All Quiet on the Western Front
Distributed by: Netflix
Released: September 2022
Country: Germany
Shortly after the beginning of the war in October 1914, the Western Front became bogged down in trench warfare. At the end of the war in November 1918, the front line had barely moved. More than three million soldiers died here, often while fighting to gain only a few hundred metres of ground. During the First World War, almost 17 million people lost their lives.
Sorry for the spoiler, but this text is how Germany’s All Quiet on the Western Front closes. If the filmmakers had just written this at the beginning, it would have saved me and all the viewers a whole lot of time and effort. Even better, had the enemies in The Great War had this information before the power keg of Europe blew, think of the number of lives saved.
This
2022 BFF winner is based on the 1923
Erich Maria Remarque
novel
many of us were forced to read in high school (or get the Cliffs Notes, ha ha, just kidding Fr. Streicher). I
have never seen the 1930 American version of this story, but while it
won an Oscar for Best Picture, I would have no problem believing the
German film is much better in a lot of ways. The trouble is, our
2022 version was made over 100 years after the end of the war, which
sort of takes
the zing our of the point of the film, which is, of course, to
paraphrase American
Gen.
William Tecumseh Sherman, war
is
no bueno.
Ferdinand Foch at the signing of the Armistace |
Simultaneously, we see the big shots behind lines working behind the scenes. On the one hand, German officials know the war is lost and are going to have to stomach some bad terms. The French coalition, led by Gen. Ferdinand Foch, are uncompromising and haughty (this is a German-made film, after all); the Germans, led by the more reasonable Matthias Erzberger (and played by Daniel Brühl, who viewers may remember from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds in a less sympathetic role), have no choice but to sign a bad deal. All the while, like in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, another WWI film, the military leadership remain impervious to the sufferings of the grunts, only concerned about personal glory and fruitless ideations.
Daniel Bruhl, Inglorious Basterds |
The
Title:
German:
Im
Westen nichts Neues.
Literally,
In the West, nothing new. Nothing new, indeed.
Culture: If there is one truism of History, it’s that one thing leads to another. World War I didn’t come out of nowhere and aptly serves as the run-up to the war that started in 1939. All Quiet provides a bit of a window into the wartime zeitgeist of the new-ish country that was Germany in the early twentieth century, from the rush of patriotism to the gut-punch of defeat in 1919, particularly in that train car where the armistice agreement was signed.
Agenda danger: This is what we call the classically anti-war film, plain and simple. And do we really need another anti-war film, even if is is a really well-made one? This 147-minute movie can be summed up in a simple Pink Floyd lyric:
Forward he cried from the rear and the front line died.
The general sat while the lines on the map moved from side to side.
Best Picture that year: Everything Everywhere All at Once
Rating: Recommended if you are trying to figure out if you are pro- or anti-war, or if you are in high school and would rather skip reading the novel.