All Quiet on the Western Front has always been at its soul about innocence lost. In addition to its’ stature as perhaps the greatest artistic text on the First World War, it may be the most powerful statement we have on the disillusionment of war. What has always struck me as so potent about it is how it presents unequivocally the idealism and glory for war battered into young men by their state, and then violently shoving them headlong into the hellish terror and chaos that war inevitably is.
The 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front is a personal favourite of mine for reasons such as this -I once declared it the greatest anti-war movie for its’ vehement stance on the subject just a decade out from the end of one war and the beginning of another. But it has always had one particular flaw and that is that its’ story from the acclaimed novel by Erich Maria Remarque presents a uniquely, explicitly German perspective on the war, and this movie was told by Hollywood. There is something a little bit lost in that, especially with the actors led by Lew Ayres speaking English in distinctly American accents.
Edward Berger’s new adaptation reclaims All Quiet on the Western Front for Germany -focusing purely on its’ German outlook -a side of the story vastly underrepresented by our typical World War I narratives. While they can often tell the truth and accentuate the cost and the trauma of the war -and this was indeed the most pointless war of modern history- they still are depicting it from the vantage point of the winners. But as Berger explains, it’s very different coming from the side that lost. Perhaps that is why this of all war stories (as well as Grave of the Fireflies) speaks so potently: there’s no sense of glory whatsoever, only pain and crushing defeat.
All Quiet on the Western Front begins beautifully with a still shot of silent European woods. We see a family of foxes crouch into their foxholes and then we see foxholes of a very different kind, in No Mans’ Land and littered all around with bloody, muddy corpses. It nicely sets the mood of the destruction that has been wrought, before transitioning into a fierce German push, following through the trenches, over the top, through the barbed wire and onto the battlefield -as though it were playing at a First World War rendition of that Omaha Beach landing from Saving Private Ryan. It’s certainly as bloody. This movie never once lets up on how vicious and intense its’ war is. Someone gets shot in the head just as they’re going over, men are suffocated in a trench collapsing in on them, one especially harrowing sequence sees a man slowly dying of multiple stab wounds, choking on the blood while the man who inflicted them also tries in vain to alleviate his passing.
That man, a boy really, is the story’s protagonist Paul Bäumer, played with awesome dedication by Felix Kammerer -a bright-eyed young lad swept up in the frenzy of the noble war spirit in Berlin, whose illusions of it and quick victory over the insidious French are subsequently shattered. He and his friends are so enthusiastic, so naive they don’t bother to question why their uniforms seem to be recycled. Berger then traces their steady diminishing of dreams, first in the reality of their soldiering and its’ stern requirements, then in the fetid conditions of No Man’s Land, and finally in their first combat experience. They directly observe it wasn’t what they thought it was, Paul’s close friend cries about wanting to go home. And it’s only the beginning.
For these kids at least. The movie moves the plot up a bit to late in the war. It’s 1917 rather than 1914 when Paul enlists, and when most of the action takes place it’s over the course of the last week of fighting in 1918. And so Berger juxtaposes the story of Paul and his brothers in arms, ignorant to the impending end, with the efforts of pacifist government minister Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) to negotiate a ceasefire with the Entente in light of Germany’s hopeless fortunes. And in this it’s curious to see Berger depict the hostility towards this from the Entente powers -specifically its’ French liaison. There’s a clear desire here by the allies to humiliate the Germans in their heavy conditions for the armistice, and Erzberger and his associates debate the repercussions with severity. It’s an extremely critical perspective on what would become the Treaty of Versailles and a harsh outlook on the Entente command who are depicted as willing to prolong the war and the casualties out of pride. It is unusual, but then only because we’re so unused to sympathizing with the Germans in this war. What Berger does is allow for the strife of Germany to be heard, and emphasize that nobody was really the good or bad team in World War I. Everyone suffered and cruelty came from all sides. He illustrates this also with a small subplot centred on a proto-fascistic German general played by Devid Streisow in denial about Germany’s defeat and ordering a charge on the morning of the 11th just before the armistice.
Meanwhile he does a lot to humanize Paul and his company of friends, whom we get to know to some degree enough to feel their losses when they come. Of particular note is the big brother of the gang, Stanislaus “Kat” Katczinsky, played remarkably by Albrecht Schuch, who is an illiterate cobbler in civilian life with a loving wife and a tragic lost child in his past. He takes Paul and the others under his wing, bonding over women, their lives after the war, occasionally robbing farms, and just generally doing the best to make their service bearable. But all of them live in dread of the next time they have to go into No Mans’ Land, knowing it’s completely arbitrary if any of them survive.
And Berger realizes these fears in frightful detail. His trench-run scenes are his most captivating, his most visually interesting, and his most gruesome, characterized by a significant grunginess in addition to the violence. After all, it’s sometimes forgotten how dirty a war this was. Paul spends a lot of time in the mud (Berger acknowledges a major influence is Apocalypse Now), and there’s a hefty sequence where his face is just caked in it as he exhaustively lays low in a foxhole with a dying Frenchman. But it’s in these moments often entrenched in such alien context and imagery that honest humanity seeps out. Seeing the man suffering, Paul’s empathy kicks in -the othering of the enemy hasn’t been drilled into him so much that he can’t see them as human. It is such a powerful beat that spotlights an inherent kindness all too foreign to this war. It’s the only ray of hope that Berger allows in this otherwise pessimistic fable.
There is one scene I missed that was a vital part of the earlier American version of this movie, in which between the action Paul returns and confronts the schoolmaster who had earlier preached with nationalistic fervor on the glory of war and is still doing so. Paul attempts to set the record straight with his students but to little avail. It was a major scene of fury towards the military conscription complex and a significant point of Paul’s hardened personality. Instead this film lets just the action speak for that, and in any case Paul is still at the end a shell of his former self, due to all the loss and carnage and trauma. I prefer the effect of the former but I understand that where the earlier movie chose to emphasize righteous anger this one is focused on the waste. The waste of resources, the waste of power, and the waste of lives. It utterly reviles the First World War as one colossal waste, as it should.
It was said of the original All Quiet on the Western Front that it ought to be “reproduced in every language, shown in all the nations until the word ‘war’ is taken out of the dictionaries.” The same might be said of Berger’s haunting new version. The anti-war messaging though may not be as strong an impulse of this movie as its’ function of dedication is. Through Berger’s keen direction that reinvigorates the text and an intense yet also sweepingly elegiac score by Volker Bertelmann, it is a film of mourning. A powerful ode to the fallen, slaughtered in a ceaseless campaign of destruction that truly had no winners, no glory, no nobility. All is quiet on the western front because the war left none to draw breath there.
All Quiet on the Western Front releases on Netflix October 28th.
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