All Quiet on the Western Front (2/5 Stars)

“All Quiet on the Western Front”, the 1929 novel by Erich Remarque must be in the public domain. That would explain why Director Andrew Berger felt entitled to copy and paste the title onto a movie that bears little resemblance to the original work. True, the names of the soldiers are the same, and the movie takes place on the Western Front in World War I, but the tone and content are different and the message, well, I know the movie wants to be anti-war, and surely that was the intent, but I doubt such a message would be received by the audience when the trench warfare therein resembles an awesome video game.

Surely, a large part of the blame for this movie comes from the success of Sam Mendes’s 2019 World War I feature “1917”. I wrote a review back then that criticized the plot, essentially stating that its main character's mission path back and forth between enemy lines in a race against time was inherently contradictory with the truth of World War I, which was about sitting in a muddy trench for months on end hoping that an artillery shell didn’t randomly land on your head. Well, who am I to say I know the experience of World War I? All I can say is that I listened to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History episodes on the subject and I’ve read Erich Remarque’s novel “All Quiet on the Western Front”. The literal translation of that title in the original German comes out as “Nothing Happened in the West”. Although based on the author’s first hand experiences, the novel references no actual battles and much time and space is paid to impress upon the reader as to how little is accomplished when fighting does occur. I am aware of how hard it would be to make an exciting war movie out of a military situation in which nothing happens, and when it does, nothing changes and it’s all just a brutal waste of people and time. However, it would seem to me that this would be the task, and the only point in making a so-called “message movie” about the horrors of World War I (and especially an adaptation of this particular book) is to attempt the task. If you aren’t going to attempt the task, why adapt this book at all? 

The creators here don’t attempt the task. Actually, they appear to be taking pains to avoid it. It would seem that they didn’t believe the story of “All Quiet on the Western Front” could stand on its own, perhaps not having high enough stakes. To help out, the movie introduces a B plot about a German officer named Mattias Erzberger played by Daniel Bruhl. This officer is tasked with negotiating a peace deal with the French. We are told that the longer the peace deal is delayed, a certain amount of men are killed on the front each day, one of those men being Paul Baumer (played by Felix Kammerer) the main character from the novel. So now we have our ticking clock. Paul Baumer is in a chase with time to survive the war. He only needs to make it months, now weeks, now days, now minutes before the armistice is called! The suspense!

This movie is garnering a lot of critical praise and plenty of awards nominations. Surely, we can all see that it has good production value, and good cinematography, and good (nay I say great) makeup (Paul’s face is repeatedly plastered with several varying layers of multi-colored mud). I am reminded of Roger Ebert’s criticism of war movies, in that competent ones generally fail in their anti-war message by virtue of their competence. That is, once a war movie has a battle scene that is artfully drawn and competently staged, it will not fail to be exciting, and in doing so, titillate all our pro-war sensations. This is very much the case in this movie. In one scene, Paul Baumer moves through an enemy trench with the speed and sure aim of a Call of Duty gamer. In a later part of the same sequence, in contradiction to all known military tactics, waves of counterattacks are organized by type (first tanks, then flamethrowers etc.) which move past infantry ranks needlessly exposing themselves to absurd lateral attacks. It should go without saying that none of this nonsense is in the book.

Sometimes a scene from the book pops up in the movie, looking embarrassed as if it does not know what it is doing there. In the book, Paul Baumer gets caught in a bomb crater in No-Man’s Land with an enemy soldier that he kills in hand-to-hand combat. Then, because of the nature of the war, Paul has to wait in that crater for an entire day before he can escape to his line during the night. During the long boring hours of the day, he becomes obsessed with the man he killed, at one point rifling through his possessions, finding that he was a baker, and promising the dead man that he will take up his profession as reparation for killing him. Paul does get back to his line eventually and, once there, is struck by how quickly his all consuming obsession dissipates. Of course he’s not going to become a baker. What a silly notion. This scene shows up in the movie, but because it is sandwiched between two action scenes, it is hurried through, and the entire point of it is lost. Paul kills a man in hand-to-hand combat and then feels bad about it. But before he can even look through the man’s pockets, the next scene starts and Paul is running for his life again. There isn’t the guilty promise nor the realization that the promise didn’t mean anything. Both would have taken time (in movie time and real time) to set up and this movie does not have the patience for either.

In other scenes, although there ought to be enough drama going on, the movie spices things up by going overboard. In the book, a man has his leg amputated and lapses into depression about it. In the movie, this same man decides to commit suicide by repeatedly jabbing a sharp stick into his throat.  The director thought it best to show us the scene as it happens. It is one thing to show men getting shot while charging machine gun fire when in reality they were shot by charging machine gun fire. But why make up scenes of brutality? Why isn’t the real brutality enough? I can say the same for the ending, which is contrived and manipulative and has no place in a serious movie. World War I actually happened and it was terrible. A movie respects the experience by showing it as it was, not better than it was, and not worse. For all its other merits, this movie fails its core mission.

Captain America: Civil War (4/5 Stars)

At least once a year I feel the need to point out the moral ambituity of large-scale action sequences in modern blockbusters, specifically the untold and unfelt thousands of deaths that necessarily must occur when entire cities are reduced to rubble. I had been crying in the wilderness to nobody in parituclar about this for so long that I expected that I would continue to do it indefinitely. Imagine my pleasant surprise then when Marvel’s new movie, “Captain America: Civil War” not only admits the reality of human collateral damage but makes it the focal conflict for the entire story.

It starts with a covert operation in an African country by Captain America, Black Widow, Hawk, and Scarlett Witch (new to me but apparently introduced before). A bad guy is trying to steal a biological weapon. The fight starts in a parking lot moves to an office building and finally ends in a crowded marketplace. The bad guy has a suicide bomb in which he means to kill everybody. Scarlett Witch, whose mutant power is to telekinesis, moves the bomb explosion from the marketplace to the air but miscalculates and ends up killing about fifteen people in an office building. The Avengers given that they are conducting vigilante military operations are held suspect for this outcome. A proposal is passed to give the United Nations oversight over the Avengers.

Iron Man, aka Tony Stark, feels guilty enough for this occurrence (The fifteen dead were charity workers although any fifteen dead people would have been good enough for me) to support the resolution. Captain America, coming out against democracy, believes that the resolution would stop him from taking action for or against whatever he deems himself to be important. It may be obvious whose side I am taking in this conflict. I’m with Iron Man all the way. Captain America apparently thinks he knows better than entire democratic societies. That is the sort of behavior that gives Freedom a bad name.

The amount of characters and superheroes already introduced in this umpteenth of Marvel movies makes listing all of them and the actors playing them time prohibitive, but they line up in equal numbers on each side. Thankfully Thor and The Hulk are somewhere else, as their presence would seriously tip the scale against the more destructible members of the Avengers. The action sequences are better and more entertaining than previous Marvel movies. This is because instead of relying on the spectactles getting bigger and more explosive, the superheroes fight themselves (and thus aren’t nameless pushovers) and thus humor and creativity have to be employed to make sure nobody gets embarrassed. The abandoned airport fight is especially good. Also, as I said before, no massive human collateral occurs. The result is a very enjoyable movie and my favorite Marvel movie so far.

Joining the Marvel universe for the first time is SpiderMan (the other two Sony franchises have not happened in this particular franchise) and Black Panther. Now this is a good opportunity for a compare and contrast between what is considered to be one of the most beloved characters of Marvel and what is sure to be the most boring.

Spiderman, aka Peter Parker, is a dorky teenager who lives with his Aunt May in Queens, New York. Black Panther is the handsome well-mannered prince of the aforementioned African nation. When Stan Lee created Spiderman, his stated intention was to give the character all the regular flaws a teenager generally has like immaturity, acne, and a hopeless crush on a girl. Such honesty and relatability became endearing pushing Spiderman to an upper echelons of popular superheroes. Black Panther, in contrast, seems to be a corporate marketing committee’s response to an outcry for political correctness. He stands in like Two-fer in “30 Rock” as proof that the corporation believes black people can be noble, properly educated, and not sidekicks. It is perhaps a good thing that the effort was made but the fact that they went about it in a way that crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s goes a long way in making the character generally unrelatable and almost as important, boring. He has no flaws and by the end of the movie his one conflict is resolved. I can’t imagine what will happen in the next movie that will allow the character to learn and grow in complexity. Perhaps he will join Thor battling interstellar ice monsters. Peter Parker as we all know has a long journey ahead of him since not incidentally he starts from a far humbler beginning.

(I doubt anyone else has noted this but the term ‘black panther’ refers to the militant wing of an oppressed poor minority group. Is it not culturally insensitive for a wealthy member of a ruling majority class to appropriate the moniker? Or does this not count because they are both black.)

But enough about this. I really liked the movie and would recommend it to anyone interested in seeing a blockbuster. The humor, the action, and most importantly the maturity set it apart from most others. Finally I have added the original Captain America movie to my DVD queue. For the first time I have wanted to see it and fill in that particular gap in my Marvel movie knowledge.