''All Quiet on the Western Front'' - Essay Example

Moreover, sound just added a new reality, allowing us to feel what soldiers felt waiting out shelling in a bunker or hiding in trenches knee high in dirt. Surely, the movie was not going to happen without the outstanding book, even in spite of the fact that it started its triumphal procession around the world a year after the movie release, in 1931. That year the novel by Erich Maria Remarque was nominated for the Nobel Prize, but did not win it. In the same year the book was committed to fire by the Nazis all around Germany as anti-German.

 The Third Reich fell down, but eighty years later the book still remains the best selling in the history of Germany.  The adaptation by Lewis Milestone became the absolute classics of the genre. Being a native of Tsarist Russia, Milestone directed the Hollywood movie with an immodest budget of $ 1.2 million, having the main task to remake the book, narrated in the first person, where all historical events were deeply intermixed with reasoning, into a monumental film about the most unjust of the wars, about aging without growing up, about death without end.

Well, he succeeded probably because of his life experience. A year spent on the Western Front allowed Milestone to read Remarque’s story through the eyes of the soldier, who is emotional over every word, every page and to do the film with a so powerful emotional impact. The book and the film are not mainly about the war, its prehistory, reasons for it or historical heroic battles. They are the saga of the lost generation. Its glorification and requiem at the same time. Hemingway, Dos Passos, Remarque wrote not about the war, but about common men at war.

Before the First World War many countries were wrapped in aggrieved pride, vanity and revanchism. The rulers diligently heated those “righteous” emotions of their subjects. But, as usual, not the rulers, with rifles and bayonets, fought against other rulers. Young men, who just began to live and love, just learned to distinguish between good and evil, had to go to battle. Instead of the bright future they met doom, pain of loss and irreplaceable emptiness. Everything they had been taught before became pointless.

The generation, which will be called later the lost, had to adjust to new values ??and rules. They had to kill, save their skin any minute, at any cost. Dirty barracks became their home, more dear than home where they born. New boots became their dream and lice - the most devoted friends. A wound became the last way to escape, at least for a while, from the nightmare of trench war, when inactivity is followed by a hurricane of fire, when every moment you are at gunpoint and see enemy’s eyes.

  Paul Baumer, Kropp, Leer, Muller, Kemmerich rushed boldly into the abyss of war. But soon they realized that they have become one of the millions of soldiers who are fighting in the interests of others; that glory, bravery and medals are ghosts and phantoms and their real battle mission - to wade through the war alive, to break that ring of death. Right in the first scene, the director shows how rapidly enters the war into peaceful life. A housewife is cleaning, washing floors; her husband wipes door handles and opens the door.

Outside the door –