Since it became known that director Edward Berger was going to release for Netflix a new version of the war classic filmed in 1930, No news at the front, it was known that the film was not going to go unnoticed. Is that this story, based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, is one of the most remembered war classics in the history of cinema. In addition, it is worth clarifying that there was another version in 1979, where Delbert Mann directed it for TV.
And every expectation is also accompanied by the demand. And it must be said that Berger’s film never lowers its guard. You can find some weak points, but its deployment and narrative is very precise.
No news at the front begins with one of the many battles that took place in the First World War, a conflict that caused some three million soldiers to die in the infamous trench warfare, where soldiers from both sides stood face to face in their trenches and fought for months in terribly unhygienic environments, surrounded by rats and facing a field riddled with bombs and corpses. The film does not escape this, and shows how these bodies are stripped of their uniforms, which are put in bags, washed and given to new soldiers.
There appears Paul Baümer, a 17-year-old who wants to go to war, a boy who loves his country and wants, like almost all his friends and acquaintances, to defend the country in combat. When he receives the uniform from him, it contains another name, to which the officer tells him that it must have been too small for him. Berger thus condenses the inhumanity of war, giving us the first warning that the front will be the place of cannon fodder, and that those behind it little understand (or prefer not to understand), what it means to live in those trenches.
And there begins its most tremendous side, a visual and technical display that has nothing to envy to the latest great war films such as 1917 by Sam Mendes. It even shares with this the use of sequence shots and the tracking of the character while he is surrounded by Danteous war scenarios.
On the other hand, and returning to the parallel story, the film also shows the negotiation between German and French leaders, in the negotiation to end the war and put an end to the massacre. Undoubtedly these scenes are enhanced when we come to observe so crudely what was happening on the front.
the remake of No news at the front It lives up to its previous versions, it is a magnificent work of war, and, although it is not very innovative in its forms, it rounds off a work of great quality. Being the German candidate for the Oscar for Best International Filmmay be one of the candidates.
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