Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front painted one of the 20th century’s preeminent visions of hell, and forever put the lie to romanticized ideas about war. Lewis Milestone’s 1930 film version followed in short order, nabbing a Best Picture Oscar, but since then, Remarque’s famous tale of trauma and tragedy has only made it to the screen once more, courtesy of a 1979 TV movie. That situation is now ably rectified by Edward Berger’s big-budget German-language adaptation, which—currently in theaters, and premiering Oct. 28 on Netflix—proves a striking and harrowing portrait of the perils of nationalism, the chaos and madness of combat, and the lasting physical and psychological scars produced by both.
All Quiet on the Western Front is bookended by identical shots of a distant mountain range overlooking a misty forest—a visual articulation of the futility of Germany’s Western Front campaign, which from 1914 to 1918 made next to no appreciable territorial gains. In between those images, however, Berger’s film (co-written with Ian Stokell and Lesley Paterson) details the terrible, transformative effect the Great War had on its participants. Chief among them is Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), who’s initially so excited to enlist that he forges his parents’ signature in order to join the military ranks. Along with his friends Albert (Aaron Hilmer), Frantz (Moritz Klaus) and Ludwig, they scream and cheer at their superiors’ rah-rah promises that they’ll return home draped in glory (by fighting for “the Kaiser, God and the Fatherland”), and beam with pride upon receiving their uniforms.
As illustrated by a prologue about a doomed soldier’s jacket, those new threads may as well be funeral attire, and as soon as the boys arrive at the front, their illusions are shattered. The corridors dug into the ground are narrow, muddy, and populated by jaded recruits and brutish commanders, and after suffering an early humiliation, Paul is given the onerous task of collecting the dog tags of the dead so they can be itemized by distant officials. “This is not how I imagined it,” wails Ludwig about their new “home,” where the sole bright lights turn out to be the flares that fly through the night air, turning no man’s land’s corpses into silhouetted specters, as well as Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch), a supportive, slightly more seasoned veteran whom Paul befriends.
Firmly ensconced in this abyss of death and despair, Paul and his mates endure one horrifying ordeal after another, beginning with Paul getting a bullet to the helmet for daring to shoot at a corpse that was being eaten by rats. Paul somehow survives this assault, just as he does a subsequent bunker collapse and a trek over the trench wall (a dividing line between safety and anarchy) and across the battlefield, where remaining in one living, breathing piece has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with luck. Berger’s camera trails alongside Paul and company as they navigate this impossible landscape, his action coated in fire, smoke, and explosions of earthen and organic debris. It’s a nightmare from which there is no apparent escape; all that can be done is press forward in a desperate bid to stay alive.
The carnage’s repetitiveness is, to some degree, the point of All Quiet on the Western Front, although Berger nonetheless finds a variety of different ways to underscore war’s wretchedness. A showdown with French tanks, culminating with a flight from flamethrower-wielding adversaries, is followed by Paul’s skirmish with a French soldier in a dank, watery pit where murderousness and pity result in the exact same heartache. Paul and Katczinsky’s discovery of their friend Tjaden (Edin Hasanovic) in a makeshift church infirmary culminates in a shocking act of self-harm, which provides another wounded soldier with an opportunity to steal Tjaden’s meal. Even moments of joy and levity—Katczinsky snatching a goose from a farm, thereby affording his buddies a veritable feast; Frantz’s brief dalliance with a trio of women, earning him a handkerchief that smells of warmth and innocence—are fleeting and destined to beget merely more grief and misery.
While All Quiet on the Western Front’s primary focus is Paul’s on-the-ground tribulations, it also diverts its gaze to Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), a politician ordered to negotiate the November 1918 armistice with the French—no matter that he has no leverage, thanks to Germany’s dwindling chances of victory—and also to General Friedrich (Devid Striesow), a commander who eats fine meals in a luxurious estate and bemoans his country’s desire to capitulate to its enemies rather than soldiering onward as his father did under Bismarck. In both instances, Berger casts the blind zealousness of true-believers into sharp relief, and that also goes for the French, whose uncompromising demands for Germany’s surrender are cautioned against by Erzberger in a comment that foreshadows the Treaty of Versailles that will serve, some years later, as part of Germany’s motivation to again attempt world conquest.
Berger immerses viewers in the grim muck of WWI, but—in keeping with his source material’s spirit—he eschews glamorizing (or sentimentalizing) any aspect of his tale; there’s no 1917-style flash and sizzle to be found here. The only genuine beauty on display comes via cursory glimpses of the ravaged countryside (barren trees, running creeks) and the clear, expansive sky that looms above it. Juxtapositions of nature’s splendor with man’s butchery serve as further comments on the insanity of such “patriotic” causes and the terrible consequences they have for people, nations, and life itself. Meanwhile, in a performance that quickly segues from buoyant idealism to crushing dread and hopelessness, Kammerer captures the way in which such experiences wound the body and destroy the mind. His eyes shaken and vacant, and his face habitually caked in mud and blood, Paul resembles a zombie who recognizes that “we’ll never get rid of the stench.”
There’s no happy ending to All Quiet on the Western Front, regardless of the fact that its story concludes with the ceasefire sought by so many. And though Berger’s film may not say anything that isn’t now common knowledge, its rageful anguish and despair over the cost of fanaticism resonates as powerfully today as it did nearly a century ago.
