You see, they look like a lifeless pawn.
The film is adapted from the classic novel of the same name written by Erich Maria Remarque. It tells the story of Paul Baumann and his classmates Lyle and Miller participating in the German National Volunteers during the First World War. Sent to the front to fight the French. On the battlefield, they witnessed brutal starvation, bloodshed, and death, and the absurdity and ruthlessness of war drove Paul from war obsession to discouragement.
The film describes that during the First World War, the German government used beautiful slogans to call on young and enthusiastic student volunteers to join the battlefield to defend their homeland, but the reality of the war they witnessed on the front line was cruel and meaningless. When the protagonist finally woke up from the patriotic dream, he found that another group of young students had been tricked into the battlefield to die, and he himself was shot and killed by the enemy when he reached out to catch a butterfly in a trench.
Every scene of the film is sympathetic, expresses the heaviness and pain of the war vividly. The fear of danger when life and death are at stake, the doubts about the life that falls to the ground in an instant when charging into battle, the first time to face the death of a friend, the first time to meet the enemy, the first time to hear the enemy's dying at close range respite. Fear becomes blind, sympathy eventually becomes indifference, indifference to the point of not being surprised by his own life and death. went from being a recruit who yearned for war to gradually realizing the cruelty of war. Fear, exhaustion, and pain are eroding the protagonists step by step. The same emotion also affects the audience little by little, until the sad ending. There are no heroes in war, and may there be no war on the Western Front.
