STREAMING: LOVE AND WAR.

A little after half of All Quiet on the Western Front passes, there is a powerful two-shot - ie. a shot of two characters - lying in a ditch, a metre away from each other.

One of them is Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer), a German teenager whose impulse and enthusiasm got him enlisted, and who by now has seen most of his schoolmates die from rogue bullets and grenades.

The other is Gerard Duval (Marek Simbersky), a French typographer, who has a wife and a kid waiting for him back home.

Neither of them will get back home alive.

All Quiet on the Western Front encapsulates the idea every anti-war movie makes, that war is brutal and no man wants to kill the other. The George Clooney-Julia Roberts starrer Ticket to Paradise is a predictable entertainer than works primarily because of its leads' chemistry

Just moments before, Duval had been blown inside the ditch by a bomb, and Baumer, in desperation, waddling through water and mud in the hole, had flung himself over his enemy, repeatedly puncturing his chest with a knife.

With Duval surely on the brink of death, Baumer topples to the ground beside him, one breathing a sigh of temporary relief, the other breathing his last.

At that instance, in the two-shot, other than the difference of life or death, one can see that these two are more or less one and the same: unknown men, scared, surviving, desperately clinging for a fading chance to go back home.

The scene, though, isn't finished yet.

Duval gurgles blood and Baumer, scared of being discovered, stuffs his mouth with dirt.

Hardly a minute later, overcome with guilt, Baumer wipes that blood and dirt from his enemy's mouth, and then squeezes water into the nearly dead man's sputtering throat, saying that he's sorry, while accidentally suffocating him.

The latter part of the scene is heartbreaking and encapsulates the idea every anti-war movie makes: war is brutal, and bad, and no man wants to kill the other.

It is needless to say that scenes of charging calvaries from trenches abound in All Quiet on the Western Front. The film is the German-produced adaptation of the famous novel by Erich Maria Remarque, about the war on the western front, where both the French and the German army lost and retook land mere metres from each other, every day until the end of the First World War.

The novel has been filmed twice before. The first version, made in Pre-Code Hollywood in 1930, won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars, and is still acclaimed as one of the...