The Drinker Recommends... All Quiet On The Western Front

As a German myself I just have to admire the amount of talent in this movie, it is absolutely refreshing to see a German movie that good even if it is, again, a war movie 😂

Fun fact: main actor for Paul, Felix Kammerer, this was his first acting job in film. Previously he was an actor in theater

This was brutal to watch. I felt exhausted after that final scene. I will probably think about this film from time to time. 17 million dead. How fortunate I feel sitting in my comfortable chair, in relatively peaceful times, to pursue my own path. I feel so badly for those young men.

That scene where he stabbed the man and then tried to save him absolutely broke me. they acted that out so so so well. fantastic movie.

When anything good actually comes out I'm almost confused and wary. Like a dog that's been kicked too many times and is being petted by a genuine person. Hollywood has really fucked me up.

The one thing from the book (and earlier adaptions) that I really missed was when he went back home for a couple of days on front leave. I always felt this was a central element of the story, driving home Paul's alienation from society and the lack of understanding of those not having to fight in the war for the plight of the soldiers in the trenches.

3:22 actually, in the scene where they're all in the yard and the general orders them to attack, you see and hear several soldiers refusing to follow his orders, then you see military police grab them, and then as we see Paul's stony face, we hear those soldiers being summarily executed

Someone said that the soundtrack of this movie sounds industrial because it is the metaphorical cogs on the war machine turning. This put the soundtrack in a new light for me and made me enjoy the movie even more.

As a Marine vet of Iraq and Afghanistan, I'd like to nominate the crater stabbing scene as the best scene in a war film ever.

I expected this video, and the Drinker never disappoints

This should be shown in all high schools around the world. Never let what these kids went through be forgotten. Lest we forget.

I'm glad they kept things like the crater scene and Kat dying on Paul's back, but there were some big pieces of Paul's experience that weren't in this adaptation and I was surprised by that. Like the bird sketches he does, or how at one point he is wounded and gets to go home for 2 weeks towards the end of the war. There's a powerful scene where he's back home talking to some older patriotic men in a beer garden about how the war is going. Paul tries to tell them how Germany is losing but they are in denial, they think Germany is winning and casually dismiss Paul's opinion despite his personal experience on the frontline. The futility really sinks in for him here, as he realizes the men who sent him and his friends to war are completely disconnected from reality, and everything he and his friends sacrifice will have been for nothing.

As a German - and I think many of the french or british people can agree - movies like these have kind of a personal note to them when you know some of the man portrayed there might be your great grandfather fighting along his brothers or cousins... It's like watching something that was history wise just a moment ago but feels so distant.

My grandfather was a grammar school teacher conscripted and fought in WW1, he was gassed and suffered terrible lung damage, which killed him when my father was 10. The emotional damage he suffered was also enormous. All Quiet is more important than just a story, it is history.

If Hell were a real place, it would just be a copy of WW1. The subject really fascinates me, because it represents something like an extreme of human experience. I remember from one of Dan Carlin's hardcore history podcasts, he read excerpts from various soldiers' descriptions of the battlefield, and out of that came a list of sensations/experiences that I can't really rank because they are all equally horrible. In no meaningful order... 1: Huge rats everywhere, feasting on corpses and occasionally living soldiers while they try to sleep. 2: The smell of blood, rotting corpses, feces, and spent munitions - so overpowering that soldiers could smell it from miles before arriving at the front. 3: Artillery barrages lasting hours, sometimes even days, creating a ceaseless, disorienting roar that drove many soldiers insane. 4: Overpowering thirst due to a lack of fresh water, while being surrounded by muddy puddles, oily with corpse bloat and toxic gas residue. 5: Horrible constipation due to poor diet, and lack of even a safe place to take a shit. (In one excerpt, a soldier described how his friend was desperately trying to wait for dusk so he could go take a shit in no man's land, but eventually gave up an decided to chance it, only to get blown to pieces by a shell.) 6: Endless, interminable boredom in miserable squalor. Basically just sitting in a muddy hole for days, stretching into weeks and months, waiting to die. The list could go on and on. I feel like if somebody wanted to deliberately design the most miserable human experience possible, they'd have a hard time topping WW1.

The scene where Paul kills the French soldier in no man’s land and has to be with him as he slowly dies hit me harder than any moment in film in recent memory. Pure brutality and emotionality

I read the book 25 years ago. Excellent movie. Makes me so glad we are living in current times. My great-grandfather fought in WW1 - he was an officer but still was involved in the front lines. He survived 4 injuries (2x bajonett 2x bullet). He was also tortured as a captive. We still have lots of his things from the war. I feel like I just got lucky to be born in a time after WW1, WW2 and communist dictatorship in CEE. The men (ok, and women) in my family had to go through all of that. Let's appreciate what we have here.

Watched this 3 days ago, absolutely loved it. Unbelievable acting by the main young guys. Absolutely perfect viewing.

Kat was such lovely character and great acting.

The scene where they had to fight tanks and napalm scene was straight out of a horror movie