Review of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) by Amice L — 01 Feb 2011

It's stunningly great. The cinematography is consistently powerful, and you begin recognizing immediately how many film scenes were inspired by the ones here. It's put together primarily through a collection of long epic scenes, punctuated by short, powerfully efficient vignettes.

Any film that carries the mantle of greatest war movie, for any length of time, also carries with it heavy expectation. I can say that the original All Quiet on the Western Front quickly established that my expectations were woefully inadequate. In the opening scene, it surpassed them and left me laid bare to the tragic, inevitable toll that would befall these doomed men.