"All Quiet": Classic and Devastating

Now this is what I thought the Best Picture Death Race would be like: classic, interesting, thought-inspiring movies. It's not that All Quiet on the Western Front was particularly subtle, or entirely different from anything I'd seen before, or even all that great at telling its story. But it was visually fascinating; you could tell that the director carefully chose the framing of each shot. It was far better acted, with believable and heartwrenching violence. And it just felt like a movie, a good movie, rather than a propaganda piece or a stage show.

For a movie about how dirty and ugly war is, there are plenty of gorgeous scenes here. This one in particular, with its wide view of a crowded landscape, feels like an ancestor to Gone With the Wind.

This simple, artsy shot is the only tranquil scene in the whole movie -- and even this feels sad and sinister. (It's at 9:20.)

And by the end, I was struck by the story's similarities to The Hurt Locker. Soldiers broken by war, dreaming of home until they arrive there and discover they no longer belong.

The scenes themselves are kind of haphazardly strung into a story, but each on its own is genuinely heartbreaking, both because of the way they were crafted, and because we're still telling them -- in film, in books, in the news -- to this day.

Posted in: BestPicDeathRace