All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)
dir. Edward Berger
Rated: R
image: ©2022 Netflix
If I asked you to explain the cause of World War I, what would you say? Likely, you’d mention something about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (but could you name the country he was on the cusp of ruling when he died, or why he was assassinated?) and a complex, confusing set of alliances that eventually dragged most of the world’s population into the conflict. Beyond that?
I’m not asking in order to shame anyone. I consider myself a history buff – I was awarded an associate’s degree in the subject while getting some basic coursework out of the way at my local junior college – and the intricacies of what was initially dubbed The Great War are hazy at best in my own mind.
I ask in order to make you think about a period in world history that upended the social order of almost every person on the planet, destroyed huge swaths of land, and devastated the global population, yet one that most people alive today know little to nothing about.
With each passing year, World War I is receding in our collective unconscious as this vague, massive thing that we all know was important, but which is increasingly becoming an esoteric topic mined for trivia questions.
To those who lived (and died) during the “war to end all wars,” it was anything but trivial. Forty million people (military and civilian combined) died as a result. Humanity experienced unimaginable suffering in the four+ years of a conflict that has mostly been relegated to dusty history books.
Swiss director Edward Berger has determined to make that suffering very imaginable and horrifically unforgettable with his adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s seminal 1929 antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front. Remarque was a veteran of WWI, and he relayed the horrors of what he saw in battle through his protagonist, the patriotic German Paul Bäumer. Three years into the conflict, Paul enlists with most of his high school classmates in order to defend the glory of his homeland.
Paul has no way of comprehending the horrors that await him. He and his classmates are all smiles as they race together to the enlistment office. The bleak reality closes in on young Paul within hours of his arriving at the western front, in Northern France.
The starkest difference between Berger’s adaptation and what I remember about Remarque’s novel – admittedly, it’s been over a quarter-century since I read AQotWF for a high school history class, but it left an indelible mark on me – is how we relate to Paul.
The book is written in first person narrative, with Paul speaking directly to the reader about what he sees, hears, and feels during his ordeals. I remember being particularly impressed with Remarque’s short and to-the-point style for Paul’s declarative inner monolog. (I also remember thinking the style might have been a function of reading an English translation of a German text.)
Berger – who adapted the novel with the help of screenwriters Ian Stokell and Lesley Paterson – stripped out all of that inner monolog for his picture. His version of Paul is a tabula rasa. In the novel, we are one with Paul because we have access to his inner-most thoughts. In this film version, we come to know the character so well because we experience each second of terror as we stare into his face. It’s constant trial-by-fire, and Berger forces us into the trenches and beyond as Paul fights to stay alive and sane in these insane circumstances.
Also new to this adaptation – again, if I remember correctly, the book is tied singularly to Paul’s POV – are scenes of German High Command’s feckless callousness for their own soldiers when strategizing. Meanwhile, one German official, Matthias Erzberger, who is based on the real-life German writer and politician, is existentially unmoored by the incredible loss of life and is working to secure an armistice with the Allied powers to stop the senseless bloodshed.
Aside from those brief respites, which serve to show how disconnected those in charge were from what was happening on the ground – at one point, before a preliminary negotiation on terms to end the war, one French military official takes time to worry that the croissants prepared for the meeting aren’t fresh – we are literally in the trenches, experiencing the raw terror and desperation, not glory and honor, that is war.
If Sam Mendes’s 2019 World War I film 1917 depicts war as a non-stop action thrill ride – the main criticism against that film is that its one-continuous-take conceit comes off as gimmicky and detracts from the true horrors of war; it’s a valid critique, but the movie ultimately worked for me – then AQotWF is war as it truly is: terrifying and senseless suffering.
Berger contrasts the man-made carnage and brutality of war with fleeting moments of the pristine beauty of nature. In the film’s opening seconds, we see a sweeping shot of a lush, green forest before cutting to a family of foxes quietly sleeping and the pups suckling from their mother. It’s a reminder that, while nature can be unforgiving and inhospitable, the level of destruction and suffering wrought by war is only possible through the ingenuity of the human animal.
“Man is a beast,” one character says during AQotWF. The atrocities we see during the film make that assessment hard to deny. From one hapless soldier who we see completely obliterated under the tread of an oncoming tank to the enemy Paul kills in hand-to-hand combat during an attack, Berger makes war nothing short of hell on earth.
The visceral hand-to-hand combat sequence, one of the most vivid passages of the novel, is pulverizing in this film version. Paul stabs his adversary repeatedly in the chest, but the man does not die. Instead, Paul spends hours in the artillery-blasted crater where they fought, listening to the man’s pained gurgles through the blood clogging his esophagus. In his initial panic, Paul attempts to silence the man by shoving handfuls of mud into the soldier’s mouth, to no avail. I openly wept as this nameless man spent the remaining minutes of his life in excruciating agony. I was simply overcome by the cruelty we are capable of inflicting on one another.
Volker Bertelmann’s jarring score incorporates idiosyncratic percussion to keep us off balance. James Friend’s beautiful but cold cinematography is able to capture both the splendor of nature and the degradation of war. Together, Berger and Friend capture sweeping vistas and expansive views of the battlefield dispersed among a relentless gauntlet of human suffering.
Even an aerial dog fight is insignificant compared to Paul’s terror. In one shot, we see two war planes engaged in combat, but it’s far away, in an upper corner of the frame. Felix Kammerer’s performance as Paul is both haunting and haunted. His face, almost always covered in mud and other battlefield detritus, relays an existential unease as he gets used to the fact that each new day could be his last.
Actor Daniel Brühl plays the morally conflicted Matthias Erzberger with a sense of urgency to stop the killing as quickly as possible. Most American audiences will recognize Brühl from a handful of Hollywood productions, most notably his swim through the MCU as Helmut Zemo in Captain America: Civil War and the limited series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Erzberger is trying to stop as much of the suffering as he can, while stymied by the likes of General Friedrichs, a commander who believes soldiers have no purpose without war.
It's Friedrichs’s stubborn callousness that leads to the heartbreaking final minutes of All Quiet on the Western Front. With minutes to go before the armistice takes effect, Friedrichs orders his soldiers into battle one last time, in an attempt to end the war with a German victory. In his efforts to survive this last campaign, Paul becomes the beast that his fellow soldier mentioned earlier. It’s not his fault. War strips human beings of their very humanity. All Quiet on the Western Front is a devastating illustration of that fact.
Why it got 5 stars:
- The five-star rating is usually reserved, for me, for films that have stood the test of time (at least 25 years) and proven that they are a culturally significant work of art. Sometimes, though, a new film will move me (usually to tears) because I’m so shaken by what I’ve seen. All Quiet on the Western Front is definitely one of those movies.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- If, after seeing AQotWF, you’re at all interested in exploring cinematic depictions of World War I further, I highly recommend catching up with Peter Jackson’s stunning documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old.
- Rae and I are currently at the start of watching every Oscar Best Picture winner. The next one on the list for us is the 1930 adaptation of AQotWF. I can’t wait to compare and contrast both versions. I’m currently curious if Academy voters will want to make history with the first Best Picture winner that is a remake or adaptation of the same source material of a previous Best Picture winner.
- There’s a heartbreaking moment near the beginning of the film when Paul thinks he must have gotten the wrong uniform, because the one he is handed doesn’t look quite right. An earlier scene shows us a roomful of seamstresses sowing closed holes in the uniforms of killed soldiers so that they can be reissued to new recruits.
- Saving Private Ryan has nothing on AQotWF’s horrific representation of the use of flamethrowers in war.
- Also, filmmakers like Eli Roth have nothing on the horrors of actual war.
- If anyone out there wonders why we need a new adaptation of AQotWF, you need to look no further than Vladimir Putin’s psychopathic invasion of Ukraine. New century, same senseless and needless suffering.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
All Quiet on the Western Front is currently still available in select theaters, due to its Oscar nomination for Best Picture. It’s also available to stream with a Netflix subscription, which is how I screened it. I am sorry (but also a little glad) I didn’t see this on the big screen. There is no doubt it’s an overwhelming experience.