Not only is it a total bastardization of the original novel which leaves it’s main themes at the door, it is a film that is all style and no substance. The production value of the scenes and the score are really great, but this is a film adaptation of “All Quiet on the Western Front” and it couldn’t feel more wrong.

Between taking out some of the novels best scenes, adding a totally useless geopolitical plot line instead, and it’s POV siding with the Germans and making the British/English look like worse aggressors in the war, the film falls completely on its face. 

1917 runs circles around this movie. In fact this movie is worse then many of the countless films it’s trying to rip off. It starts with so much promise, and it evaporates. 

“At the end of the film I had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning me over one saw that I could not have suffered long; my face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.”