Mark Kinsella

This is a riveting film. If ever there was a movie to clearly and vividly show the horrors and absurdity of war, especially this war, it is this incredible rendition of this famous novel. The visual images of the Western Front with its mud, rats, and endless fighting over just meters of territory as generals confer behind the lines with their warm meals and drink is absolutely heartbreaking. To think, these were so called Christian nations savagely destroying each other with every known technology of killing at the time jolts you to consider every tenet of Western Civilization as true or false. The death, the eerie fires on the battlefield as the fog moves above the dead cancel all thoughts about the natural goodness of man. If nations that believed in the so called Prince of Peace could do this to each other how can theire be any meaning to life? But yet as the battles end and you hear the silence and see the raw brilliance of the forests in November, there is still some small sliver of hope. War is absolute hell, but men are still helping each other out of the trenches and stumbling home somehow. See this film, but you can't just sit there and eat popcorn. It will turn your stomach as you see some of the final images of the dead who seemed to have died for absolutely nothing. An Excellent, excellent film!