Sin novedad en el frente

Cuando se menciona a Erich Maria Remarque, recuerdo mi pequeña encuesta cuando todavía estaba en la secundaria. Pregunté a todos mis conocidos qué novela les viene primero a la mente cuando digo el nombre de este escritor alemán. Esperaba que ganara “Sin novedad en el frente“, sin lugar a dudas. Me equivoqué porque sobreestimé mi amplio círculo literario: ninguno ganó... Personalmente, prefiero otras obras de Remarque, aunque mi favorito personal ya ha sido adoptado a la pantalla, pero totalmente echado a perder. En el caso de la última adaptación de “Im Westen nichts Neues”, sólo podemos elogiar y felicitar a los alemanes por la exitosa adaptación de una de las novelas pacifistas más importantes de la historia. Leí el libro hace muchos años, pero siempre sentí que los cineastas se inspiraron por ella bastante libremente. Al menos estoy convencido de eso al final de la película, porque entonces no habría “El camino de la vuelta”. También estoy seguro de que el libro no fue tan explícito como la película, pero eso no importa en absoluto, al menos subraya la inutilidad de toda la guerra. Felix Kammerer brilló como actor y mi favorito Daniel Bruhl brilló en su papel secundario. La música merece un Oscar. Los cineastas podrían ponerse a adoptar a “Tres camaradas”... (08.11.2023)

Como no he leído la novela, comento solamente la película bélica. Técnicamente buena. No hay nada que objetar a los decorados, el vestuario, la cámara y las escenas bélicas o de negociación. Sin embargo, la descripción de los personajes secundarios y, sobre todo, los diálogos se quedan cortos, parecen planos y no atraen emocionalmente. A la película le falta un mayor enfoque de guión en las historias personales de los protagonistas y de varios personajes más. (13.11.2022)

An adaptation that isn't afraid to mess with the very foundations of what is rightly a timeless classic and yet it is the most faithful adaptation possible. An established benchmark of how to adapt the written word into film language (not telling and showing), preserving the message and yet "standing up and not being a mere illustration". Everything is subordinated to the suggestive concept of "you are there with them". The absurdity and futility of the war machine through everyday trench existential horror, which, however, in addition to the horrific scenes (through a war scene, through the simple survival without hope for the future), manages to contrast the humanity and unexpected permeations of normality in spite of everything (officers, timelessness, humanity), often without words; purely by sight, sound, suggestion, music. Yes, you could say that it doesn't build up, it just kind of flows during the last days on the front. That’s not very viewer friendly, but it’s the intention, and it works, without being the same over and over again. It cannot be denied that many of the horrors have already been handled equally impressively by other works (but it is hard to accuse the adaptation of the classic on which everyone is based of being "a bit dated"). This is a film that will inevitably divide, some will berate it because "they messed with my beloved book", others because "we've seen this before and we don't need to do it again", others will bemoan "the non-existent pace". And then there'll be those who won't sleep easy as a result, not because of the explicit depictions of wartime atrocities or the topicality "it was a century ago", but for the overall sense of the confusion of it all, even though it makes do with little; perhaps the mere pilgrimage of a uniform from the front. (29.10.2022)

War is like a plague. It infects you with sadness, depression, and human devastation, and you can't escape it even when it ends. A two-and-a-half-hour film based on such a slim novel is quite intense. I quickly realized that the focus here is on the atmosphere of the trenches and the individual events unfolding on screen, which often lack logic or justification, more than on the story itself. In this film, the illogic of war and moments from the book, like the harrowing trench scene, speak for themselves. It captures everything happening in the trenches and during the signing of the war's end. It's a powerful, visceral experience — brutal, thought-provoking, and full of questions about human existence and self-destruction. (31.10.2022)

The repetitive alternation of the heat of battle and the coldness of waiting, the recurring motifs for unimaginative half-wits, the book’s premise stripped of all its compelling scenes, which the film replaces with simple (and sometimes unrealistic) war porn and a completely hollow political storyline. The film fails to approximate Remarque’s insistent humanism except by literally illustrating the conflict of minor and major history, which doesn’t make a lot of sense (the horrors of the First World War didn’t actually consist in the fact that Foch wanted an armistice in six days and the Germans needed to think it over). As an adaptation, this is a disaster, devoid of psychology and with no thoroughly developed characters, and as a film it’s drawn out, transparent and superficial. The versions from 1930 and 1979 had something to them, but this fails even as a stand-alone work. Netflix’s problem isn’t the lack of casting actors of color. Its problem is that its projects lack dramaturgy and thus don’t much sense. (01.11.2022)