Review of All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) by Mauro_Lanari — 30 Oct 2022

(Mauro Lanari).

Nothing new on the cinematographic front. Unfortunately it is not an auteur film, one of those that, after havin' metabolized pacifism and antimilitarism, tries to deepen the subject in search of the origins (even metaphysical) of evil, hatred, horror. Already Kubrick took about 3 decades to go from the 1st to the 2nd level, that is, from "Paths of Glory" (1957) and "Dr. Strangelove" (1960) to "FMJ" (1987). Also Spielberg took a minimum of time to transition from "Saving Private Ryan" (1998) to "Band of Brothers" (2001). The best directors hit the mark on the first try: Coppola with "Apocalypse Now" [1979], Klimov with "Idi I smotri" (1985), Nolan with "Dunkirk" (2017). In 2019 Mendes' "1917" had few functional scenes to delve into the darkness, while "Platoon" (1986) should be considered as one of Stone's works dedicated to tackling the dramas and myths of his generation, Eastwood's 4 feature films (the Gunny of "Heartbreak Ridge" [1986], the 2006 diptych "Letters from Iwo Jima" & "Flags of Our Fathers" and "American Sniper" [2014]) have other goals, the same for "Life is Beautiful" (1997) and "The Tiger and the Snow" [2005] by Benigni, "M*A*S*H" (1970) by Altman and even "The Thin Red Line" (1998), where Malick applies his typical stream of consciousness to this genre of movie. Perhaps Berger's 147 minutes serve just to sensitize Netflix's clientele to the current war events, but they do not know how to go further: the immediately following Spanish flu caused many more deaths and in a shorter chronological span.