A re-enactment of war

Whereas Spielberg, Copolla and Klimov can so seamlessly thrust you into the horrors of war as if you yourself were on the battlefield, Pabst here completely misses the mark. My true criticisms with Westfront 1918 boil down to the filmmaking itself. You can definitely understand what it is Pabst is trying to convey with his anti-war messaging, especially during the interludes in the small town outside of the battlefield, yet there were rarely any instances where I felt like I was witnessing scenes of war but rather scenes of a re-enactment of war. In philosophy, yeah, that’s exactly what it is, for every single scene of war ever shot in narrative film is a re-enactment. But not once did I get the impression that anything was truly on the line. There’s explosions galore, yet no sight of the enemy. There’s grenades blowing up in people’s faces, yet they keel over as if struck by a lone bullet. The strive for realism here just comes off as awkward rather than horrific.

Its easy for one to just simply blame this on the period it was made in, yet I completely reject that sentiment for in the same year Lewis Milestone directed the greatest film from the pre-code era and one of the great war films period, All Quiet on the Western Front. And in the silent era, we got two absolute masterpieces that I would personally put in my top 10 war films of all time, The Big Parade and Wings. And a big part of the reason as to why those films work is because we’re given the time to actually know and fall in love with these characters. I had no personal attachment to any of the characters here because the true main character is the army itself. Perhaps that’s the point, but for me, I need that bit of resonance.

And because the use of sound in film was still in its primitive stage at this point, you can well imagine how unpleasant a lot of it is to listen too. Especially when they’d just recycle the exact same sound over and over again. If the sound of what hilariously appears to be reminiscent of someone breathing into their headset mic is an explosion, then I don’t know what is.

Westfront 1918 definitely gets it anti-war messages across, yet the execution of it can be quite mediocre, especially in simulating the war experience. I will however commend the fine photography of the battlefields, the barbed wire and the tracking shots along the trenches.