The critic of Cineaste condemned the movie because, in his "liberal intellectual" worldview, he did not demonstrate graphically enough how soldiers were hurt by the horrors of war. In fact, Peter Jackson showed and broadcast just enough horrors not to make his narrative into a caricature. Moreover, the movie did not shun a more mundane features of the trench warfare: fleas, lice and rats, which were, by recollections of the veterans much more pervasive than enemy bullets.
The critic cannot digest a realistic reproduction of war impressions by its participants: nationalistic fervor, total demoralization of a few, especially by the end of the conflict, and conversion of the most into mindless killing mechanisms and, yes, the fact that some people enjoy killing others, even or especially if it is connected with mortal risk for themselves. Not to speak of Ernst Junger, the author of the "Rain of Steel" and a great inspiration to a modest corporal by the name of Adolf Hitler, but Otto Dix, one of the most genial and outspoken portraitists of the war brutality, depicted himself as Mars, god of war and several times returned to his machine gun nest--the deadliest of the WWI military professions, except, may be the poison gas operator--when he could escape that by the war wounds.
Peter Jackson movie might not be overarching depiction of the Great War, nor it was intended to be--but to accuse it for polishing the contemporary reality of industrialized warfare is arrogant and insincere.
German WWI recruitment posters were a stark contrast with the posters of all other combatants including Austro-Hungary. Namely, posters of all other nations were dominated by the mortal threat to the home country, but the German war propaganda was centered on what fun it is to kill enemy.
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