Throughout the last century we have repeated the idea that World War 1 was a senseless, pointless war, yet our media often fails to display that.

It was largely thanks to people like Erich Maria Remarque, who showed the ideas that spurred the wars and placed them against the reality of the consequences of those wars; one of those consequences being this same conclusion about how pointless it all was to a common man. I read the novel, on which the film is based, many years ago, and one thing that always stuck in my memory was how Paul was hiding in a bomb crater at one point during an attack, which was there from previous months, and there's this dead body laying in it which was weeks (or maybe even months) old. The attack was to regain some insignificant piece of land, which was later lost again, and I always thought that particular episode in the book was where the title of the novel came from. I guess the film would always focus more on the actual warfare, but the book manages to show more of how those men sent to front didn't have any future. At least not anything meaningful to speak of anyway. Remarque's later works such as Black Obelisk (my favourite one) and A Time to Love and a Time to Die provide a bigger picture about how deprived of actual meaning and hope the lives of men were, when either being sent to front or later as the survivors when the war was over.