All Quiet on the Western Front (2022): A Review and Commentary

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A fantastic film that tells a story that is as relevant today as it’s ever been.

It is morbidly ironic that as German director Edward Berger’s bleak and beautiful new remake of the classic World War I film All Quiet on the Western Front begins streaming on Netflix, that all is most definitely not quiet on Europe’s Eastern front.

It’s not insignificant that the movie, a remake of the 1930 Academy Award Best Picture winner based on the 1929 novel of the same name, which recounts the tale of a group of young German men intoxicated by the fantasy of fighting in World War I who are then eviscerated by the brutal reality of it, should premiere while a vicious war rages on Europe’s Eastern front between Ukraine and Russia.

The lesson of the book and all film iterations of All Quiet of the Western Front is that war is a fruitless, savage endeavor that, like an insatiable, gruesome beast, devours men’s bodies as it mangles their spirits and souls.

Of course, we know all of this to be true about war, and yet, we in the West, in the U.S. in particular, are such thoroughly disinformed, misinformed and propagandized Russo-phobic war fetishists and superhero fantasists that we convulse with glee at the notion of escalating the war in Ukraine – a war which we started via the U.S. backed Maidan coup and ensuing slaughter of ethnic Russians in the Donbas, up to and including calling for more muscular American military intervention and even the use of nuclear weapons.

This is all madness…but as All Quiet on the Western Front teaches us, all war is madness, and some form of extreme psychosis is required to participate in it. Berger’s two-and-a-half-hour film effectively captures this madness, from the young men’s giddy rush to enlist at all costs to their grim death sprint out of the open air coffin trenches and across the hell of no man’s land.

The movie is exquisitely and exceptionally photographed, and that cinematic beauty juxtaposed against the inhuman brutality of the behavior captured in the frame is jarring and deeply unnerving.

Berger also uses a technique which I almost always find off-putting but which works here, which is using modern music in a period piece. The music is a grinding, industrial guitar that accompanies the young German men as they take their first few steps out of the fantasy of war and into the reality of it. This music is used sparingly throughout, but it is remarkably effective in conveying the sense of this war, as is true of all wars, as being a mindless meat grinder, industrial in its level of dehumanization and carnage.

The opening of the film, of which I will refrain from revealing the specifics, is simple yet extraordinary in transmitting this same sensation of war as mass murder incorporated, and it sets the stage for the rest of the film to expound upon that thesis.

The battle scenes in All Quiet on the Western Front are realistic, disturbing and exceedingly well-executed. Director Berger and his cinematographer James Friend are able to maintain audience orientation while never sacrificing artistic vision. The battles look, and therefore feel, grounded, gritty and gruesome.

Cinematographer Friend masterfully lights and composes his frame not only in the battle scenes but in the quieter moments. There are shots of landscapes, trees and the sky in this film that would look right at home in a Malick movie or framed in a museum.

The acting, particularly Felix Kammerer as the lead Paul Baumer and Albrecht Schuch as Kat, are terrific as both men bring quiet intensity and sensitivity to their roles. Kammerer’s mastery of the thousand-yard stare and Schuch’s innate humanity elevate their performances and the movie.

The rest of the cast are subtle and superb as well, bringing life to what in lesser hands would be well-worn war movie stereotypes.

The film is not perfect though, as the narrative break aways to follow the ceasefire negotiations among the German contingent of bureaucrats, headed by the great Daniel Bruhl as Matthias Erzberger, feel like they should be in a different movie. These sections are interesting, but they break the spell of the film by removing the viewer from the myopic madness in the muck and mire of the front lines. I understand the desire to want to take a glimpse of things from 10,000 feet so to speak, but in this case, it works against the film’s better interests and drama.

That said, the rest of the movie is glorious as it vibrates with a sort of dramatic Malickian chaos mixed with existential inevitability that is captivating, compelling, exhausting and unnerving.

This movie should be mandatory viewing for Americans, the majority of whom are vociferous cheerleaders for the current war in Ukraine. These American idiots with Ukrainian flags in their Twitter bios are no different that the young German men at the center of All Quiet on the Western Front eager to prove their worth and courage, except, of course, that those Germans didn’t just pose and preen about war on social media, they actually went and fought and died in it.

The neo-con, armchair tough guys who’ve gotten us into every war of my lifetime, of which we’ve won none, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq and now Ukraine, are like the bloated and bloviating military bureaucrats in All Quiet on the Western Front as they’re eager for other men to pay dearly for the exorbitant faux-nationalist checks that their flag-waving egos were so excited to write. The neo-cons con is to destroy their host nation from within as they accuse dissenters from the self-destruction of being traitors (or in the case of Ukraine - Putin shills and apologists) . These nefarious neo-cons always demand other, more masculine, working class men sacrifice their bodies, minds and souls for the sake of the neo-con’s fragile eggshell egos and deep-seated genital insecurities.

If you follow media narratives throughout history, this war in Ukraine has all the markings of America’s typical modern war psyops/propaganda playbook. There’s scaremongering using the delusional domino theory about some expansionist enemy/ideology, be it communism (Vietnam), Islamism (Afghanistan/Iraq) or Putinism (Russia), that will conquer the earth if the U.S. don’t role play as Churchill to some new Hitler. And there’s always a new Hitler, an alleged madman who is a history breaking tyrant that is simultaneously an evil genius and an incorrigible, bloodthirsty idiot. Today it’s the media-crafted Bond villain Putin. Before him it was the madman Saddam, or the madman Qadaffi, or the madman Bin Laden, or the madman Ho Chi Minh and on and on and on.

Will watching All Quiet on the Western Front wake up American morons from the establishment media’s Russo-phobic propaganda spell and remove from the memory hole the U.S.’s and Ukraine’s role in starting and enflaming this war? No, probably not. Nor will it disabuse Americans of the notion that they are the good guys and that this is a good war, as there are no good wars and there are no good guys fighting in them.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a fantastic movie, but it’s not a miracle worker and it would take a miracle for America and the rest of the West to wake up from their propaganda-fueled dream of the war in Ukraine as history-making hero machine and to see it for what it really is, a senseless, money-making meat grinder, which contains within it the possibility of a worldwide war of unimaginable carnage.

All Quiet on the Western Front is Germany’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature. It most definitely deserves to be nominated, and in my mind is thus far the number one contender for the award.

You should watch All Quiet on the Western Front because it’s an excellent film, and also because it contains lessons that we in the West should already know but apparently need to learn over again, and fast…namely, that war is hell and only devils want it.

©2022

The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A Review and Commentary

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An unforgettable true story turned into a completely forgettable motion picture.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever is the amazing, nearly unbelievable, true story of John “Chickie” Donohue, a seemingly dim-witted, ne’er do well merchant mariner from Inwood in New York City, who decides to show his support by traveling to Vietnam in 1968 to deliver beer to his neighborhood buddies serving in the war.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever, which is written and directed by Peter Farrelly and stars Zac Efron and is currently streaming on Apple TV +, is a really great story…but unfortunately, it’s a bad movie.

Farrelly (There’s Something About Mary) won a Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Oscar four years ago for Green Book, his much-maligned movie on race relations, which was also set in New York City in the 1960’s and dealt with a conservative seeing the light and embracing a more progressive vision.

Green Book wasn’t as bad as the interminably aggrieved victimhood brigade would have you believe, but it also definitely wasn’t Best Picture material (although with the laughable CODA winning the award last year who the hell knows what a Best Picture worthy movie is anymore). Green Book was basically a well-crafted, well-acted, rather simple-minded movie about hope for humanity, no wonder it was so hated in our current awful age.

With The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Farrelly seems to, in the wake of the Green Book criticisms, be trying to either bolster his much tarnished liberal bona fides or give a mea culpa for his perceived sins against the new woke religion. Whatever he’s trying to do…he fails miserably.

Green Book, for all its shortcomings, worked as a piece of middlebrow entertainment masquerading as upper middle-class art, because it featured two really terrific actors, Viggo Mortenson and Mahershala Ali (who won a Best Supporting Actor for his work). The Greatest Beer Run Ever is not so blessed, as it stars poor Zac Efron.

Efron seems like a nice guy, and I have absolutely no animus towards him whatsoever and wish him nothing but success. But the truth is he’s an extremely limited actor and those limitations are laid bare in this film.

Efron’s Chickie is like a more handsome, street-smart Forest Gump who stumbles through history oblivious to his own buffoonery. As one Sergeant says upon meeting Chickie in a war zone, “don’t worry about him, some people are just too stupid to get killed.”

As for Efron, he’s a good-looking kid (“kid” – he’s 34!) but he’s utterly devoid of charisma and magnetism. He almost seems to be trying to hide in front of the camera. Emotionally he’s a black hole from which no life or light escapes. And his dismal New Yawk accent is come and go for the first third of the film and then disappears completely for no apparent reason.

To be clear, Efron isn’t the only bad actor in the movie. The entire supporting cast, with two notable exceptions, are simply dreadful.  The egregiously amateurish cast are either over-the-top caricatures or underwhelming to the point of invisibility.

In particular, Chickie’s group of friends in New York are portrayed by a collection of the worst actors I can remember seeing in a mainstream movie and their accents are less New York than they are a rancid stew of Providence, Boston and Maine. I won’t name any of them out of some twisted sense of compassion, but holy shit they are embarrassingly bad.

The two notable exceptions regarding the abysmal acting are Bill Murray as The Colonel, a World War II vet who runs the local bar, and Russell Crowe, as a journalist in Vietnam. Murray and Crowe are not particularly exceptional in their roles, but whenever they are on-screen a sense of relief comes over the viewer as they know at least they’re in the hands of professionals. Murray and Crowe feel at home on the screen, whereas everyone else, most notably Zac Efron, does not.

To be fair to Efron, Farelly’s script and his direction are no help either as they’re utterly atrocious.

There are major plot points and dramatic moments throughout the movie that need to be earned but simply never are, like when Chickie makes the decision to go to Vietnam, it just sort of happens…and everything, particularly the crucial emotional beats, are as vacuous as that.

Another grating thing about the movie is that a major plot point is Chickie must carry a bevy of beers (Pabst Blue Ribbon cans) in a duffle bag across the ocean and all over Vietnam. Beers are heavy, but Chickie’s wondrous bag always seems nearly weightless and empty, but he continuously pulls beer after beer after beer out of it like it’s a magic hat.

If that bag were realistic, and Chickie had to lug it around and decide between dumping out beers or staying true to his mission, then the story and his burden would take on great meaning. The duffle bag literally could’ve been Chickie’s (and America’s) cross to bear across the globe for the sin of the Vietnam war…but instead it’s just a ticky-tack prop that draws viewers out of the reality of this astounding true story.

Another major issue is that Farrelly’s tone through much of the movie is whimsical, and it undermines the horror of the war we see unfolding before us and it all feels…unseemly. There’s a scene like this at the front lines in Vietnam which is so poorly choreographed and directed, and tonally off-kilter, that I found it repulsive.

What’s so grating about The Greatest Beer Run Ever is that it really could have, and should have, been great.

As I watched I kept thinking of how amazing this film would’ve been if it were made in the 1970’s, when the topic, a conservative ‘Road to Damascus’ moment regarding the crime and calamity that was the Vietnam war, would have more cultural resonance, meaning and impact. Imagine a movie like that directed by someone like Hal Ashby and starring Jack Nicholson, I mean God-damn…THAT would’ve been worth seeing!

But instead, we get this rather pathetic modern-day effort from Farrelly and Efron that feels almost instantaneously forgettable.  

To be fair, there are a few sequences that I thought were well done, most notably when Chickie runs into a little Vietnamese girl in a field and tries to interact with her. The scene is shot without sound with music playing over it and it’s easily the best and most profound scene in the film. Another interesting visual is what I will call “the falling-man” shot…which was very reminiscent of 9-11 and therefore was loaded with uncomfortable but insightful symbolism.

What is most interesting to me about the rather uninteresting The Greatest Beer Run Ever though, is that Farrelly was attempting to make somewhat of an anti-war movie in an age when anti-war movies are so rare as to be extinct. The reason for this is two-fold…first, the Pentagon and intelligence community control Hollywood and the messages about the military and war that it produces – and anti-war sentiment is not on their agenda. This manifests in movies and tv shows like Top Gun: Maverick and Seal Team getting made and movies like Oliver Stone’s long planned project on the My Lai massacre not finding funding. Secondly, the anti-war movement in America, along with Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party and the rest of the populist movements of both left and right, have been successfully co-opted and crushed by the establishment, resulting in the anti-war movement being virtually non-existent today.  

Anti-war sentiment is now anathema in America, as liberals – long the vanguard in anti-war movements, have been so easily conditioned to demand blood lust, most notably against Russia. The same liberals I marched with against the Iraq war in 2003 are now ignoring the War in Yemen and demanding all-out war in Ukraine – up to and including nuclear war, and unthinkingly regurgitate vapid establishment propaganda like children reciting their A-B-C’s.

If you apply logic and dare to question establishment propaganda, like the obvious inanities of the Ghost of Kiev, or the Snake Island buffoonery, or the less obvious but equally dubious claims of the Bucha massacre, or the supposed Russian rape camps, or you speak out against the U.S. escalating the war by sending billions upon billions of dollars to Ukraine (in the form of weaponry) and sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines, you’ll be reflexively tarred and feathered as a shill or stooge for Putin.

People have become deathly allergic to context (and thinking), so if you point out the fact that the U.S. instigated the illegal coup in Ukraine in 2014 ,and later broke the Minsk Peace agreements, and point out the fact that Ukraine killed 14,000 ethnic Russians (who were Ukrainian citizens) in the Donbas in the eight years after the coup, and that the Ukrainian government is riddled with fascists who banned the Russian language and shut down media outlets and opposing political parties, you’re just a useful idiot on Putin’s payroll.

This sort of shallow, simple-minded, historically illiterate, Manichean, knee-jerk jackassery used to be what liberals called out on the right and righteously fought against, but now liberals act exactly like flag-waving, McCarthy-ite right-wingers demanding all those with opposing views slavishly obey the establishment line or be branded a traitor or Russian sympathizer, or both. These empty-headed, emotionalist liberal fools are afflicted with the same disease they used to fight against, and are completely blind to their reactionist Russo-phobic conditioning.

The co-opting of the anti-war left by neo-con war mongers and neo-liberal corporatists is a calamity and will be catastrophic for the health of our nation, and may well lead to another world war and all of us to a fiery death.

On that less than pleasant note, let’s return to an equally unpleasant but much less important topic…The Greatest Beer Run Ever.

In more skilled and gifted-hands The Greatest Beer Run Ever could have made salient points on these weighty and vital issues and held a mirror up to reveal the madness that has engulfed America and its anti-anti-war discourse and actions. But unfortunately, Peter Farrelly lacks the needed craft, talent and courage to make such a meaningful movie, and instead churns out this flaccid, flimsy, D-level nonsense that will come and go with no one noticing.

The bottom line is that The Greatest Beer Run ever is a missed opportunity, and you would be wise to miss it too.

©2022