If you’re able to put aside the original, impressive 1930s film version and the 1979 remake, and also the novel, and not get distracted by making comparisons, then you are in for a moving and engrossing experience watching All Quiet On The Western Front. This movie has to be appreciated on its own terms alone. I’m just watching it now for the second time and absorbing every powerful moment of it.
For me, this new version is the greatest war movie of all time.
Why? Firstly, because it is an anti-war movie, written, directed and acted with great passion and care and there’s not many of them around anymore. Offhand, I can’t think of one current anti-war movie. The more popular genre of ‘war is hell but it’s still entertainment’ should always take second place. There is a new plot for this version, and it’s a rather unusual one inspired by the title, but nothing ‘positive’ is achieved in it, there is no heroic mission completed as in 1917, not even surviving, and that’s also why I like it, because it’s the most valid definition of war.
It’s painful to watch in places and I’m sure the original regional accents add greatly to the German version, but it is still a masterpiece. For so many reasons, in particular its mesmerising detail, which reminded me of the detail Joe Colquhoun, artist-creator of my Charley’s War, put into our story. The designer as well as the director deserve an award for it. The unique, discordant and threatening music is really disturbing. The chilling tanks and flamethrower scenes bear out my premise in Charley’s War that the Great War was the first science fiction war. And it is also noteworthy for showing a gentler and human side to the Germans that is usually lacking from British movies depicting both World Wars.
Its greatest achievement is that such a film even got made in this dark age of censorship. But, as we know from The Crown, Netflix is thankfully outside the grip of the British State.
A British equivalent to this movie is impossible. 1917 is not it. Britain is still remarkably jingoistic and it’s getting worse. Thus SAS – Rogue Heroes, released around the same time, is brilliantly written, exciting to watch, and is clearly authentic, but… Why a but? Because it features yet another fucking upper class British hero! This time it’s Stirling, undoubtedly courageous, but a man with a death wish leading a squad of brutal SAS soldiers. I do wish the BBC would stop endlessly pounding its state propaganda into our heads, holding up our ruling class as heroes to be worshipped, revelling in past glories and conditioning us so we are ready to cheer for whatever ‘our brave lads’ are covertly up to today in the Ukraine and elsewhere. The leaders are always from Eton or – in Sterling’s case, the Catholic equivalent: the dubious Ampleforth. I know a fair amount about Ampleforth in this era and it’s hardly surprising Stirling was so fucked up. At least one other well known Ampleforth alumni – the British officer hero Robert Nairac – also had a death wish. The uncomfortable truth is – where war is concerned – Britain is the most blatantly brainwashed and censored country in Western Europe, which I’ve exampled in past articles during and after the centenary years. As a result, Blackadder Goes Forth was not shown widely on TV in the centenary years, Charley’s War was optioned by a major TV production company but not made, Oh, What A Lovely War played to packed theatre audiences, but the film was never screened. And so much more.
By comparison, All Quiet On The Western Front comes as a breath of fresh air from all this behind the scenes, creepy manipulation. It leads the way for more such films, although I doubt from Britain. The Germans are to be congratulated for making it. I’ve been told that young Germans today know little about the Great War. It’s been wrongly merged in their minds with the Second World War and this film can only help to correct such a dangerous misconception. To show new generations that ordinary German and French soldiers were not to blame. But rather the officer class and the politicians of all the warring nations. In fact, Germany deserved to be praised for its ordinary sailors putting an end to the Great War with the Kiel mutiny. The British were planning to keep the war going until at least 1920, despite our own mutinies.
I hope the film helps to lift the guilt trip which I know German friends of mine, born long after the war, have suffered from. When I visited the graves of the Western Front, I was dismayed to see that the graves of the German dead have ‘second class’ status. All are not equal in death. The authorities kept that pretty quiet. I was told that German visitors were comparatively rare, which is sad, because their culture especially honours its dead, as anyone who has seen Berlin cemeteries on All Souls Night – with the graves illuminated by candles – will know.
So All Quiet On The Western Front is not just another war movie. It has an important role to play today in conveying the truth to a German and an Anglo-American audience. It’s a truth that certainly in Britain the State has gone out of its way to hide. Thus the groundbreaking books Hidden History and Prolonging the Agony – that detail how the British and American establishment deliberately extended the Great War by three and a half years – are not reviewed by our government controlled media. But these vitally important books have still reached the public, found their audience, and are now available in German translations.
That’s encouraging and positive news. Young Germans can now discover that the Treaty of Versailles, where their forefathers were forced to sign a ‘war guilt or else’ clause, was a lie. It’s foreshadowed in the film with remarkably detailed and informative scenes on the actual signing of the Armistice. It shows the ruling class on the German and Allied sides – the class the BBC so slavishly adores and wants us to venerate with heroes like Sterling – are the real war criminals. All Quiet On the Western Front is an important part of getting the truth out there.
Mr. Mills, Pat - you have been spoken of only in awed reverence for decades in this household. I hesitate to use the over-used hyperbolic phrase 'life-changing', but if anyone or anything did, culturally speaking, for myself and siblings, it was and is your sterling efforts. I can only add that I am in complete agreement with everything you write above. More than that - what you have said here, and in previous installments, is like a refreshing glass of sanity in an atmosphere of fetid, cultivated hysteria. To read such words is to be liberated from the suffocating, oppressive, jingoistic, propagandising, money-mad status-chasing straitjacket of the present. I must also mention two points from a previous post that made me cheer: your thoughts on the communal aspects of storytelling and creativity, and the story of yourself and Kevin O'Neill writing in a crowded pub. These are things that are genuinely inspiring. Genuinely, no phony, cynical bullshit. It's made me get corny (forgive me) - Pat Mills might rightly hate superheroes, but he is one! And he uses comics as Magick. The reader does not leave a Pat Mills comic unchanged. They are brainbombs that reroute consciousness. Many have been saved from a drab, robot existence. Underestimate his power at your peril!
After a review like that, there's only one choice for this coming Friday night movie!