True movie making brilliance.
3.5/4 stars

One of the most uncompromisingly pacifist movies of all time, "All Quiet on the Western Front" (based on the Remarques novel "Im Westen nichts Neues") follows a group of young German recruits in World War I on their passage from idealism to disillusionment, ending disappointingly with the death of the sympathetic central character, Remarques' alter-ego Paul Bäumer.

From the schoolboys' day-dream sequences in the classroom through Paul trapped in a shell crater with a man he has killed and a moonlight swim with French farmgirls to the final shot of the soldier's hand reaching for a fatal butterfly, the film is an anthology of now-famous scenes. Some of these moments might some conventional, even formulaic by today's standards, but this is down to the fact that so many more recent efforts, from "The Naked and the Dead" to Stone's Vietnam trilogy and Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" borrow from this mother of all anti-war movies.

The message is deeply-felt and even more remarkable considering the times it was put out in. As far as pure filmmaking goes, "All Quiet on the Western Front" is a decent effort, but not really a groundbreaking feat. The acting gets a touch "theatrical" at times, which is common for that cinematic era. Director Lewis Milestone displays inspired craftsmanship throughout the complicated battle sequences, using quite a bit of pronounced rhythmic editing, although he clearly is no Eisenstein himself.

Unlike many socio-critical films which date almost immediately, this unpolished humanist picture has lost little of its original impact: although an epitaph for the generation lost in the trenches of World War I, we feel those soldiers could be fighting on any side in any war. As a portrait of tragedy and futility, "All Quiet on the Western Front" set standards against which all future anti-war movies would be judged.

Review by Wolfman