Fleischmann's 1989 version is a film of ideas - not subtly argued ones, true, but big ideas nevertheless. Is 'progress' inevitable? Can we be forced to be good? Can violence be ended by violence? And so on. Issues rather relevant to, say, Syria today. The ideas that people grapple with and which, in so doing, define them as human beings.

German's version is not a film of ideas. It is a film, almost entirely, of sensations. The look of things - noir, misty, rainy, slimy, smokey. The look of human flesh, starved, tortured, diseased or dead. The sound of things - the many things that squelch - if ever marketed in the US, the film might do better being titled Squelch! And to the degree that one can in film, the smell of things - people are always sniffing here - urine, manure, disease, death. Rain again. It is not a film about ideas - two or three times you get a brief, dim echo of an important exchange from the 1989 film, but it's like a distorted glimpse of a familiar face in a nightmare. If I hadn't seen the 1989 film first, I would not have noticed the significance. Indeed German's film is hardly about human beings. There is no real characterisation; the meaningless, incoherent fragments of speech you hear in passing, the people who peer into the camera as it moves by, leave the humans seeming much like the animals who are all over the set. It leaves one cold. Even the obscene tortures don't really seem to matter very much.

I can't understand the appeal of German's version. Its 'look' was interesting, yes, but hardly held me for an hour, let alone three. Film ought to give us more than this.