2022 Winner, All Quiet on the Western Front

 

All Quiet on the Western Front

Director: Edward Berger

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.

The story follows 17-year-old Paul, a naive kid who forges his parents’ signature to be able to enter the German army in 1917. Paul and his pals can’t wait to get to the front and kick France’s ass. It takes about 10 minutes after getting there for them to realize trench warfare isn’t quite as glorious as their schoolmaster had made it out to be. One of the chums, Ludwig, even cries on the first night that all he wants to do is go home. But the only way Ludwig is going home is in a body bag (I’m pretty sure they didn’t have body bags in 1917, but you get the gist).

Ferdinand Foch at the signing of the Armistace

The war drags on and the deaths pile up. Paul and his comrades engage in the kinds of things one does during wartime—scrounge for food, dream of women, talk of what they’ll do when they get back home. An older soldier, Kat, latches on to the group, a wise though illiterate man. Paul worries that the war has changed him, that life will never be the same after all he has seen. Unlike educated Paul, Kat knows getting out of this thing alive is the objective—everything else is gravy.

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

There is much to admire in this film about WWI, a conflict that seems to have been somewhat resurrected in film with Sam Mendes’s 1917 (from 2019) and Peter Jackson’s 2018 documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. More stylish and gruesome than these films, All Quiet on the Western Front draws you in and has you rooting for these ill-fated German kids. Particularly integral to the style is German composer Volker Bertelmann’s Oscar Award winning-score. Like John Williams’s remarkably simple theme from Jaws, the music here consists of only a few notes—from a distorted bass—that alert the viewer that what is coming next isn’t good. Tragedy will come from an ill-fated charge from the trenches or from the delusional words of a German general who on the last day still thinks sending the boys to fight and die is a noble undertaking.

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.