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Im Westen nichts Neues (2022)
Human misery at its best
I can wholeheartedly say this is, by my humble standards, an exceptional movie... but I will never be able watch it again. It is, almost in its entirety, utterly depressing and drags you, no matter how much you try to resist, into the sludge & mud (literally) of our human existence. If you know the book, the theme or if you just you watched the trailer, you know it is going to hit hard. With 2 and a half hours it is also on the long side, towards the end I was often checking how much is left as if I was begging for the human misery to finally creep itself to a conclusion.
The movie alternates between subtle hints at what is coming and violent chaotic scenes where you cannot absorb all what is happening to all the characters in front of you. And just when you think the last scene was too heavy to digest, it hits you with another one and another one and so on. There are a lot of soldiers, but you don't have to memorize many names or faces... they all soon will be fading of their short existence on the screen. Although there is a somewhat noticeable progress of relationships or events, this movie does not feel like a story with a start and an end, in its classical sense. Is there any logic to it all... maybe... maybe not... who cares if the fate of so many is sunk in a deterministic tornado of nationalism, lies, hopes, death and revanchism.
And maybe this is one of the differences between American and European war movies. At the end of the American one, a dying Tom Hanks will whisper in your ear: "Earn this!", leaving the impression that the young generation of the time acted and behaved better to honor the sacrifices of all the men who perished... but not here. Here you see a green recruit going from corps to corps, as if an allegory for the whole conflict, executing an erroneous, mortifying & superfluous task for someone his age... and lets you wonder: who has it better? The ones who perished here or the ones who must live with the consequences of this war. I do not regret watching this movie even if it may look like it from this review, I already regret that I will not be able to watch it again in a long time.
Troy (2004)
A mockery of the Iliad
I'll start with the few pros, high production value, a lot of stars in the cast and I suppose the oscar for costume design is earned. But in general I think this an attempt to create something epic, which ends in being a colossal farse. The performances of most of the cast are amateurish at best, the story is told in a very unintersting way. And that constant vocal music which tries to make every trivial moment "epic", is just annoying to the extreme. I do not know why I kept watching after the first half an hour. If they felt an Earthquake in Greece in 2004, it was probably Homer turning in his grave.