What's new
British Ordnance Collectors Network

Join over 14,000 collectors of inert military ordnance. Get expert identification help for shells, fuzes, grenades, and more — plus access our classifieds marketplace and decades of archived knowledge. Free to register, takes seconds.

Im Westen nichts Neues (2022)

This new release looks amazing. I'd read the book as a kid then saw the 1970's remake. Then went to see the 1930 original at the National film theatre, (with piano accompaniment). Its a tragic story. It's refreshing to find a Great war film told from the German perspective, and gives a clear insight into how they suffered just as much as the allies. Just young lads sent to war to settle 'a family quarrel' (in the words of Harry Patch).
 
Just watched it. You may want to have subtitles on as there is some French spoken. It is very good but I have 2 questions.
1. I remember the book ending entirely differently. Is my memory failing me?
2. At about 19min into the film, the new recruits enter the trenches for the 1st time. There is a machine gun firing. The cloth belt comes out on the left side with approximately every 5-6 cartridges still in the belt. Is this true that not all fired cartridges are discarded?
 
Last edited:
OK, good news, I am not senile, Here is the ending in the book.
He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.
 
I got a free EPUB file to read the end of the novel. It had a picture of a British soldier as a front. Gotta love advertising!!!!
 
The film was a disappointment to me. Yes, very emotive and definitely showed the horror and slaughter involved. But a terrible lack of attention to detail, authenticity and therefore credibility for me. Soldiers firing rifles with zero recoil, dialogue using modern sayings (but this may be a translation sloppiness), and a person writing with a fountain pen left-handed. (People did write left-handed, but not easily with an ink pen, which would smudge the ink - and not as depicted in the film).

The story did not follow the book or previous films very much at all, and the character “fleshing out” was almost non-existent. I found this puzzling. They should have followed the book, or made a completely different film.
 
I agree that it was disappointing. It greatly deviated from the book. Visually, it was excellent - great mud, blood and gore. It had BMP's turned into some passable St. Charmond tanks. Musically, it was very annoying and almost like they barrowed sections of the sound track of "Apocalypse Now". Most of the movie takes place from November 8 to November 11, 2018. Paul dies at exactly 11 AM on the 11th. They include the peace negotiations and scenes with Ludendorff. They show the general ordering a final attack in the last minutes of the war for no reason. They show the Germans going over the top with no artillery preparation twice; the Germans almost never did this - especially at the end of the war. They included none of the training scenes which were an important part of the book.
 
Last edited:
I mistook these forward protruding tabs for cartridges. I found this German belt in my collection, forgot that I had it.
DSCF5076.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top