Not big 9n the AQotWF remake. It was brutal, as it should be, but it was somehow less impactful for all that. Perhaps it was the addition of the peace negotiations. Perhaps it was the decision to have the main character die in a fight ordered to start 15 minutes before the armistice. Perhaps it was the decision to show nothing of the characters outside the army which down plays the lingering dehumanizing effect of the war. But the result for me was a movie whose entire message was shot off before we even meet the main character. "War is all Hell. Now let me show you a bunch of ways in which it is Hell."
The peace talks/last minute death part kind of took the focus from the dehumanizing nature of war to the bull headed behavior of the very real Marshall Foch and the pig headed obstinancy of the fictional General Freidrich. In a way I get it, particularly in a German movie - Erzberger was scapegoated and murdered for signing the armistice and German militarism was sort of a problem going forward, so those scenes may have played differently in Germany. For me, they weakened the effect of the movie. Also, they were amusingly anti French, which I should have expected from a German movie.
Anyway, pretty good, excellent technically, although the sound track relied on a repeat motif that I kept thinking of the movies version of the hourly dong. But I prefer the original which was a true Milestone of cinema.
