movie about going back intime to kill hitler

Movie about going back intime to kill hitler movie#

The Erzberger narrative is also intended, one supposes, to build suspense: will the Armistice go into effect before the worst can happen to the characters we’ve come to care about? (Presuming one has indeed come to care about them, which was not my own experience here. And the intransigence of some of the French delegates in these scenes will bring to mind the years-long humiliation Germany was subjected to by the Armistice agreement, which helped bring about the rise of Hitler. So why’s it here? I reckon several reasons: first, to demonstrate that in the Great War, there really WERE some “good Germans,” which when you think about it is neither here nor there in this scheme, as the reader/viewer is meant to at least have some empathy for Paul, who is after all a German soldier. Go back in time if that ever proves possible and you cannot kill him. There’s a parallel storyline in which real-life German vice-chancellor Matthias Erzberger tries to broker a peace with the French and others. Baby Hitler, as still an innocent, must be judged in the place where he is. Within all the action, the narrative of young Bäumer making his way, learning what it is to kill, and trying to forge fellowship in his untenable situation plods along. Filmmakers have arguably lost the plot, turning “War is hell” into a “Can you top this?” competition.

Movie about going back intime to kill hitler movie#

The in-the-trenches tracking shots that Stanley Kubrick crafted for “ Paths of Glory” (a movie that culminated in a point that actually made sense, unlike this muddle) are now steady hand-held digital panoramas of exposed viscera and agonized writhing. Like “1917” before it, and like the better films that continue to inspire a concentratedly grisly mode of war picture (the epochal Russian film “ Come and See” is explicitly referenced at least once, as is the more recent, and more problematic, “ The Painted Bird”), “All Quiet on the Western Front' is state-of-the-art in shoving your nose in realistic-seeming carnage and possibly inducing hearing damage in laying on the ear-splitting aural experience of a fire-fight. Instead, this film sets its sights on the head-spinning carnage of warfare by showing how young enlistee Paul Bäumer ( Felix Kammerer) gets his wrong-sized uniform: the clothing has been recycled off of a corpse. It jettisons the early scenes in the novel and film in which young German students are goaded by an ardent super-patriot professor into joining the military and saving the fatherland. Nor, I suspect, will this rendering (and I do mean “rendering” in more than one sense) of the story, which nonetheless is Germany's official film submission to the Academy Awards this year.Īt two and a half hours, it’s as long as the 1930 version, but packed with quite a bit more plot. A second version, in 1979, directed by Delbert Mann (a “dreary” director, per Andrew Sarris) and starring Richard Thomas, then famous for his portrayal of saintly earnest John Boy Walton on “The Waltons,” didn’t have close to the same impact.