed by the war, even if they survived the shell fire. It was the ‘lost generation’.
Most of the empires that went to war did not survive it. States rose, empires collapsed. In Britain, the recruitment of the “companion battalions” – people who came from the same place, mobilized together and fought together – led to the fact that in entire towns a generation was erased. In France, every fifth man between the ages of 20 and 30 is killed; Masses of women remain “engaged forever” – without married life and without partners. In Russia, the war was followed by a revolution, followed by a long and murderous civil war. And in Germany, which held large territories from France until the last moment, a whole and disgruntled generation of soldiers returned home, and many troubles were destined to grow from this.
‘There is nothing new in the West’, based (more or less) on the 1928 book by Erich Maria Remarque, tells the story of one of those soldiers, Paul Boehmer (Felix Kammerer), a patriotic young German who volunteers for the Imperial Army with his friends, arrives at the Western Front And there we encountered the inferno and the unimaginable horrors of trench warfare, the futile fighting and the endless bloodletting. Under the tutelage of an old and older soldier, Stanislas “Kat” Kaczynski (yes, the name is Polish in the original as well), played by Albrecht Schoch, and together with a whole series of soldiers whose names you will have trouble remembering, they try to survive the ongoing massacre.
At the same time, the anti-war politician Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Breihl, ‘Goodbye Lenin’) was sent to obtain a cease-fire agreement with the French, because the war situation was bad for the Germans; And General Friedrichs (David Streisov), a caricature of a grumpy Prussian officer opposed to any armistice or surrender agreement, does his best to send his troops into battle after battle after battle before a cease-fire arrives in hopes of achieving… something.
Beyond the above plot, ‘There is nothing new in the West’ tries to tell the story of the lost German generation, which found itself in the horrors of the World War. A generation whose childish patriotism, which led it to yearn to fight, was blasted by artillery, stabbed by bayonets, pierced by machine guns, killed and was killed. A generation whose remains, if they remained alive, returned in collective trauma, with the rear unable to understand them. The generation whose knowledge of life, as Remarque wrote, is reduced to the knowledge of death.
This is the third film adaptation of Remarque’s book, which caused a stir when it was published in the late 1920s; In a short time it was translated into many languages, and became a successful film. American, of course, with English-speaking actors. In 1979, another version was produced, an American TV movie, with an excellent slogan – “They went to war as boys, only to not return from it as men”. And now, a hundred years after the events, for the first time the film gets a German, German-speaking version, which presents the German side of the First World War, in a way that has never been seen before, in a film that should not only be the best description of the German side of the First World War, but GodA film about the First World War.
The problem is, he doesn’t succeed.
‘There’s nothing new in the West’ was praised almost from wall to wall, especially for the realistic depiction of the abrasive, vast and pointless war (this last point is debatable, but it is the prevailing perception). It has been compared to ‘Saving Private Ryan’, but the comparison is not flattering to ‘In the West’.
There is no doubt, the film is realistic, if by realistic we mean blood, severed limbs and horrors. But it wasn’t just the amount of artificial blood that made ‘Private Ryan’ what it is: it became the benchmark for war movies because it didn’t look like any movie before it, and after it it was impossible to show war movies the way they looked before. That is not the case here.
‘There’s nothing new in the West’ looks very similar to quite a few more and less well-known World War I films from the last decade – ‘War Horse’, ‘1917’, ‘Fashdale’, ‘Private Pisspool’ and others, and even earlier films like ‘Years of Engagement’ the french Of course, this should not disturb the viewer, and certainly not the viewer who does not suffer from the obscene habit of watching war movies excessively; But if the viewer has seen even one film about the First World War in the last decade, then at least part of the effect will work less on him.
To the film’s credit, it should be said that the cinematography is great. Although as mentioned the gray-blue color palette is the standard for World War I films today, but even with the standard you have to know how to work, and the film knows: in the opening scene, the transition from silence to hell is performed so smoothly that it takes a few seconds to understand what the eyes are seeing. There is not much new here, but what is there is well executed. One of the scenes at the beginning of the film, which follows the path of used uniforms, is superbly shot and quickly conveys the difficult German situation at the time, without the need to say too much.
The battle scenes are also impressive. The most impressive scene to me was in one shell crater, with the participation of two soldiers from enemy armies, and nothing else, and it was excellent because it conveyed the horror and inferno of war through their effect on the individual soldier, without the need for many stunts; The need to kill or be killed, the rapid transition between dying and being killed, and the lone soldier’s dealing with the fact that he killed, face to face and at short range, a human being like himself.
It’s not that there’s a lack of stunts: there are some really impressive big battle scenes, chief among them a battle scene involving a French tank assault (the St. Chamon tanks, which are very impressively recreated, although the little snoozer in me wakes up and says it’s best not to do close-ups on the wheels if as a result You can see that they actually took a Soviet vehicle from the 1970s and built on it a French vehicle from the 1970s 1).
The rest of the battle scenes are still effective and impressive, but they are mostly more and more of the same deadly mess: trench fighting here, trench fighting there, artillery here, artillery there. It’s probably relatively faithful to the spirit of the book, it’s impressive, but it’s not interesting enough, especially when the main impression in a large part of the battle scenes is mainly one big mess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fewueSTMBs
Naturally, war is indeed one big mess; But the film contributes to the mess by mixing up tenses and tactics freely. He is relatively accurate in his description of the French combined attacks, with the help of infantry, armor and tanks; but to present the appropriate atmosphere, he does a complete mish-mesh. In 1918, the time the film takes place, the Germans no longer stormed by running large and dense units over a long distance in the field The deserter. Fighting methods developed greatly, which allowed the Germans, in the spring of 1918, to break through the British and French lines in the ‘Kaiser’s Offensive’ (‘Operation Michael’), but their attack waned due to attrition, logistical difficulties and the reaction of their opponents; after that, the consenting countries – Great Britain, France, and their new ally the USA – for successful combined attacks, starting with the brilliant Battle of Hamel by the Jewish-Australian General John Monash, and ending with the “100 Day Offensive” from August-November 1918, which ended the war.
In any case, after four years of fighting, all the commanders already knew very well that dense forces have no chance of crossing a large no-man’s land in the face of machine guns and artillery, and they also knew that a long advance shelling does not help if the other side has time to recover and man the positions. If the battles in ‘There’s Nothing New in the West’ were realistic, they would feature relatively small units trying to infiltrate under the cover of a rolling screen of fire. But what we mostly have is lots and lots of soldiers running around in explosions, with body parts flying here and there, and then murderous close-range battles in the trenches. and again and again At what stage there is overload and it is difficult to understand what is happening.
The method that the film uses – to compress the combative events of years into single scenes – is of course not new. Other films have used it before, quite a few of the battle scenes are reminiscent of scenes from other films, and one of the prominent scenes that takes place near the scene with the tanks is suspiciously reminiscent of a scene from the series ‘Young Indiana Jones’, both in terms of the general structure, both in terms of appearance, and even in terms of use The dramatic in a particular weapon. Indeed, ‘There’s nothing new in the West’ has more of a budget for effects. But this compression creates a mess. You can defend it and say that it conveys the soldier’s experience of endless wear and tear, but precisely here it fails: instead of continuous wear and tear there are some highlights of battle scenes and these highlights are simply not good enough.
However, as the emotional impact of the fight scenes is clearly present, the inaccuracies and clutter in the film was also acceptable as it aimed to convey the atmosphere of trench warfare, rather than a specific battle description. After all, most viewers are not World War experts, and accuracy is far less interesting to them than emotional impact.
And here is the main problem of the film: it is indeed based on the book, but it is an independent work. So independent, that it undermines the message of the book itself, and what it offers instead is much less successful.
In a rather strange plot choice, the film begins in 1917. It’s strange, because it shows the enthusiasm of the innocent young men who run to fight and have no idea what awaits them; And that was certainly true in 1914. In 1917, the enthusiasm for the war had largely died down, and its price had already begun to be clear even in the German rear. Why did the movie bother to do that? Do not know. I guess most viewers won’t mind it, but what would the filmmakers lose from the period spacing to make it more realistic? It is not clear.
What is more obvious is that the changes in the film even under its title. The book ‘There is nothing new in the West’ was a book about the ordinary soldiers, when the senior commanders are far from the eye and the heart. It is about the lost generation itself, and its senders – the teachers, commanders, leaders – appear less and less the more senior and distant they are. The movie, however, puts them back into the picture, and it doesn’t work.
The non-fight scenes are, for the most part, the kind that every war movie watcher has seen before. It is probably impossible to avoid this, since the experience of the soldier in the First World War, as well as the clichés of war films, will be shown more than once in the cinema. If ‘Private Ryan’ has already been mentioned in this review, it too is largely a travel film, whose battle scenes, direction and cinematography turned it from ‘another film’ into ‘the film’ about World War II; In contrast to this, in ‘The West’ there is a collection of scenes, some of which take place one after the other without much effect or a unifying line – and it doesn’t really work.
Some of the ‘small’ scenes are very successful: a desperate search for a missing German company; The joy of a magnified meal that comes because of particularly bad circumstances, and more. But breaking the story of the ordinary and confused soldier to jump every now and then to strategy and trying to end the war leaves the film not focused enough. The soldier’s routine – front, attack, defense, shelling, patrols, rest in the rear, and again, and again – is interrupted here and there by Ertzberger, the German generals are not satisfied with him and the French lack any willingness to compromise or give up, and he tries to end the war quickly and save as much as possible Haim (Also, it is almost impossible to remember from the movie that it was the Germans who invaded Belgium and France; in general, the good relationship between a German soldier and a local young woman plays a small but important role in the movie, and Marshal Poch, the commander of the French army (Thiabe de Montalbert), is adamant that he wants to humiliate Germany. It seems that a little more perspective would have helped here).
Another storyline, of General Friedrichs, the German officer who is not ready to give up on the imminent surrender, is just annoying. Friedrichs is a (probably) fat, mustached and bald Prussian who not only looks like a caricature of a bloodthirsty German officer, but also plays in the exact same way. Every time he came into the movie, I got a headache. His whole purpose is to roll the plot towards the climactic scene at the end, but he does it in an exaggerated and extreme way as if he were the villain in an old movie (or, to be precise, a less successful German version of one of the French commanders in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory). In fact, his services are only required because the film makes another decision: to end at the end of the First World War.
The report that “there is nothing new in the West” was the official German message, which hides the ongoing killing of the war. But in the film, the title has no meaning: the climax of the film comes because in the West there is everything new. There is an imminent ceasefire. The statesman tries to get her, the general opposes her, the soldiers are waiting for her to arrive. Due to this choice, the film turns from a film about the ‘lost generation’ into another story about the hard-hearted generals who do not consider the lives of their soldiers, a story that has been told over and over and over again about the First World War (not always rightly so, by the way).
A story with impressive effects, some very good scenes, but in the end – another war movie. Not groundbreaking. Not bad. no more. There is nothing new on the screen.
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