All Quiet On The Western Front vividly and poignantly reminds moviegoers that World War I was hell
Director Edward Berger injects visceral intensity and visual poetry into his powerful adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 novel
Film Reviews All Quiet On The Western Front
World War I ended a little more than a century ago at this point, and it’s never felt like more of a historical blank slate on which to project our fears, our hopes, and our own cultural darkness. World War II still stands as a righteous crusade against evil in the eyes of Western popular culture, but our connection to the original Great War is something much more tenuous, more open to interpretation, and perhaps even intimacy in its storytelling. Perhaps that’s why Sam Mendes’ sweeping epic 1917 and its story of survival against all odds caught on so well with audiences and awards organizations. It was easy to superimpose ourselves onto the battlefield in front of Mendes’ camera, and imagine our own daring rescue missions.
Edward Berger’s All Quiet On The Western Front, the third major cinematic adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s legendary novel, is playing with many of the same raw materials as Mendes’ more recent, Britain-focused hit. You’ll find more long takes of futile charges over trenches, more moments of quiet before the inevitable storm of war, and more young actors thrown into the crucible that makes boys into warriors. But in a world that has since been ravaged by a pandemic and a new European war, Berger’s film sidesteps the inevitable comparisons to Mendes (much less Lewis Milestone’s 1930 Best Picture winner) to instead give us something bleaker, more brutal, and perhaps more honest. This is a film about the boys who don’t come home, and its story proves both deeply affecting—and surprisingly timeless.
The fighting in Berger’s film, as in Remarque’s novel, centers on Paul (Felix Kammerer), a young German student who’s swept up in the nationalism of the war movement and enlists for a one-way ticket to the front lines in the fight against France. Paul begins the film bright-eyed, smiling, eager for the mantle of “veteran” and “hero” that will drape his shoulders when he finally comes home. What he doesn’t know is that his uniform was just recently stripped off a corpse and laundered for re-use, that his path to so-called glory lies through miles of mud, and that his band of idealistic friends will not be intact by the end of the war.
After capping off the film’s opening act with a terrifying depiction of Paul’s first brush with combat, Berger leaps forward to the fall of 1919, the final days of the war. Now a hardened soldier with the end of his time on the front in sight, Paul has settled into the mundane, bleary-eyed life of the Great War, while the real battle is fought elsewhere. As a German diplomat (Daniel Bruhl) races against time to forge an armistice, the country’s generals try to keep fighting, because it’s the only thing they know how to do.
This tension between peace and the constant urge to keep pushing at the front forms the emotional and structural backbone of Berger’s narrative, and what’s most striking is how readily he’s able to bring the diplomatic struggles far away from the trenches to bear on Paul and his friends as they grapple with ceaseless artillery barrages and gallons of muddy water. The totality of the consequences springing forth from the decisions of the powerful is never lost on the day-to-day work of the soldiers, and on Paul’s journey as he trudges through grief, blood, and a distant memory of what he once called peace. To underscore those consequences, Berger plays up the indecision of the German leadership, as diplomats argue for the sake of each human life and generals argue for the sake of national pride and bloody legacy. It’s an argument you could see playing out on the front page of a major newspaper any day right now, and it heightens Berger’s timeless points about the futility and false pride of war.
Though he’s certainly not the only bright light in the film’s large ensemble cast, Kammerer must carry much of this narrative tension in his face at all times, and he does a remarkable job of looking both distant and cold in the face of ceaseless tragedy and simultaneously imbuing Paul with a raw sense of humanity. There’s a sense of watching an open wound move through space as he powers through this film, from the fluid one-take battle sequences to the shell-shocked stares he delivers when the explosions die down and the counting of the dead begins. It’s a remarkable, reactive, and very rewarding performance, and it’s backed up by the compositional confidence of his director.
Berger’s All Quiet On The Western Front is a powerful, human odyssey about the cost of endless war and the whims of the powerful, but what lingers afterward is the way its director frames that narrative across the (literal) European landscape. Berger’s battle sequences are memorable, but just as memorable are his moments of quiet punctuation by framing up the silent trees of the Western European forests, the babbling brooks that will flow on no matter how much blood seeps into the waters, the wildlife that will keep fighting its own battles, heedless of the human ones. A shot of a tank emerging from smoke like a monster in a horror film might be followed by a still tableau of a forest canopy, as though God himself is watching from just above those trees, maybe judging the combatants, maybe ignoring them. If the outcome is the same, does it matter?
These are the questions invited, and not always answered, by All Quiet’s elegiac and haunting look at a war almost no one is still alive to remember. Yet what it has left to teach us, and what we carry of it into our own wars, is very much up to us—and it’s the film’s keen awareness of that sense of projection that makes it resonate.
112 Comments
1919?
thank you for your valuable input
I think it’s valuable to point out that the war ended in 1918, not 1919.
It was 1919 in Kiribati!
Can’t we have one thread where we don’t fall into a time vortex?
Spoiler: we create the anti-time anomaly in the future, with the inverse tachyon pulse beam. So, you know, let’s not do that.
just reverse the polarity
ROOOXXXXANNNNEEE!
“Thank god, we lived through it. The great war, 1914~1917…”
The AVClub has a long standing bitterness toward Versailles and the War Guilt clause.
Yeah, WWI is a sore spot for them. Nathan Rabin blocked me on Twitter for questioning the validity of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. I called it a Failure, he called it a Secret Success.
And if you criticized the Washington Naval Treaty, Sean O’Neal tore you a new one.
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky tore it apart comparable to Messines Ridge.
That’s such a deep cut.
But Leonard Pierce was right about the Ukraine-Russia armistice.
God that’s good.What a fuckwit he was.
Pfft. Everyone knows it was a fiasco.
otherwise Armand White wouldn’t have put it as his “Best of”
They changed so much from the book, may as well make it alt history ww1 baby!
. . . and then Tom Hanks single-handedly defeated the Central Powers by thumb-wrestling Kaiser So-say-we-all.
The war ended in nineteen dickety two it sure did.
They’re like six hours ahead so it checks out.
Also, if this was in the spring near the end of the war, meaning 1918… German diplomats were in no mood to negotiate. It was only after the Ludendorf offensive broke down in the early summer that some in the German government started to consider negotiating. So, I’m guessing this film actually takes place in the autumn of 1918, when there would have been more tension between the German military command and the politicians. (Obviously, I haven’t seen the film yet).
Maybe he was like one of those Japanese soldiers marooned on some island who didn’t know WWII had ended and kept “fighting” for a long time after. That certainly accounts for his exhaustion.
I remember reading the book and watching the 70s version my first year of high school. Probably too young to really appreciate the story. I’m looking forward to watching this version
Seems Matthew went to the same history school as Trump. 1919. Sheesh.
The treaty of Versailles wasn’t signed until June 1919. There where still skirmishes after the Germany surrendered in 1918 and well after the treaty.
It’s just a typo.I gave a presentation at work today, and I referred to the current year as “twenty thousand two.”
Should have doubled down and said, “I am presenting you this information, FROM THE FUTURE!”
Did I miss the part where the author of this article states that the film will be available to stream on Netflix beginning October 28?
WWII however, was kickass.
Yeah, but that “band of brothers” were all white and didn’t play any instruments.
I’m waiting for someone to finally finance my movie about the dominant theme of World War II. It’s called “People Burning” – or “People-Burning.” I haven’t decided yet, but investors don’t seem interested regardless.
Personally, I’ve been pushing for Schindler’s List II: Schindler’s Pissed
“You’ll find more long takes of futile charges over trenches, more moments of quiet before the inevitable storm of war, and more young actors thrown into the crucible that makes boys into warriors.”Hey no thanks. As I said before I can’t watch movies like this anymore. Too stressful, too sad.
I might have to miss it too. I’ve watched half a dozen documentaries about war/slavery/capitalism-run-amok last month and my spirit feels like it’s hiding in a trench. All the same, I’m always pleased to see WW I get more press.
Can’t do it, man. There’s too much misery in the real world to consume dramatizations of other real misery. WWI seems like the shittiest of all, too. I mean it’s all shitty, but when I think of what it must have been like in those trenches… well, I refuse to think of what it must have been like in those trenches.
I get it. This war did change everything. The worst part is that it wasn’t the last war too.
Make a double feature with this movie and Die Brücke (Bernhard Wicki, 1959) as they compliment each other in various ways.
Great book. This and “Jonny Got His Gun” are two short but powerful WW1 novels that are great reads and really tell the horrors of WW1
Yes .Also the original reason I’d heard of ‘Johnny.. is because there was a Metallica song about it and the video features clips from the 70s movie.
I heard about it because the author, Trumbo was blacklisted in the red scare.
Same. My HS girlfriend’s ethics class had to read it and it was apparently NOT a pleasant experience.
short but powerful WW1 novelsI was going to say, isn’t Western Front insanely long? But according to Wikipedia it’s only 200 pages? I swear every copy I’ve ever seen of this book is an enormous, War and Peace-sized tome. Do some editions have additional material or something? Even the images I’m seeing on Google look like they’re way more than 200 pages.
Yes it is actually shorter than the first harry potter book. I am seeing closer to 300 pages but still not a long read.
It’s pretty common in literature curricula, so you’re probably seeing a lot of scholastic/critical editions.
Side note but its shocking Marsha Hunt only just recently died, Johnny was one of her last notable films.
The original All Quiet on the Western Film film is very harrowing because it looks like actual WWI footage since it’s not that far removed from the era.
All Quiet on the Western Film sounds like a document about Clint Eastwood’s career.
Shoot. Too late to change it.
If you told me Clint Eastwood started out in silent film, I’d buy it.
what about a musical?
I have seen the famous shot of the French soldier falling on barbed wire right as he’s hit with artillery used by outlets and people on YouTube thinking its real. Thats either a compliment to the filmmakers or a depressing realization that fiction and reality was so close.
Isn’t that from the 1979 version? Or did they use the same kind of framing in both?
Its been a while since I saw the 1979 TV movie but the shot I’m thinking of is definitely the 1930s Best Picture winning film.
Can’t wait to watch this. More necessary than ever to have media show the futility of war. The Great War was such a ridiculous and needless imperialist venture, with consequences that still ripple through today — particularly how European powers saw the opportunity to carve up the Middle East. Some may find it hard to watch young men ripped to bits by artillery, I find it much more sickening to watch movies and shows that glorify warfare and make combatants seem like superheroes.
Why is it virtually impossible for the AV Club to include release dates/info anymore in reviews? Seems like it would be among the rest of the data such as cast and whatnot.
Firstly, this movie looks fantastic. I’m not normally a fan of reading subtitles but I loved the book in school and being a bit of a history nerd really gives me hope this will be good. World War II still stands as a righteous crusade against evil in the eyes of Western popular cultureI’m not sure what you mean by “in the eyes of Western pop culture”? WW2, while not black and white, is about as close as you’re going to get to good vs evil in the modern era. There aren’t many if, and or buts to spin it any other way. The actions that led to the war are a little more nuanced, and can be construed in different ways. The same can be said about how various countries approached the war, their training, gear etc, but in the end, the war itself is pretty clear cut.
I mean I get the argument that we didn’t know (at least in any detail) about the Nazis’ treatment of Jews and other “undesirables” when we entered the war, but the same insanity that drove the Holocaust fueled Hitler’s assault on the rest of western Europe. We knew enough about Germany’s intentions to be confident we were fighting for a good reason. Unfortunately we didn’t realize how much worse reality would turn out to be.
Just look at movies like Foreign Correspondent and Casablanca that unhesitatingly portray the Nazis as evil, even years before anyone knew about the Holocaust.
Well, they probably knew what happened in Poland in 1939. They were portrayed as fanatics. And they were to a certain group of people. And they were a breath of fresh air to others.
Exactly. We thought we knew, and it turned out to not only be true, but soooo much worse than initially thought. Pop-culture certainly has no bearing on this.
We knew what he said, bfred—we just couldn’t allow ourselves to believe what he actually did, because Western civilization was supposed to be well beyond that kind of behavior. Oops, guess we’re not that far beyond it after all!
Not entirely correct. Hitler attacked western Europe for strategic military reasons. For the most part (Norway excluded), occupation there was fairly light-handed and relied on pre-war administrations. The war in the east was a racial-ideological war of annihilation.
There is grey areas and moral complications as in most wars, but basically everyone in the Allies see themselves as the hero. From Russia to Britain to China, righteous cause against evil is pretty universal for ww2.
WWII was much less morally clear on the eastern front.
Not if you are Russian.
And you ignore the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and what you did to Poland, Finland and the Baltics…
That’s due to the Soviets’ involvement being less “My God, the atrocities!” and more “Hey, you weren’t supposed to start the atrocities without us!” at least at first.
Katyn says hello.
Was it? The Soviet Union had a non-aggression treaty with the reich that Hitler straight-up violated. I have little doubt the Russians saw it as anything other than defending the homeland, even if they knew Stalin was a dick.
Prior to Hitler turning on the Soviets, Stalin used the opportunity to gobble up part of Poland, then executed every Polish officer the NKVD could get their hands on (see Katyn Massacre), then forcefully annexed the Baltic republics (all the while wiping out anyone who could offer resistance and doing his best to culturally Russify the populations), then attempted the same with Finland, with much more mixed results due to amazingly heroic Finnish resistance. This was all before a single German bullet was fired in their direction. The subsequent Soviet invasion of Germany late in the war was particularly brutal against civilians. Arbitrary executions, looting and rape were the rule, not the exceptions. True, the German military had done the same or worse all over eastern Europe, but that didn’t give a moral justification for what the Soviets unleashed. When I lived in Germany for several years, an elderly neighbor of mine told me what she endured as a young girl trying to escape with her family from East Prussia to the American occupation zone. It was one of the most horrific first person stories I’ve ever heard about the war- long story short, at age 8, she was the only one who made it alive, and just barely at that.So, I view the eastern front not as a fight of good against evil, but two of the most brutal regimes in human history at first cooperating in their brutality, then brutalizing each other.
Have you read War of the Rats? It’s the main inspiration for Enemy at the Gates and goes into much greater detail about what a just straight-up race to the bottom of human brutality the Siege of Leningrad was. What stuck out to me was a large area where the Russians had the Germans surrounded called the Cauldron, and they’d just drop artillery in there all day. Any German who tried to walk out and surrender was shot. The Germans also couldn’t resupply, so the few survivors mostly made it via cannibalism. Truly grim shit.
“straight-up race to the bottom of human brutality” That’s the eastern front in a nutshell.
Well, I can’t see Russia from my house.
It was easier to make World War II a clear-cut battle between good and evil because in those days, in an isolationist America without the flood of information that television and, later, the Internet would provide, it was far easier to dehumanize an adversary – particularly if, like Japan, they were non-Caucasian. In the case of Germany, though, the “anti-Hun” sentiment was far harder to gin up in the ‘30s because a) they were white Anglo-Saxon Christians, and b) there was more than a little anti-Jewish sentiment in America as well. America as a nation actually sat out the first four years of the war because, nationally, Americans were loathe to involve themselves in another European conflict, and as long as Hitler wasn’t bombing the continental US, he wasn’t a direct threat. The amount of subterfuge that Roosevelt had to go to to provide the UK with war materiel was prodigious. It took Pearl Harbor to generate the national will to engage directly against Germany as a member of the Axis.Once the propaganda machine got going in earnest, though, it went full-bore, and by 1945 Germany and Japan might as well have been populated by slavering, rabid orangutans for all America collectively cared. Then, once the war was over, the machine pivoted to the International Communist Conspiracy and we got a whole new group of people to imagine with horns, drool, and yellow-eyed hatred for all humanity.
Under what possible definition were Germans “Anglo-Saxons”? Despite, of course, some of them literally being actual Saxons?I actually did a project about this in university. One of the reasons why the US didn’t go heavily into the Hun propaganda mode was because there was enough recent memory of anti-German propaganda from WWI going overboard and causing domestic distrubances against the large US population of ethnic Germans. The government didn’t want to repeat the same blow-back effect again, so they went much lighter this time on the propaganda, being more careful to distinguish between Nazism and Germans in general. Of course, the Japanese population was much less significant, so they ahowed much less restraint demonizing Imperial Japan… not that the Japanese didn’t make the propagandists jobs easy by what they were doing in China, which legitimately horrified the American public. And this was years before Nazi Germany fired a single shot.
I don’t think it’s controversial to point out that the Japanese were fucking brutal in WWII. As they were retreating from Pacific islands ahead of the U.S. Marines, they would just torch POWs rather than leave them behind. I’m not going to pretend U.S. soldiers were choirboys but WWII had an unusually nasty set of allied opposing forces.
The “Rape of Nanjing” was well named.
If WWII perfected mechanized death, WWI was basically men fighting toe to toe across open land often for no obvious gain. I can’t imagine what living in a trench for a year, unable to stick up your head and waiting to be sent back into a wall of gunfire, must have been like. I love a good war movie but the bleakness of WWI has never been something I felt compelled to spend much time with.
Well its important to note that the Western Front is mostly where trench warfare happened. The Eastern Front was quite fast paced by comparison, in Italy fighting in the mountains was common, Serbia and Macedonia wasn’t quite like the Somme and the African front had a lot of guerilla warfare.
And the Middle East had the great not-cavalry charge of all time.Also, no, it wasn’t Lawrence of Arabia who captured Damascus, dammit.
Interesting that you mention “mechanized death,” because WWI was the great confluence of the new generation of mechanized war machines and the archaic line-based warfare that traced its roots back to the Civil War. So you had all of these troops trying to enact strategy and use tactics developed in the single-shot-rifle era, while fighting against new heavy artillery, tanks, airplanes, and machine guns. Bleak doesn’t even begin to describe it, for sure. Hell, for most of the war they still had horses at the Front (All Quiet has a section devoted to it, too). But then, that’s always the way of war. You start a war with the lessons learned from the previous one, and you’re always caught out by it – it’s not until the end that you’ve been forced by attrition to adapt to the new reality, and those lessons are drenched in blood and agony.
Theres an old adage that WW1 pushed the world forward technology wise by a century. Almost all breakthroughs from medicine to the radio were caused by the war. Its fairly impressive how much changed tech wise as a result of the years 1914 through 1918.
Yeah as a kid I was stunned to learn in class that the cavalry actually still rode horses in WWI, when there might be armor on the other side of the battlefield.
Even in WWII, horses were heavily used. Their role in cavalry was gone, but the Germans and Soviets still relied them on them for logistics.
I see WWI as akin to the original Terminator. Exciting, but dirty and inconclusive. WWII was like Terminator 2—better effects, flashier, with a pretty satisfying ending that left people wanting more.
Yeah, but that then means that the Cold War and Vietnam were the equivalent of all those pointless forgettable Terminator sequels and there’s just been too many great films to come from those sources for that argument to hold up
Iraq was the Terminator Genysis of war sequels.
I finally got around to seeing 1917, and I admit I don’t really know how an adaptation of All Quiet can really be bleaker. I guess the death of the main character? But really they’re both pretty miserable; in 1917 they (briefly) save some soldiers but anyone who knows the history knows they’re likely going to die in the coming big pushes or influenza epidemic regardless. I can’t think of any WWI movie that has any sort of triumphant feeling at the end; in some ways it’s pretty unique in that respect.
The novel All Quiet I always found very interesting because it’s one of the few examples of arguably the definitive popular account of a war (in the western canon) being written from the losers’ POV. I guess because it’s not a visual medium the horror of the trenches wasn’t what stuck with me; more it was the amount of tedium and nervous energy and the feeling of everything slowly falling apart on the front and at home that I connected with as a teen. It’s been a while since I read it so I’d be curious to revisit it to coincide with this film.
I mean WWI ( AKA the Great War) was basically a lot of countries jockeying for power * and then pretty much sacrificing most of their generation of young men for lines on a map.Also even when it was won, the financial penalties inflicted on Germany made it easy for someone like Hitler to come to power.WWII is seen as a ‘righteous war’ because of what the Nazi’s were doing , although it had a much higher civilian death rate.( I mean technically forming two power blocks as nobody would be stupid enough to start a war that dragged so many countries in. Then almost immediately were stupid enough to start said war.)
Interesting that Clive Barker is a producer on the film.
So that’s why Gavrilo Princip opened the box…
Underrated comment.
The Horror Of War , still counts as horror.
All I had to do was read the title, and I remembered a history class, decades ago now, where we watched All Quiet on the Western Front. A different version, obviously, but it had the same effect.
World War II still stands as a righteous crusade against evil in the eyes of Western popular culture
Depends on who you ask, these days. Seems like 30-40% of the USA now disagree…
Also, ask the Poles, Finns, Czechs, and Baltics how righteous the war was in their neck of the woods.
WWII was much less morally clear on the eastern front.Ah, that’s what you meant. Talk about getting caught in the middle.
But is it as poignant as the finale of Blackadder Goes Forth?
I also want to give a plug for the outstanding book, which is as wonderfully-written as it is short. One of my favorite German novels.
WW1 ended on 11/11/1918. Seriously, how bad of a hack are you?
This looks incredibly depressing and extremely well done. I’m not familiar with the main actor but I’ve loved Daniel Brühl since Goodbye Lenin. I don’t have Netflix so hopefully I can still see it some other way. Disappointing that there’s no theatrical release for it in my city.
I’m guessing any version that doesn’t revolve around John-Boy Walton is bound to feel a bit more authentic.
A film like this is so important now. It should be a critical antidote to all these wannabe tough guys who lament that a generation of Americans is too woke and weak and soy etc etc. That is precisely what people thought in the late-19th early 20th: the Belle Epoch had made people soft. And a good war was what everyone needed.Whenever you see some doofus drop a meme or comment about “what happened? men used to go to war?!?!” or whatever, remind them those in the trenches would have loved to be at home, alive, knitting, enjoying their soy latte, while earning their “useless” college degree.
Yeah the Ted Cruz people who said Russia is masculine and America is weak and feminine clearly have a warped concept of war.
Regarding the difference in the cultural response to/remembrance of WWI vs WWII, it should be noted that WWI has a much bigger place in the consciousness of those in countries that were actually affected by the war. Of the roughly 5 million military deaths, the US only lost around 100,000. Meanwhile England, France, Russia, and others had entire generations of men wiped out. It also represented one of the biggest political upheavals in European history until the fall of the USSR, something else Americans were mostly shielded from. While we were basking in the “roaring 20s,” western Europe was still digging itself out of the ashes and hacking up the former empires into various states and protectorates.
I know the reviewer has no say in this, but I love the irony of reading this article and having a rather large ad for the Navy pop up
Um, the armistice was negotiated and signed in November 1918. It became effective at 11 AM on November 11, 1918 – “The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.” That’s why in most countries that observe it, Armistice Day falls on November 11.
After capping off the film’s opening act with a terrifying depiction of Paul’s first brush with combat, Berger leaps forward to the fall of 1919, the final days of the war.Correction: that wasn’t Paul, that was Heinrich, the soldier whose uniform is cleaned, repaired, and given to Paul when he joins up.
Spoilers: I think this is pretty close to 1917, including casting someone who looks like George Mackay. You never really get to know the characters, much of the plot is episodic and situational. That said, it does have the inevitability of a horror movie and the horrors of war have rarely been so realistically and dynamically depicted. People getting crushed by tanks, bayonetted, and most memorably, one of the main friends getting fried with a flamethrower seconds after he shoots his last shot then runs out and tries to surrender. For me, it’s also a bit of a different feel because I am rooting against the Germans, so the movie basically had a happy ending.