Y'all Seem To Vibe With The Majority Of The Trad Art I've Shared, Here's A Bit Of What I Was Doing Back

i've reflected onto this comparison many times since i started working on my own aqotwf piece of media to see what went wrong (for me and the audience of this movie) and what could potentially go wrong in my own take of the story. personally, i think their fundamental mistake had everything to do with all this new essence they were trying to add, mostly with the point of view of the character of this one general, as well as the politicians.

the core message of this book centers around the point of view of very normal and average people - shoemakers, students, smiths, postmen, etc. they literally find themselves in a war against other people just like them, who they have no precise idea why they have to kill and yet they do. so, bringing up other parallel storylines with a completely different message embedded in them really makes no sense because there was NO NEED to begin with.

the ending seems to click the wrong way with many. this is maybe because it altered another core idea of the book, it being that you connect and bond with paul throughout it and learn about his family, friends, interests and so on, only to have the facade shatter by his really random and uneventful death and the report which quotes the title. the truth gets served to you in the form of "yk every single one of these people who died meant something to someone and was unique and special, but at the end they are all nothing but elements of a statistic".

so yk i'm definitely not touching that part in my own adaptation :D

how does the 2022 movie shit on the novel?? (I love the 2022 movie and haven’t read the book)

Hiii so first off I wanna thank you for this ask from the bottom of my heart because this story is deeply important to me and I've been seething about it for two years straight and now I finally have an excuse to talk at length about the problem without sounding (completely) unhinged. I'd also like to clarify that I'm not mad at you or anyone else for liking this movie especially if you haven't read the book. I actually think that as a standalone film, it's pretty phenomenal. The acting, cinematography, and soundtrack are really on point. The problem isn't that it's a bad movie, it's that it's a bad and seemingly purposefully disrespectful adaptation.

So now I'll get into why (buckle up). As my followers know, War Movie Commentary is not typically the focus of this blog so uhhhh sorry y'all we'll be back to your regularly scheduled brainrot soon enough, but if any of you care deeply for literature or history or the history of war, or are familiar with this book or movie, I urge you to hear me out. Sorry, It's long. I kinda ran with it lmfao

So the first and most important thing to be aware of when discussing the disrespect of this adaptation is that, while it is not technically an explicit memoir, All Quiet on the Western Front is not a work of fiction. Everything that happens is based on something either the author or a soldier he interviewed really experienced. The main character is based on the author himself. Remarque's middle name was Paul before he changed it, he entered the German military at the same age as Paul, he had a passion for writing and poetry like Paul (a passion which if I recall correctly was omitted from the movie, but my memory may be off) and several of the things that Paul experiences are directly taken from his own life. While it is not explicitly a memoir, it is a collection of the real lived experiences of these soldiers, put to page in the form of a story with names changed. I think it is inherently disrespectful to dramatically change the events of a true story, but the way in which the 2022 movie went about it somehow took it further than just that.

So one thing you should know if you haven't read the book, which I HIGHLY recommend, Remarque wrote a preface to the book that was included in all the movies EXCEPT this one, and it states the exact purpose of the story. this is quoted from memory,

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who come face to face with it. It will simply seek to tell the story of a generation of men who, while they may have survived the shells, were destroyed by the war.”

He explicitly did not want it to be sensational, or “an adventure.” He wanted to tell real stories about real people, and all those stories were scrapped in favor of what we got. If you remove maybe two scenes and changed the title and character names, the film would not even be recognizable. How can you (not you the asker but the general you) do that to real people's lived experiences? How can you disgrace the author’s wishes like that? The book takes a humanistic approach. You learn about these people, you care about them. You spend time with them goofing off in boot camp, hassling newbies in the trenches, playing cards in the latrines, you see Paul go home and you see how his time at home affects him. How his father parades him around, how he lost interest in everything that once made him happy, how he sees Russian POWs and knows that they are just like him, how his mother, dying of cancer, strokes his hair and cries when she thinks he is asleep because she knows her baby has been lying when he said that things were fine, and he's going back into that hell.

I cannot go into everything the movie portrayed differently to the book because I would have to just copy and paste practically the entire script lol. And having differences isn't inherently a bad thing! Both other movies added or removed or slightly altered a scene here and there. But there are two specific scenes, at the beginning and at the end, that I think are the most indicative of this movie’s failure and disrespect.

In the beginning of the book, which is not told in chronological order, we are introduced to the main friend group and find out that their friend is dying in the infirmary. They visit him, they crack jokes and tell him he's lucky he'll be going home, but he's obviously not improving. He is unaware that his leg has been amputated. One of them asks for his boots, since he has nice military boots, for when he “goes home”, and the others kind of shut him up. Later they discuss how they all know Franz is dying. Paul reminisces about Franz, how he was always timid, how his mother made Paul promise to protect him. He goes to visit Franz again, and he's doing real bad. The author describes in detail how you can see the death in his face. He is now aware his leg was amputated. He wistfully tells Paul that he wanted to be a forester when he grew up, and now he never will. Paul tries to reassure him that “prosthetics are great these days!” (This was written in 1920 lmao) and insists Franz will go home. Franz asks “Do you think so?” And then when Paul remains insistent, he quietly replies, “I don't think so.” He tells Paul to give their friend his boots. Paul sits in silence with him, foreheads pressed together, watching as his friend slowly dies from infection. His internal monologue is distressed about the orderlies ignoring them. “I want to grab them and I want to scream, ‘his name is Franz Kemmerich, he is nineteen years old, he doesn't want to die, don't let him die!’” As he hits in silence until the end. All these characters are emphasized to be nineteen years old.

This is the most important scene in the book. It sets the tone for the whole rest of the story and happens very early on.

Meanwhile in the movie, an unnamed character who we vaguely see hanging around Paul gets instantly blown to shrapnel and his severed leg gets blown off and Paul finds it, cries for 8 seconds, and we move on.

So that's a pretty big failure, I would say. This was the point in the movie I started getting a real bad feeling.

So that's the beginning, now the ending which, while it is the insulting cherry on top of the disrespect pie, I cannot get over how absolutely ridiculous this film ending is. First of all, the whole bit with the military officials? Not in the book at all. That big end battle after the armistice for literally no reason? Yeah, that didn't happen. I don't know how the writers forgot that you cannot completely fabricate an entire battle in a film about an actual war that really happened. And what disgusted me was they have Paul die in a vicious killing spree, bashing heads in, storming the trench (in this fake battle that didn't happen) stabbing people, shooting people, strangling people, throwing bombs, going nuts, getting nearly DROWNED IN SHIT WATER. Need I remind you this was the self-insert of the author who they had doing this? I get what they were trying to to do, show how an innocent non-violent guy got “broken” by the war but that is not faithful to the story. It borders on fetishizing violence, which as previously mentioned was the exact OPPOSITE of what the author directly stated that he wanted his work to be perceived.

Paul did what he had to do, but he was never sadistic and never liked killing and certainly never went on a killing spree. Again, this is meant to represent the AUTHOR.

So how does he die in the book? It's where the title comes from. “He fell in October, 1918 on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to a single sentence: All Quiet on the Western Front. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long. His face bore an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.”

Bit of a different picture, innit? Look, I don't mind movies being different to books, I don't particularly mind this movie as it stands on its own, but it chewed up, shat out, and stomped on Remarque's legacy and it absolutely devastates me to know how he would feel if he saw what they did to his story. The rage I feel on the behalf of a person who just wanted to tell his real story is unfathomable.

field cook serving rationed cunt

after literal years i finally got around to downloading a pdf of the wipers times, an unsancitioned satitical british trench magazine circulated among the troops in france from 1916-1918 after the fortuitous discovery of a printing press. i have approximately five million other things i need to read so idk when i'll be able to devote much time to it, and i gotta pick up a proper copy bc it's missing at least salient no 4 vol 2. that said? i'm genuinely laughing at what i've skimmed so far

wip from one of many environment studies where i'm trying to introduce characters and make things actually work together nicely

I drew some World War I uniforms of different countries. I think I liked drawing the German one the most, or the Bulgarian one.

British - Belgian, Italian, Serbian

Ottoman - French

German - Bulgarian, Austro-Hungarian

Indian, Australian - Russian

working on müller's design idk what i'm doing but we're getting somewhere

this is the style i almost settled on for the novel. it took me forever to even get to that point (because i had originally planned to put myself through the ordeal of working traditionally) and even then, after trying time and time again for a month, i still wasn't satisfied. the style just felt too soft and illustrative and i needed something sharp and bold if that makes sense and so i spent another month trying to get there :')

anyway, here's some concept art from back in april or may

last post of 2023!!

this year i hit rock bottom in many aspects of my life and grew less happy and more confused and drained as time went by. however, i started something which means a lot to me and would like to thank everyone who has followed along so far. i have quite ambitious plans for this book and i'm more than happy to have you as part of the journey. a sincere thank you for all the love and support you have shown this project, i truly appreciate it.

i wish you all a better new year, stay safe.

I'm actually had a time of my life drawing these small pictures

But the hands that built the tower of Babel knew nothing of the dream of the brain that had conceived it. One man's hymns of praise became other men's curses.

METROPOLIS (1927) | DIR. FRITZ LANG