ALL QUIET IN THE WESTERN FRONT MAESTRO Jesus Ricardo Felix

ALL QUIET IN THE WESTERN FRONT

Maestro Jesús Ricardo Félix

Im Westen nichts Neues is a 2022 German film directed by Edward Berger. Berger is a writer-director who has made his career primarily in television. All Quiet on the Front is inspired by two aspects: the first is the 1930 American film by Lewis Milestone, winner of the Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture. The second is the famous novel of the same name by the German writer Erich Maria Remarque in the late twenties. Remarque is considered one of the most recognized antiNazi writers of the time. The author, vindicated over the years, narrates the experiences of a young soldier in the First World War. In those days the Nazis burned the copies of the novel and considered it not only anti-political but also anti-patriotic.

Paul Bäumer is a young teenager who has been convinced by his teachers to enlist in the war. He is barely seventeen but the propaganda, the love for his country and the promises of a better future are enough letters to encourage him to take the plunge. Accompanied by his young friends, Paul goes into the darkness of the trenches, going from dream to nightmare. The friendship between the soldiers is strengthened with the proximity of death, from the humidity of the tunnels they dream, fantasize, watch their comrades being wounded by grenades or struck down by flamethrowers or mustard gas. The older generals try to instill in them the necessary courage to dodge the bullets in the name of a few meters of ground that are lost and gained as the days go by. At first, food is plentiful, tobacco is plenty, there are spaces to laugh, flirt with local women, but above all, dream of the long-awaited return. Later, the enthusiastic soldiers know the face of hunger, the roar of bombardments in the middle of the night, the innovative war toys such as armored cars, mortars, etc.

The soundtrack is not to instill nostalgia or terror, it stuns us intermittently as if to accompany the character through the trenches, a bit similar to what Christopher Nolan does in Dunkirk. At times we remember the Sam Mendes film 1917, because of the way we follow the protagonist through his ordeal, but also because of the technical deployment of the filmmaker Edward Berger, although the German chooses to highlight the Definitely recommendable, I think that just like Apocalypse Now, Dunkirk or 1917, All Quiet Front is a film to be enjoyed better in the movie theater. There are moments that can be considered cliché or predictable, to say the least, but in its favor I would have to say that it is difficult to innovate on the subject of the war genre. It is also a difficult film to watch because there are moments where the blood, the dirt, the misery of war explodes in our faces and we realize that young people are thrown to sacrifice themselves in the name of old politicians who proudly wear uniforms decorated with thousands of kilometers from there. Remarque portrayed the scenes of the first war in a masterful way, since he lived firsthand Paul's experiences when he was enlisted at just eighteen years of age. It is said that in the first war around ten million people died without the participants learning the lesson, since they would repeat the act years later with even more sophisticated machines, more lethal, quintupling the number of deaths.