Edgar Cochran ✝️’s review published on Letterboxd:
It is impossible for me the astonishing visionary adaptation of Lewis Milestone who, considering everything that is fair, constructed one of the most visceral anti-war films of all times back in 1930, a time where this film won 2 Academy Awards for Best Motion Picture and Best Director, respectively, and the visceral depiction was possible thanks to being made just in time before the Hays Code entered to censor the industry.
The subsequent British TV adaptation took elements from Peckinpah to intensify the battlefield immersion, but it is a more romanticized version of the repercussions of war in young men that idolize either false perceptions of “glory” and “honor”, or a “national cause”. The film remains nonetheless impactful and will always deserve a release on the big screen.
Berger ventures into a remake from a purely German perspective, and there are two elements I respect: the physical and facial acting of Austrian actor Felix Kammerer’s, and the epic-scoped cinematography that captures the magnitude of an unmeasurable catastrophe. Cinematographer James Friend should participate in other projects; he shows his perfect capability of capturing calmness, tragedy, or both at the same time in a dissonant dance of death. All the names mentioned here jumped from a TV career to a German super-production for the big screen, and I applaud such bravery. There is commitment from the crew involved, but as much as Kammerer tries to do the best with the written material, it is a vapid and soulless exercise that relies more on the power of being based on a novel that tells real-life war veteran experiences rather than on how to execute them to a degree of emotional empathy.
At the end, this is being discussed on social media as an action film, often applauded for “being a more realistic portrayal of battlefield dynamics than the cheesy original”. Perceptions are subjective, but I personally haven’t seen something more desperate, asphyxiating and immersive than Milestone’s milestone (I did it again...), and if we keep approaching war films as spectacles rather than willing to discuss the psychological spheres of the human conditions that are irremediably fractured or broken, cinema will keep becoming more a visual spectacle and less an exercise of effective catharsis and reflection.
62/100
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