Trenches | Wanderings and ... wonderings.

Oct 30 2022

Art, Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, World War One

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) is a terrible movie.

The 1930 original is an exercise in magisterial technique. You watch it and marvel how it was put together.

Whether the technique fits the script – most films fail at this – has always been an issue for your reviewer, and as we’re talking about WWI films, the pointless 1917 (2019) is an infuriating venture into needless aesthetics.

Sadly, I hated this movie. It was the definition of mawkish and naive, the soldiers wee gullible pups with identikit snarling chops, marching about with big gormless grins on their proposed way to Paris. It was embarrassing to view. NO ONE behaves like this, and indoctrination isn’t that effective.

The score – annoying drums for no reason, interrupting the drama which could have been – was not good at all.

I also found it funny how the teacher looks the exact same as the Wilhelm II verbal-shagger from the Lewis Milestone corker – pathetic!

It’s a truly rubbish movie, a veritable Pick ‘n’ Mix of cliches and embarrassing reworkings of tropes from far superior fare.

I lost a lot of interest in all developments and contemplated my next viewing of Paths of Glory (1957).

Don’t bother with this.

Tagged 1914, All Quiet on the Western Front, Film, First World War, Movie, Movies, Netflix, Trenches, World War One, WW1

Sep 20 2021

1917 (2019) irritated me beyond belief.

Finally got around to seeing this having missed it on the big screen. Netflix would have to make do as it usually does these days. I suppose movies like this demand the theatre experience, but I’m not waiting a decade for a one-off re-release.

Cinema concerning The Great War is understandably not omniscient as affairs regarding WWII are. The former conflict as seen by contemporary historiography (at least on the Western Front) is more static, more simple, with less of a political and civilian dimension. There are exceptions in cinema – Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The White Ribbon (2009), but there are only a handful ever worth watching again.

I couldn’t stand this movie.

1917_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq4pEjwOyKlC9wl9Xfy1fa3KW4jv4QXXB7Po56W9Fjil0

It’s appalling acting from many on display. The main bloke is good but the rest are phoning it in. There are so many annoying cameos from marquee actors who appear merely to boost the star names on the poster.

Bizarrely, it seldom feels like anything is at stake; I wasn’t bothered about any of the developments. One of the bloodiest and destructive conflicts in history is reduced to a bloodless, frankly boring episode which never once feels real or sincere. And as for the ‘one shot’ USP, it’s nothing more than a gimmick. But then a moment happens when it stops being a sequence shot by cutting to black, which negates the so-called perfectionism of the preceding exercise. It’s pointless.

And a lonely French woman makes an appearance, and she proceeds to shelter the protagonist. No cliché unturned.

Stick to Paths of Glory (1957).

Tagged 1917, Cinema, Film, First World War, Movie, Sam Mendes, Trenches, Western Front, WWI

Nov 02 2018

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) – colourised reality.

download

Viewed through the prism of black-and-white, Charlie Chaplin-speed film footage, it’s axiomatic to view actors from the past as otherworldly, alien even, and simply not blessed with the smarts and skills we believe ourselves to possess. We forget they are people of their time using that era’s technology and science and its harnessing of military doctrine.

Then the grainy kaleidoscope of war gets colourised to the max and all hell breaks loose. You’d think this is GoPro stuff sent back to Flanders in a time machine and then propelled back to the future by Marty and Doc, such has been the collective hyperbole over Peter Jackson’s colourised tribute to our great-grandparents.

And that’s the thing – as the red, green and blue is blitzed the more we can relate. Yet war today is some distant thing we flick through on CNN or whatever. Fully realised 3D depictions of car bombs and RPGs ambushing armoured personnel carriers we have decided are too graphic, this in an age when students find clapping traumatic. But the carnage of the Somme is somehow acceptable because it’s a centenary old. Weird.

Perhaps we need a WWIII to make reality (people die, war is hell) more palatable to our viewing tastes.

Wanderings and … wonderings.

Tag Archives: Trenches

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) is a terrible movie.

1917 (2019) irritated me beyond belief.

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) – colourised reality.