Nothing new in the West
Erich Maria Remarque's undying 1928 anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front has the uncommon fortune for a major literary classic to have been adapted into a major cinematic classic, and this happened almost immediately: the U.S.-produced adaptation that would go on to win the Academy Award for Outstanding Production (i.e., Best Picture) at the 1929-'30 ceremony premiered less than 16 months after the serialisation of the book began in Germany. That 1930 film is, in my eyes, one of the utmost masterpieces of early sound cinema; it's also, more directly to the point one of the very best films adapted from a prose source ever made. So ordinarily, the idea of a new All Quiet would instill in me an instinctive and peremptory "well that's a fucking stupid thing to do" (and if we're talking about the 1979 made-for-TV adaptation, I'd be 100% right).
This comes up because we now do in fact have a new movie version of All Quiet on the Western Front that has come fully inoculated against my snobbish dismissal, for the undeniable reason that it is the first time a cinematic treatment of the story has been produced in Germany, and in the same German language that Remarque wrote the book in (which includes restoring its original title, Im Westen nichts Neues, "In the West, nothing new". Even if there was never any chance that I'd like the 2022 All Quiet as much as the 1930 All Quiet - and there was, to be clear, never any such chance - one can hardly say in such circumstances that the 2022 film serves no purpose. Restoring the original language to a story that, for all its intentional and intense universality, is still very much about the specific German experience of the First World War is a purpose in and of itself.
Also, the 2022 film knocks the pants of the 1979 telefilm, so that helps things as well.
This incarnation of the story, directed by Edward Berger and adapted from the novel by himself & Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell, starts with the same fundamentals: Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), a teenager in 1917, signs up with great patriotic fervor and youthful fearlessness to fight on behalf of the Kaiser against the nation's many enemies. By the time the war has ended in November 1918, Paul has watched nearly all of his equally fervid friends die horrifically in the muddy, diseased trenches of perhaps the most brutally gruesome battlefield in the annals of modern warfare, reduced to ash and bone and rotting flesh in service to redistributing the balance of power over a few hundred yards of crater-marked wasteland. And thus do we learn that War is, as it turns out, Hell.
Credit to this new All Quiet on the Western Front where it's due: it sure does seem Hellish at that. There's nothing quiet as staggering as the way that the 1930 film used the new technology of synchronised sound to create a nihilistic hurricane of violent sounds, vomiting unprecedented violence into the melodrama of a 1930 prestige picture, but this is, at least, quite a miserably unpleasant trudge of a film. That is, to be clear, a compliment. In all media and at all points in history, this is designed to present the ultimate anti-war story, ripping up what were in 1928 freshly-formed scabs and confronting the recent butchery in Europe with undisguised contempt and a punishing lack of sentiment. And that continues to mostly hold in this latest version of the story, though it lacks the severe ugliness inherent in the story. Indeed, this All Quiet isn't really very ugly at all. Berger and cinematographer James Friend have given us quite a polished & sleek version of the story, one that has been buffed to a grim, grey shine through some damned aggressive color grading. It sort of gets at the idea that warfare is monotonous in its heavy silver sheen, though mostly it just demonstrates that regardless of what country you shot it in and regardless of what the content of the narrative is, everything that ends up with Netflix dollars going into its production seems to end up with the same glossy digital glow. The film isn't "pretty", though it has some compositions that seem rather too self-consciously buffed for their own good. But it's crisp in ways that don't really work for the filthiness of the sets and the costumes and the actors. Other than the actual scenes of battle - which have an unmistakable and undeniable brutal potency, both in their messy images and their screaming soundtracks - this has a rather lifeless, stylistically indistinct look to it, one that feels like it's borrowing from war films of the last several decades and trying to average them out. Though it's probably inevitable that it mostly feels like 1917, the highest-profile WWI film in recent years.
The monotony of the style is, I think, meant to be part of an overall strategy, or perhaps it is mere chance, since it's not really a strategy that I think works out: basically, this movie is one thing, from start to finish, pounding away relentlessly. By shuffling the story around and placing all of the material with Paul's pre-war innocence in flashbacks, it's able to get us directly to the trenches in the immediate first moments of the movie, and that sets off 148 minutes of more or less uninterrupted heavy, grey bleakness, on all fronts. The sharp, metallic images keep looking like one thing, the harsh anachronistic notes of Volker Bertelmann's score keep sounding like one thing. Quite literally, in fact: the score consists of multiple cues, but the one that keeps returning over and over again is a variation on the Hans Zimmer "BWAAM" note, only instead of just one note, it is the same three notes in quick succession. It's a violent dose of 2022 into the violence of 1917 and 1918, and other than some vague "war is a timeless evil" gesture, I really don't know what the purpose of it is, but damned if it's not memorable.
Perhaps most dubiously, the monotony seems to have landed at the character writing and acting, as well. No version of All Quiet on the Western Front has been populated by dynamic psychological figures, but no version has ever been as indifferent to the interiority of its young soldiers as this. Paul and his friends are, in this telling, entirely people who are acted-upon, with very little given to differentiate them (which is, in truth, why I haven't gone to the trouble of naming anybody else). The rejiggered arc means that we don't even see innocent jingoism collapse into shell-shocked misery; the collapse has already happened when we meet the characters, and when we flash back to watch it as it occurs, it seems that quite literally one day on the front is all it took to leave the characters robbed of their soulfulness and hope. Which probably isn't an inaccurate way to characterise the viciousness of trench warfare, but it makes for somewhat tediously bleak drama. And this is especially true given that this script elects to add substantial material of the generals and other politicians attempting to bring the war to a close, and they do seem like distinct personalities - pretty close to 100% the opposite of the story an adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front should be attempting to tell, given the story's inherent mistrust of the higher-ups sending young men to the charnel house. The narrative is strong enough that it would take a weaker treatment than this to ruin it, and the heavy one-note bleakness is a reasonable attitude to adopt given the material. But I struggle to see what about this is special, given its stylistic debts to so many other war movies. And certainly, if you want a terrific film version of this same basic story, really, 1930 wasn't that long ago.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
This comes up because we now do in fact have a new movie version of All Quiet on the Western Front that has come fully inoculated against my snobbish dismissal, for the undeniable reason that it is the first time a cinematic treatment of the story has been produced in Germany, and in the same German language that Remarque wrote the book in (which includes restoring its original title, Im Westen nichts Neues, "In the West, nothing new". Even if there was never any chance that I'd like the 2022 All Quiet as much as the 1930 All Quiet - and there was, to be clear, never any such chance - one can hardly say in such circumstances that the 2022 film serves no purpose. Restoring the original language to a story that, for all its intentional and intense universality, is still very much about the specific German experience of the First World War is a purpose in and of itself.
Also, the 2022 film knocks the pants of the 1979 telefilm, so that helps things as well.
This incarnation of the story, directed by Edward Berger and adapted from the novel by himself & Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell, starts with the same fundamentals: Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), a teenager in 1917, signs up with great patriotic fervor and youthful fearlessness to fight on behalf of the Kaiser against the nation's many enemies. By the time the war has ended in November 1918, Paul has watched nearly all of his equally fervid friends die horrifically in the muddy, diseased trenches of perhaps the most brutally gruesome battlefield in the annals of modern warfare, reduced to ash and bone and rotting flesh in service to redistributing the balance of power over a few hundred yards of crater-marked wasteland. And thus do we learn that War is, as it turns out, Hell.
Credit to this new All Quiet on the Western Front where it's due: it sure does seem Hellish at that. There's nothing quiet as staggering as the way that the 1930 film used the new technology of synchronised sound to create a nihilistic hurricane of violent sounds, vomiting unprecedented violence into the melodrama of a 1930 prestige picture, but this is, at least, quite a miserably unpleasant trudge of a film. That is, to be clear, a compliment. In all media and at all points in history, this is designed to present the ultimate anti-war story, ripping up what were in 1928 freshly-formed scabs and confronting the recent butchery in Europe with undisguised contempt and a punishing lack of sentiment. And that continues to mostly hold in this latest version of the story, though it lacks the severe ugliness inherent in the story. Indeed, this All Quiet isn't really very ugly at all. Berger and cinematographer James Friend have given us quite a polished & sleek version of the story, one that has been buffed to a grim, grey shine through some damned aggressive color grading. It sort of gets at the idea that warfare is monotonous in its heavy silver sheen, though mostly it just demonstrates that regardless of what country you shot it in and regardless of what the content of the narrative is, everything that ends up with Netflix dollars going into its production seems to end up with the same glossy digital glow. The film isn't "pretty", though it has some compositions that seem rather too self-consciously buffed for their own good. But it's crisp in ways that don't really work for the filthiness of the sets and the costumes and the actors. Other than the actual scenes of battle - which have an unmistakable and undeniable brutal potency, both in their messy images and their screaming soundtracks - this has a rather lifeless, stylistically indistinct look to it, one that feels like it's borrowing from war films of the last several decades and trying to average them out. Though it's probably inevitable that it mostly feels like 1917, the highest-profile WWI film in recent years.
The monotony of the style is, I think, meant to be part of an overall strategy, or perhaps it is mere chance, since it's not really a strategy that I think works out: basically, this movie is one thing, from start to finish, pounding away relentlessly. By shuffling the story around and placing all of the material with Paul's pre-war innocence in flashbacks, it's able to get us directly to the trenches in the immediate first moments of the movie, and that sets off 148 minutes of more or less uninterrupted heavy, grey bleakness, on all fronts. The sharp, metallic images keep looking like one thing, the harsh anachronistic notes of Volker Bertelmann's score keep sounding like one thing. Quite literally, in fact: the score consists of multiple cues, but the one that keeps returning over and over again is a variation on the Hans Zimmer "BWAAM" note, only instead of just one note, it is the same three notes in quick succession. It's a violent dose of 2022 into the violence of 1917 and 1918, and other than some vague "war is a timeless evil" gesture, I really don't know what the purpose of it is, but damned if it's not memorable.
Perhaps most dubiously, the monotony seems to have landed at the character writing and acting, as well. No version of All Quiet on the Western Front has been populated by dynamic psychological figures, but no version has ever been as indifferent to the interiority of its young soldiers as this. Paul and his friends are, in this telling, entirely people who are acted-upon, with very little given to differentiate them (which is, in truth, why I haven't gone to the trouble of naming anybody else). The rejiggered arc means that we don't even see innocent jingoism collapse into shell-shocked misery; the collapse has already happened when we meet the characters, and when we flash back to watch it as it occurs, it seems that quite literally one day on the front is all it took to leave the characters robbed of their soulfulness and hope. Which probably isn't an inaccurate way to characterise the viciousness of trench warfare, but it makes for somewhat tediously bleak drama. And this is especially true given that this script elects to add substantial material of the generals and other politicians attempting to bring the war to a close, and they do seem like distinct personalities - pretty close to 100% the opposite of the story an adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front should be attempting to tell, given the story's inherent mistrust of the higher-ups sending young men to the charnel house. The narrative is strong enough that it would take a weaker treatment than this to ruin it, and the heavy one-note bleakness is a reasonable attitude to adopt given the material. But I struggle to see what about this is special, given its stylistic debts to so many other war movies. And certainly, if you want a terrific film version of this same basic story, really, 1930 wasn't that long ago.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
