It is really surprising that this movie was shot in 1930. To borrow a sentence from the comment area, the real treasure is that such a movie appeared in such an era.
At the beginning, the scene of students singing in groups across the city wall reminded me of the scene where Mao Runzhi and his classmates were having fun in the rain. They used to be full of ideals, full of ambition, longing to enter the battlefield and become the pride of their parents. On the training ground, they have not yet felt the cruelty of the world, and the biggest enemy is only the selfish instructor. But when they were about to board the train, facing the wounded on a pair of stretchers that got off the train, they had a slight glimpse of the fear of war.
Although the performance of war scenes seems to have a "magic drama" feeling due to technical reasons, the cruelty of war is fully expressed from the characters and life scenes. The corpse rat who watched the corpse scrambled for the living space in the artillery fire; after the enemy's gas attack, Muller stumbled into the pit and was poisoned by the residual gas; the rehabilitation hospital moved the seriously wounded to the death room due to insufficient beds; Kaczynski, the good-natured squad leader, was hit by a cannonball while trying to find food for the younger and younger recruits; while in the bourgeoisie, in the tavern, the talkers talked about how to counter the French, in the campus , The teacher is proud of the students going to the battlefield, and even the father of the protagonist Paul wants to have a son who goes to the battlefield to save face in front of his friends.
Under the shadow of war, anything related to beauty is out of place. At the end of the film, Paul tries to draw a butterfly parked in a trench, and the battlefield left him with a shuttle of bullets. As he once questioned, why fight? Every era has people thinking, and has the war really stopped? Hasn't the life and death of the people always been coerced by the interests of the country? Under the fanatical national sentiment, once instigated, will people's reason still exist? Or become the silent majority who dare not fight for their rights and go with the flow?
View more about All Quiet on the Western Front reviews
