All Quiet On The Western Front (2022)

The book upon which this movie is basedupon came out in 1929 as a scathing indictment on WWI and Germany's role in it--so much senseless loss of life and destruction. A million men wounded or killed in the Battle of the Somme alone, and from start to finish, until the Armistice, the battle lines moved only a few miles back and forth. The author was vilified for it, and was exiled from Germany. The story remains the same, ever faithful to the original, in its gruesome, stripped down depiction of the battles, the generals, and the war itself. Paul Bäumer is an 18 year old student who, three years into the war, enlists in the Imperial German Army to fight for the fatherland. He is soon sent to the Western Front, a place where millions of soldiers have already gone to their deaths, and he survives--he changes, he becomes all sorts of things, but heroic isn't one of them. The very best part of this movie for me is the score, which is brilliant and horrific. I heard the composer in an interview talking about the signature sound of the score, the one that signals that even worse things are about to happen--and it turns out they are made my his great-grandmother's harmonium, an instrument that dates back to the war, and he uses it to indelibly imprint upon the audience that sound to be associated with dread. Well done and hard to watch, especially as Russians impose these same horrors on Ukraine right now in modern times.