As demanded by no one, my review of AQOTWF.

I have already done a little piece on this film where I commented on the excessive use of the color blue in the trailer.

War is Blue - All Quiet On The Western Front

What’s in a color?

Fallout

SPOILERS - CAVEAT EMPTOR - CAVE CANIS

This review is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for viewing this is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of an afternoon lost and destroyed by the blue.

[Quotes are from the book except obviously the paraphrased paragraph above]

Yes it is bad.

Appropriately enough, the first shot is blue/navy.

And so is the next.

And the third shot.

Well that looks fine doesn’t it…

Except somebody has run a ‘cool’ filter on the image. PS Those wolfy foxes look rather like my sadly deceased doggie :(

And after the lair, wtf was that, we have a cool forest. Cool as in blue.

What’s the symbolism in this. It looks more Norwegian than German. Or it could be North American. Or Russian.

Next is the famously blue mud of the Western Front. BTW The opening sequence was utter pretentious boring shite.

I thought there was going to be a nice master shot into the blue trench but they couldn’t handle that. The cinematography here is already predictably budget epic. And did I mention blue?

Okay why are the Germans doing a stupid charge in little packets of men? Without forming up?

Lucky for them they don’t actually encounter any proper wire fencing but just charge between neat little wire hedgehogs.

Well at least he used the shovel for fighting.

Its blue of course. Notice he is a chubby bloke.

Lots of blue corpses.

Frag this color scheme. Blue shoes.

Blue coffins.

They are TAKING THE FRAGGING PISS.

Blue train.

The famous blue seamstresses of Mönchengladbach.

Hard times for Smurfette.

A blue town in the famous ‘North’ of Germany in 1917. A highly homogenous and compact area.

‘North Germany’ in 1914. Notice how it starts in the Netherlands and ends in Russia.

(via https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/german-empire-1914)

Everybody remarkably clean and prosperous in 1917 as Germany was literally starving to death and where did they get the rubber for their bicycle wheels?

Private cars. Lots of them. In World War I Germany. With a petrol shortage. In World War I Germany. When the army needed vehicles. I don’t think so.

We don’t establish that Paul was trying to be a poet. I don’t remember him faking his enlistment ‘permission’ (whatever that is).

Iron youth, yeah ok. Would have worked better in a letter. And why is Kantorek Hitler gesticulating. And don’t they have an auditorium. At a school. In ‘Northern Germany’. He really is doing the full Hitler. Fatherland.

Okay its messing with the chronology, Paul signed up in 1915 or 1916 I think. Not 1917.

Thin kid gets chubby bloke uniform.

PS What was it with foxes at the beginning of the film?

Everything is destroyed. Why? Have they been retreating? That’s some long range artillery fire.

Not going to screen capture the blue trenches.

I think the sergeant would have said something about putting a rifle barrel up into the rain. Maybe Smurf rain doesn’t rust.

Okay this 1917. Wouldn’t this be the Hindenburg Line in 1917? Which wasn’t this sort of ‘primitive’ trench? Trenches were used for storage and admin with defense in depth between seperated posts and MEBU.

No, the Germans wouldn’t be bailing out the Hindenburg Line (which wasn’t a trench line) with their stalhelms.

And the trenches are wrong. There wouldn’t be any of this type in 1917 on the German side, they’re copying British and French films badly but if there were any of this type they would have had firing steps.

Not the incredibly deep AND WIDE (deadly) AND STRAIGHT (deadly) trenches we see in this film. Wide and straight means a shell comes in and kills a lot of people. We see some ladders but you don’t fight from a ladder.

Okay they’re fresh but why are these idiots sticking their heads out.

He gets shot somewhere. Did his helmet save him? That’s not how they worked in WW1. I mean a modern ballistic helmet against a high power rifle from back then… not good.

Cool battlefield shots.

Boring.

Pretentious.

Yeah a shallow bunker like that would be worthless.

A two minute bombardment. Two minutes.

And bloke gets shredded at bunker entrance. Well that blast would have also killed everybody in the bunker.

Yeah that bunker was useless. Except Germans didn’t build bunkers like that with two inches of soil over timber.

The bunker floor has also moved two meters above the level of the trench. And it shrank to two meters by two meters because of the explosion.

(Paul is getting out the ruined bunker here. A bunker that is at ground level)

This is cheap, lazy and bad film-making.

Explain to me how the trenches have got filled in and now his head is sticking out (in daylight) over the level of the trenches.

Did the French nuke these trenches? Is this Verdun with siege artillery firing?

Jump in time to 7 November 1918 I suppose.

By German (Prussian) law, only blue is allowed for clothing. And curtains.

Okay so none of the character building. None of that. Just jump the days after the Battle of Amiens. Its like a porn film where you go from the plumber at the door and now its the big finale suddenly without the bits in between. Or so I’ve heard.

Blue ties for supervisors in blue suits wearing blue glasses.

They’re taking the piss by now - Champagne the famously BLUE country.

Suspiciously modern.

Farmer would have been shot for this and I think farmers’ arms were confiscated.

I could be wrong. Phil will know.

Look I know I’m going on about this but they are all wearing blue. The pot is blue, the buckets are blue, the caps are blue, the clothes are blue.

FFS.

The peasant girls in the field are dressed in blue but I’m not going to screenshot that.

GOTT IM HIMMEL

Reading family letters on a toilet rack. Well that’s very poignant and contrasting, it’s the new Tarantino. Do these men have trench constipation? Thank God, that was the longest scene in the film. Talking on the toilet. And they don’t sit in the ‘freezing’ cold (frost on the ground) chatting trouserless. In the book they have stalls - “square, neat boxes with wooden sides all round, and have unimpeachably satisfactory seats”. Not freezing your arse off.

I still know nothing about them.

Tedious and cheap walking-around scenes that don’t build anything ensue.

Is this a post-apocalyptic film? Set in a world after war? Not France occupied by legions of Germans running a ferocious military occupation system? As covered in Phil’s book BTW.

Somebody call Dan Kaszeta, the French actually invented instant murder gas during WW1. Silent and kills where you stand. Actually nanomachines. Murder nanomachines.

Look how neatly they all lay down. Like they’re having a kip. Zzzz.

FFS.

Pull out the chateau general trope why don’t you.

What’s this fragging stab in the back myth? The GERMAN GENERALS DIDN’T WANT WAR. THERE WAS REVOLUTION TAKING PLACE ON 8th NOVEMBER. German command knew the war was lost and finished. Austria had surrendered. There were no fresh troops. Or maybe this is the stupidest general in the German army.

Yes General Von Klumphead of course would have been planning an offensive. In November. 1918. An offensive. While the Kaiser was packing his things.

Okay Paul was having a kip in a safe area. In November 1918. During the collapse of the German army. When it was in retreat.

And they’re driving around in trucks. At the height of the fuel shortage in Germany. Maybe they should have a Panzer or two accompanying them.

This isn’t even half-way through this film.

I need a drink.

No, even the German high command and highest civil servants weren’t eating like this at the time. Maybe the Kaiser on a special day. Look maybe this could have been say a contrast if we had been shown the soldiers hungry. Thin. Shown Russian prisoners starving in front of them. We haven’t seen that.

In the blue wagon.

We’re in a bar watching this and the female friend I’m with has literally gone to sleep. Then again they usually do in my company.

Orange juice in Germany in November 1918.

It is distressing to watch their movements, to see them begging for something to eat. They are all rather feeble, for they only get enough nourishment to keep them from starving. Ourselves we have not had sufficient to eat for long enough

Yes. And maybe fresh delivered Colombian coffee with a shot of malt whiskey afterwards.

The Germans invented firing steps only after four years of war. It took them a while but they finally got it.

It’s an hour in and I don’t know anything about any of the characters. Not the protagonist, not his friends, not his superiors. One of them has indecent feelings to a theatre poster. That’s all I know about them.

Paul has no character. There’s a gruff veteran who is gruff. A sergeant with a heart of gold. Or maybe he’s dead. Maybe the veteran as well.

I really don’t know.

Paul is empty. He’s a soldier with a helmet, rifle and dead eyes.

Nothing else.

And there’s a Branagh looking civil servant who does something.

I don’t know what.

The book develops the characters. We feel for them. We know their names. Their quirks.

By threes and fours our class was scattered over the platoons amongst Frisian fishermen, peasants, and labourers with whom we soon made friends. Kropp, Müller, Kemmerich, and I went to No .9 platoon under Corporal Himmelstoss.

He had the reputation of being the strictest disciplinarian in the camp, and was proud of it. He was a small undersized fellow with a foxy, waxed moustache, who had seen twelve years' service and was in civil life a postman. He had a special dislike of Kropp, Tjaden, Westhus, and me, because he sensed a quiet defiance.

This is terrible. I don’t care about Paul or anybody else. The civil servant has more character.

What is this film?

Supposedly cool shots of blue?

Kieslowski already did that.

It’s everything I expected from the trailer.

A blue waste of nothing.

THIS IS NOT EVEN HALFWAY THROUGH.

Gott in himmel on my soul.

Should I mention that none of the above BS is in the book?

A book about the senselessness of war and trench life? Seen through a soldier’s eyes…

My feet begin to move forward in my boots, I go quicker, I run. Soldiers pass by me, I hear their voices without understanding. The earth is streaming with forces which pour into me through the soles of my feet. The night crackles electrically, the front thunders like a concert of drums. My limbs move supplely, I feel my joints strong, I breathe the air deeply. The night lives, I live. I feel a hunger, greater than comes from the belly alone.

Müller stands in front of the hut waiting for me. I give him the boots. We go in and he tries them on. They fit well.

He roots among his supplies and offers me a fine piece of saveloy. With it goes hot tea and rum.

A reaction to soldaten nonsense literature?

And instead we get a scene where the evil cunning French don’t want peace.

Is this Nazi apologia?

The Nazis were right about the stab in the back?

And the French were evil with their demands?

Maybe Netflix should have had a historian vet this atrocity.

And now a battle scene.

The Germans are attacking.

In November 1918.

Across a frontline that looks like the Somme at the height of trench warfare.

Not fresh terrain the Germans would be DEFENDING in November 1918.

I haven’t mentioned this before but this film really does labor the goddamn broken artillery piece trope all the time. I want to know who was pulling artillery pieces into no-mans land. All the time. All the fragging time.

Remember this is fresh terrain.

Which has been blued only recently.

Again wire is just a two meter stretch between hedgehogs that everybody conveniently runs between.

Bloke just threw a grenade in front of him. Where his friends were ten seconds ago. He’s not at the front of the advance.

Well the Germans just smashed the French lines with a sudden attack with no preparation. They should be in Paris tomorrow.

One bonus point for shovel fighting.

These are very thorough trenches that the French built during their victorious advance in NOVEMBER 1918 while they were rolling the Germans back.

Might I remind you that in the book Paul is dead by October 1918?

And in summer 1918 the fighting wasn’t trenches any more:

Our trenches have now for some time been shot to pieces, and we have an elastic line, so that there is practically no longer any proper trench warfare. When attack and counter-attack have waged backwards and forwards there remains a broken line and a bitter struggle from crater to crater. The front-line has been penetrated, and everywhere small groups have established themselves, the fight is carried on from clusters of shell-holes.

Zombie Paul is good at this.

Paul doesn’t fight tanks in the book though he mentions them.

These tanks are actually Titans of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

They make the ground shake.

The muddy wet ground.

Shake.

And at this point, midway through the film (did I mention Paul was dead in October and its now November when the French are INSTANTLY COUNTER-ATTACKING WITH TANKS. They’re actually doing a counter-attack with tanks. In World War I like they were an SS Panzer fire brigade on the Eastern front in 1943.

I am going to say, NO MAS.

Part II when I feel like ending it all.

Yes, that's the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth. Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.

We might do this sort of thing in the future as subscription content because GOTT IN HIMMEL MIT STALHELM I want to be paid for watching this sort of insulting junk.

If you like this content, buy the team of Blood, Skipper and Du Cane a coffee. Its only a buck, or whatever you like. Doesn’t repeat unless you want it to.

Nazism’s connection with the German soldaten trench life and nostaliga is covered here by Philip Blood in his book, Bandenbekämpfung - Hitler’s Bandit Hunters and the SS In Nazi Occupied Europe.

If you want an author’s $2 EBook PDF copy of Bandenbekämpfung - Hitler’s Bandit Hunters and the SS In Nazi Occupied Europe, use the link.

Special signed EBooks with a dedication are available here.

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