All Quiet on the Western Front

Anti-war films often emphasize dismay, agony, and death, especially in their battle scenes. They serve to communicate that war is responsible for the destruction of a people, indirectly and/or directly. In fact, the battle scenes of such films can illustrate essential messages about the war being depicted. Two anti-war films set in the World War I era, Paths of Glory directed by Stanley Kubrick and All Quiet on the Western Front directed by Lewis Milestone, both communicate how war is directly destructive to the people involved in it. Although both films are similar in the general sentiments they convey, there are many differences in the way the battle scenes are depicted and how the characters react that distinguish between the specific messages conveyed in both films.

In both films, the main battle scenes take place in the trenches. In Paths of Glory, the battle scene consists of an unsuccessful charge on a hill. The soldiers are seen drudging forward almost systematically out of the trenches and through the war zone. The clean, slow focus the camera has on the soldiers as they are seen traveling across the war zone depicts Kubrick's desire for the viewers to fully take in the blunt desolation of the scene. In this way, he tells us that the misery of war is not something to be ignored or overlooked. In addition to the way the scene was filmed, the war zone itself is shown as a horrid wasteland of wreckage, explosions, and dead bodies. Rather than showing the enemy in this scene, many French bodies are seen tragically tumbling into potholes as the rest of the soldiers continue to run frantically with Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) leading them. Kubrick is simply and bluntly revealing the cold truth about war in the scene; he is neither dressing up the scene with excessive gore nor stripping it of any horror. This emphasizes the anti-war sentiment that Kubrick wishes to communicate. Kubrick depicts war as pitiful, hopeless, and coming to no means of an end.

In All Quiet on the Western Front, the battle scene is filmed in a much different manner. Firstly, it is the enemy that is seen charging rather than the Germans, who take the main focus of the film. The French are on the invading end, and the Germans are on the killing end. Moreover, when the machine gun is fired on the trench side behind the fence, the viewer sees waves of the enemy simply being mowed down almost instantly before they are able to penetrate the fencing. A very prominent image in this battle scene was the remnants of two bloody hands of a man that had been detonated still gripping the fencing, depicting a feeling of desperation and loss of hope. The killing in this battle scene is more ruthless than it is pitiful like in Paths of Glory. In All Quiet on the Western Front, the gruesome nature of war is highlighted and even somewhat overstressed (like by showing the bloody hands on the wires), thus driving home the anti-war sentiment in a much harsher manner. Furthermore, Milestone draws sympathy for the enemy from the viewer. The constant mass murder of the enemy elicits shows how war is two-sided in its misery and thus humanizes the enemy, making the viewer sympathize with the French more than the Germans in which the film's perspective is in.

In addition to how the battle scenes were shown, the way the characters were portrayed along with their reactions to their environments in both films vary. In Paths of Glory, the characters in the battle scene act in blind submission coupled with despair as well as in fear. The first wave of soldiers blindly follow the orders of Colonel Drax; they are seen frantically climbing and stumbling across the warzone as Drax continues to blow the whistle ahead of them. The scene showing them frantically following Drax depicts that the soldiers are human after all regardless of their blind loyalty in battle; they are victimized by the war, and their frenzied running simply depicts their action upon instinct as well as their desperation to stay alive. Moreover, a third of the soldiers refuse to advance out of the trenches and into combat due to heavy enemy fire. The soldiers ultimately fear the death that awaits them in the warzone. By characterizing the soldiers' actions by fear, desperation, and loyalty lacking thought, Kubrick is trying