Split Decision: "All Quiet on the Western Front"
Thursday, January 19, 2023 at 12:01AM No two people feel the exact same way about any film. Thus, Team Experience is pairing up to debate the merits of each of the awards movies this year. Here’s Eric Blume and Cláudio Alves on Germany's Oscar contender.
ERIC: Claudio, let's get down and dirty on Edward Berger's All Quiet on the Western Front. I'm in camp "love" and I think you're in camp "don't love"? The only real dissent I've heard from folks is that "it says nothing new about war" (which I look forward to addressing). But let's start with overall impressions of the film.
CLÁUDIO: Well, it's adapting a seminal anti-war novel – maybe THE anti-war novel pre-WWII – already made into a Best Picture Oscar winner before. So it's not like it had much hope of saying something new about its subject. Nevertheless, Edward Berger and company bring plenty of "new things" to the narrative presented in the literary work and its previous adaptations, so there's that...