Prequel

Its hard to believe that Madison never saw All Quiet on the Western Front.  This movie would not be hard to find, but still we decided to join Netflix to help support us in our journey.  This way, we would not be searching around for hard-to-get movies, or waiting for people to return them to libraries so we could check them out.  We signed up for the 2 DVDs per month plan, and unfortunately haven’t even been using that much.  We also haven’t watched a single thing online either.  We need to start approaching this quest more seriously if we ever plan to finish.  It has been a busy few months tho, with Madison working at Comcast, me starting grad school, the holidays, and the whole house thing.

This post is long overdue, as we watched this movie forever ago, but I still want to document it.  Otherwise this whole thing is just going to fall apart.

Experience

This is another movie we watched at my parent’s house, not too long after we watched The Broadway Melody. All Quiet on the Western Front is a classic, and a movie that I thoroughly enjoyed watching again.  Unfortunately for Madison, she fell asleep watching it, and we ended up finishing it the next morning.  To her defense, it is a long movie.

The Movie

The movie itself is amazing.  Its based on a book by Erich Maria Remarque.  It is a story about kids in a school in Germany who are swept up with patriotic spirit and inspired to leave school and join the military during World War I.  After training they are deployed into the trenches, where they become demoralized.  There are food shortages, rats, disease, rain, and they are always being shelled and rarely seeing combat.  One of the soldiers ends up hiding with a dying enemy soldier in a trench, where he comes to the realization that their enemy is just like them, and no one wants to be there.

The movie captures the horrifying realities of war, and is a stark contrast to the first movie on our list, Wings.  War for these kids was not about the glory and honor that it was made out to be — it was about suffering, demoralization, and carnage.

I do not think my summary of this movie can do the film justice, so I will just leave it at this:  This movie is a must-see to all of you who (like Madison) have never seen the film.  So far, it has been the first dark and depressing movie on the list, and definitely the best.  We home for many more movies like this to come!