all quiet on the western front movie review

All Quiet on the Western Front

This film, directed by Edward Berger from a script he wrote with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell , is the first German-made version of Erich Maria Remarque ’s famed novel about World War I, written in German and published in 1928. The first film adaptation of the book, released in 1930, was American, directed by Lewis Milestone, and kind of a landmark of early American sound filmmaking. It was well received and considered so powerful that it was thought a potential deterrent to future war. That turned out to be erroneous. (And Remarque himself contended that he had not intended to write a pacifist testament so much as to plainly depict the agony of the young recruit at war.)

A second version, in 1979, directed by Delbert Mann (a “dreary” director, per Andrew Sarris) and starring Richard Thomas , then famous for his portrayal of saintly earnest John Boy Walton on “The Waltons,” didn’t have close to the same impact. Nor, I suspect, will this rendering (and I do mean “rendering” in more than one sense) of the story, which nonetheless is Germany’s official film submission to the Academy Awards this year.

At two and a half hours, it’s as long as the 1930 version, but packed with quite a bit more plot. It jettisons the early scenes in the novel and film in which young German students are goaded by an ardent super-patriot professor into joining the military and saving the fatherland. Instead, this film sets its sights on the head-spinning carnage of warfare by showing how young enlistee Paul Bäumer ( Felix Kammerer ) gets his wrong-sized uniform: the clothing has been recycled off of a corpse.

Like “1917” before it, and like the better films that continue to inspire a concentratedly grisly mode of war picture (the epochal Russian film “ Come and See ” is explicitly referenced at least once, as is the more recent, and more problematic, “ The Painted Bird ”), “All Quiet on the Western Front” is state-of-the-art in shoving your nose in realistic-seeming carnage and possibly inducing hearing damage in laying on the ear-splitting aural experience of a fire-fight. The in-the-trenches tracking shots that Stanley Kubrick crafted for “ Paths of Glory ” (a movie that culminated in a point that actually made sense, unlike this muddle) are now steady hand-held digital panoramas of exposed viscera and agonized writhing. Filmmakers have arguably lost the plot, turning “War is hell” into a “Can you top this?” competition.

Within all the action, the narrative of young Bäumer making his way, learning what it is to kill, and trying to forge fellowship in his untenable situation plods along. Berger adds some material too. There’s a parallel storyline in which real-life German vice-chancellor Matthias Erzberger tries to broker a peace with the French and others. This is not present in Remarque’s book. So why’s it here? I reckon several reasons: first, to demonstrate that in the Great War, there really WERE some “good Germans,” which when you think about it is neither here nor there in this scheme, as the reader/viewer is meant to at least have some empathy for Paul, who is after all a German soldier. And the intransigence of some of the French delegates in these scenes will bring to mind the years-long humiliation Germany was subjected to by the Armistice agreement, which helped bring about the rise of Hitler. The Erzberger narrative is also intended, one supposes, to build suspense: will the Armistice go into effect before the worst can happen to the characters we’ve come to care about? (Presuming one has indeed come to care about them, which was not my own experience here.)

But this is not the only special pleading the director puts forth. Late in the film there’s a sequence when Paul and his older army friend Katczinsky ( Albrecht Schuch ) go to steal a goose (to eat, not to adopt as a pet or anything) from a French farm and run afoul of a dead-eyed French boy. I won’t “spoil” the sequence. But I will say that, apart from committing the cinematic sacrilege of using the same Bach choral prelude that Tarkovsky put in his “Solaris,” it is very invested in villainizing French farm boys. To which I can only ask, well, what were the Germans even doing in France at that time anyway?

Ultimately, I found this kind of whataboutism more amusing than disquieting. Maybe I’m just whistling in the dark. 

In select theaters today, on Netflix October 28th.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

• Felix Kammerer as Paul Bäumer
• Albrecht Schuch as Stanislaus "Kat" Katczinsky
• Aaron Hilmer as Albert Kropp
• Edin Hasanović as Tjaden Stackfleet
• Devid Striesow as General Friedrich
• Daniel Brühl as Matthias Erzberger
• Moritz Klaus as Frantz Müller
• Sebastian Hülk as Major von Brixdorf
• Edward Berger
• Ian Stokell
• Lesley Paterson

Writer (novel)

• Erich Maria Remarque

Cinematographer

• James Friend
• Sven Budelmann
• Volker Bertelmann

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‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Review: The Spectacle of War

Edward Berger’s German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel aims to rattle you with its relentless brutality.

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By Ben Kenigsberg

In his auteurist film history “The American Cinema” (1968), the critic Andrew Sarris compared similar scenes in two World War I films, King Vidor’s “The Big Parade” (1925) and Lewis Milestone’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930), the first screen adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel. Vidor, Sarris felt, had a more satisfying approach to showing two soldiers from opposite sides in a shell hole, one dying. Vidor emphasized the faces of his characters, Sarris wrote, rather than pictorialism and spectacle.

The first sequence of Edward Berger’s new German-language adaptation of Remarque’s novel announces about as loudly as possible that it’s on the side of pictorialism and spectacle. It opens with a landscape: a quiet wood and mountains, seemingly at sunrise. A fox sucks from its mother’s teat. A Terrence Malick-like shot looks upward at impossibly high and peaceful treetops.

Berger then cuts to an aerial view of drifting smoke, which clears to reveal an array of corpses. A barrage of bullets suddenly pierces the near-still composition, and the camera turns to show the full extent of the carnage and the muck. This is war as a violation of nature. And that’s even before Berger trails a scared soldier named Heinrich (Jakob Schmidt), who charges ahead in a pair of unbroken shots — take that, “1917” — only to die offscreen. In a device that owes something to the red coat in “Schindler’s List,” Heinrich’s uniform will be stripped from his body, cleansed, stitched up, shipped to Northern Germany and eventually reused by Remarque’s protagonist, Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), who notices someone else’s name on the label.

Does this version of a literary classic go hard or what? In truth, opting for pure bombast — a pounding, repeated three-note riff by Volker Bertelmann, who did the score, never fails to quicken the pulse — isn’t necessarily an ineffective way of translating Remarque’s plain-spoken prose. Berger has more tools at his disposal than Milestone did with the challenges of the early sound era, yet those advantages somehow make this update less impressive: The magnification in scale and dexterity lends itself to showing off. Still, the movie aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.

This “Western Front” places its faith in big set pieces and powerful images. Even the scope has been widened. Berger cuts between Paul’s experiences in the trenches and cease-fire talks between Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), who chaired Germany’s armistice commission, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France (Thibault De Montalembert). The 72-hour deadline that Foch gives Erzberger to sign adds an element of ticking-clock suspense to the overall narrative, albeit by departing from Remarque’s first-person point of view.

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‘all quiet on the western front’ review: a visceral take on the german anti-war classic.

Close to a century after Lewis Milestone's Oscar-winning film, Edward Berger offers a German adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's World War I novel.

By John DeFore

John DeFore

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Patriotic young men are as disposable as potato peels in All Quiet on the Western Front , Edward Berger’s new adaptation of the novel that gave us the 1930 Lewis Milestone movie of the same name. For some, seeing this German book rendered by a German will be reason enough for a remake; for many others, especially those reliant on history-ignoring Netflix (where this Front will debut next month), the original might as well not exist.

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A prologue encapsulates the story’s message pretty succinctly. Caught in a battle his side is losing, a young soldier named Heinrich musters his courage, tosses his spent rifle aside, and charges heroically at the enemy with a shovel. A scene later, the hero lies in a truck full of corpses, whose uniforms are salvaged, washed and mended. The bullet hole repaired, Henrich’s jacket is passed on to a fresh new recruit who has no idea it was ever worn.

That recruit is Paul (Felix Kammerer), who is so eager to enlist in the Great War with a handful of friends that he forges a permission slip he’s supposed to get a parent to sign. (It’s worth pausing to let that sink in, right?) The boys are welcomed with puffery — commanding officers who call them the “greatest generation” and urge them to fight for “the Kaiser, God, and the Fatherland,” in that peculiar order. Soon they’re thrown out into a wasteland where, for months, opponents have killed each other to gain and lose a few yards of dirt.

A different kind of end comes. We’ve been getting breathers once in a while, shifting focus to the luxurious trains and commandeered mansions where French and German authorities make decisions. While German army commanders are prepared to toss as many young bodies on the fire as are needed, politicians understand they’ve already lost, and a faction led by Daniel Brühl’s Matthias Erzberger finally secures a ceasefire. But General Friedrich (Devid Striesow) decides to launch a doomed offensive in the war’s final minutes, ignoring the human cost.

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Movie review: 'all quiet on the western front'.

Rob Schmitz

The Netflix adaptation of "All Quiet on the Western Front," the classic novel about the horrors of World War I, was directed by a German man and is in the German language.

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Review: War is hell (again) in Netflix’s new adaptation of ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’

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“All Quiet on the Western Front,” directed by Edward Berger, is hardly the first movie to argue — quite persuasively — that war is hell. It is, however, the first filmed adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s seminal World War I novel in which the Germans actually speak German. The book’s prior screen incarnations — Lewis Milestone’s Oscar-winning 1930 film , Delbert Mann’s 1979 telefilm — featured platoons of English-speaking actors cast as men with names like Kropp, Müller and Tjaden, a choice that made for some cognitive dissonance but scarcely mitigated their dramatic power or purpose. And that purpose — to de-glorify the horrors of trench warfare, mock the foolish vanity of nationalism and condemn the futility and cruelty of mass death — is one that should transcend barriers of language and culture anyway.

Even so, this solid, stirring new adaptation, which will represent Germany in the Oscar race for international feature, sets a noteworthy precedent. There’s an undeniable power in seeing Remarque’s once-serialized novel — an antiwar statement so definitive that it was duly banned by the Nazis a few years after its 1929 publication — brought to the screen in its original tongue. The sight of actual German actors in these roles can only lend authority to Remarque’s lament for a generation of men — his generation — who were “destroyed by the war,” even as it serves to bolster the movie’s horrifyingly visceral realism.

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The technical virtuosity of this “All Quiet on the Western Front” is apparent from its nightmarish opening vision of a charred battlefield strewn with barricades and bodies, a graveyard of broken flesh and twisted metal. It’s 1917, and thousands of German and French soldiers have already died here, casualties of a years-long struggle on each side to gain just a few hundred meters of ground. In a bold early flourish, Berger (who wrote the script with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell) tracks the progress of a dead man’s uniform as it’s stripped from its wearer’s body, transported, laundered and pressed back into commission — one tiny, reusable cog in the grinding machinery of war.

That uniform will soon drape the body of Paul Bäumer (a very good Felix Kammerer), a fresh-faced young man who, along with his eager schoolmates, has heeded the call to fight for “the Kaiser, God and the Fatherland.” But despite the near-certain victory they’ve been promised, something other than glory awaits them as they march across miles of scorched earth and into the trenches of Northern France. There is a stunning baptism by fire as enemy bombardments send Bäumer and his comrades scurrying for shelter. And then there is the ritual of tag collection so as to identify the newly dead, a process that will become — like a heavy, synth-enhanced three-note progression from Volker Bertelmann’s score — one of the movie’s grimmer motifs.

For a while there is the tedium of waiting, but also the consolations of camaraderie. The fine actors playing Bäumer’s comrades (they include Aaron Hilmer, Moritz Klaus, Adrian Grünewald and Edin Hasanovic) bring just enough spark and shading to enliven the classical war-film convention of one distinguishing trait per soldier, the one exception being the excellent Albrecht Schuch as Bäumer’s most trusted ally, Stanislaus Katczinsky. He’s a good man to have around, whether you’re killing time in an outdoor latrine — Berger honors Remarque’s ode to the joys of public defecation — or stealing a farmer’s goose for supper in one of the movie’s more suspenseful passages.

Hunger and thirst are constants; so are other appetites, to be sated only by a suggestive poster image or, for the lucky ones, a romp with a passing farm girl. In these moments, Berger captures the sometimes surreal idleness of war — the uneasy tension of being both a hostile, occupying force and a starving, lusting man in a foreign land. The idleness, of course, is only a respite in a movie that, as it descends back into the trenches and piles on the carnage, sometimes feels like its two-and-a-half-hour running time and sometimes feels like an eternity.

I tend to reject the widely held notion that the best, most persuasive war films are those most adept at turning violence into spectacle, as if state-of-the-art verisimilitude were the genre’s highest aspiration. Whatever its flaws or merits, this “All Quiet on the Western Front” will not settle the long-standing debate over whether there can even be such a thing as an antiwar film, especially since even the most nightmarish re-creation of armed combat threatens to become — with the enhancements of digital pyrotechnics, blood-gushing prosthetics and ear-splitting, seat-rattling sound design — an inadvertently thrilling experience. For the most part, though, Berger keeps horror rightly at the fore, never more so than when Bäumer, trapped in close quarters with a French soldier, is confronted by the undeniable humanity of his enemy.

That agonizing scene, like many others, comes straight from the novel. There’s one hefty subplot that doesn’t; it follows the real-life German negotiator Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) as he travels to sign an armistice with France, determined to end the war quickly and spare his badly beaten nation as much humiliation as possible. Brühl, the most internationally recognizable member of the cast, makes an engaging enough guide, but the decision to include this principled voice of pacifism bespeaks a lack of confidence in the movie’s point and the audience’s ability to grasp it. And while it’s instructive to witness the luxuries enjoyed by the lofty and powerful — the tea, the wine, the pastries — in contrast with the soldier’s miserable starvation diet, it’s ultimately a mistake to cut away from Bäumer and his comrades, removing us from the physical and psychological hellscape to which they’ve been abandoned.

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’

In German and French with English subtitles Rated: R, for strong bloody war violence and grisly images Running time: 2 hours, 28 minutes Playing: Bay Theatre, Pacific Palisades; available Oct. 28 on Netflix

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‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Review: A World War I Drama That’s Dutifully Competent and Dull

Edward Berger's German remake is done in the standard existential bombs-bursting-in-earth mode, but it's been made with no special flair and says nothing new.

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Over the course of the war, the land “capture” on the Western Front was meager; the location of the front line never moved by more than half a mile. So why did all those soldiers die? For no reason. Because of a tragic — one could say obscene — historical accident: that in WWI, the means of fighting was caught between an older, “classical” mode of stationary combat and the new reality of long-distance slaughter made possible by technology. By the end of the war, 17 million men had fallen between those cracks.

Yet the pale, gentle-hearted Paul, whose newly issued uniform has come off the corpse of a fallen soldier (a point meant to illustrate the endless cycle of death in WWI), somehow fights on and survives. He strikes us as a mild young man, yet there’s a ruthless killer inside him. Whirling to shoot one soldier, then knife another, he becomes, in essence, a desperate action hero, and I put it that way only because I didn’t find his acumen on the battlefield especially convincing. Berger, as a filmmaker, wants to bring us “close” to war, but the horror in “All Quiet on the Western Front” is in your face and also rather tidy in its presentation. Maybe that’s why it feels numbing.

The great war films aren’t reticent about mixing personal drama into the combat. They feature characters as edgy and defined as their theater of violence. But the new “All Quiet on the Western Front” is two and a half hours of dramatic minimalism, as if this were somehow a measure of the film’s integrity. The soldiers, including Paul, are barely sketched in, and you’re frankly relieved when the movie cuts to conventional scenes of the German vice-chancellor, Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), as he tries to broker a peace with the French generals who have trounced the German army. The negotiations are one-sided; the French, who hold all the cards, want surrender on their terms. But we register, behind Erzberger, the implacable never-say-die resentment of the German officers, which will of course be carried forward into the next war.

Stanley Kubrick, with “Paths of Glory,” made what is still the greatest movie about trench warfare, and he wasn’t shy about involving us in actual drama. “All Quiet on the Western Front” lumbers along, so that even once the armistice is struck there’s still another combat episode, all to demonstrate, with overly highlighted tragic irony, that the body count in World War I kept escalating for no reason. Anyone sane would agree with that. Yet “All Quiet on the Western Front” is the war movie as thesis statement. It keeps making its point, leaving you less shattered than empty.

Reviewed at IFC Center, Oct. 27, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 152 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release of an Amusement Park Films production. Producers: Malte Grunert, Daniel Dreifuss, Edward Berger. Executive producers: Daniel Brühl, Lesley Pateron, Ian Stokell.
• Crew: Director: Edward Berger. Screenplay: Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson, Ian Stokell. Camera: James Friend. Editor: Sven Budelmann. Music: Volker Bertelmann.
• With: Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Aaron Hilmer, Moritz Klaus, Edin Hasanovic, Adrian Grünewald, Thibault De Montalembert, Devid Striesow, Daniel Brühl.

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Nearly one hundred years after Lewis Milestone adapted Erich Maria Remarque ’s groundbreaking novel, German filmmaker Edward Berger has brought All Quiet on the Western Front to life with a fresh perspective—and the first German adaptation of a story deeply ingrained into the very DNA of the country. Set in the midst of World War I, the film’s focus narrows on Paul Bäumer ( Felix Kammerer ) and his small group of friends that get lured into war by the promise of heroism and patriotism. But there are no heroes in this war, a fact that Berger makes evident throughout the film. Paul might be the film’s protagonist—the heart and soul of the story that the audience sees the world through—but this is not a hero’s journey. All Quiet on the Western Front is a welcome departure from a long line of profound World War I films such as Sam Mendes ’ 1917 or, more recently, Operation Mincemeat because there is no one to root for and there is no positive outcome on the horizon. It’s an interesting choice, but one that delivers a more honest and devastating story.

Berger and fellow screenwriters Ian Stokell and Lesley Paterson faithfully adapt Remarque’s somber approach and biting critique of war, by painting a brutal picture of its horrors, yet it is designed to allow the audience to arrive at its own emotional conclusion as the credits roll. War is hell and for a little over two and a half hours, All Quiet on the Western Front displays its ghastly horrors without ever venturing into voyeuristic consumption, opting instead to unsettle its audience with bleak realities and sobering truths. Throughout the film, Berger cuts away from waterlogged trenches and the mangled corpses of bright young men lured into early graves, to showcase the serenity of nature. The dichotomy between life and death stands in stark contrast with the horrors on display, even as a generation dies, creeks continue to flow, seasons change, and fox kits are born. Cinematographer James Friend brings about the perfect visuals, marrying the stunning, sweeping scope of their locations with the bristling intimacy of death and mortality.

In his first performance on-screen, Kammerer proves himself as a promising newcomer on the global stage. Paul Bäumer is not an easy role to take on; the physicality of the role alone might crush a performer, and that’s without considering the great emotional toll undertaken to portray the shame, depravity, and agony of war. Paul is the heart of the film, and Kammerer effortlessly bares his soul to the audience as the war takes and takes and takes from his character. His performance is made even better by those around him, who revel in quiet moments of humanity with him and mourn with him for the ghosts of men who have quietly been dying as they lived.

RELATED: 'All Quiet on the Western Front' Director Ed Berger on Remaking the Material From the German Perspective | TIFF

A long time ago, American anthropologist James Deetz posited that the past can be seen most fully by studying the small things so often forgotten, and this seems to be the unexpected thesis of Berger’s adaptation. His cast of characters finds favor with the audiences through small, tangible personal effects that carry through the film. For Franz ( Moritz Klaus ), it's a handkerchief from a passing paramour named Eloise—a trinket that brings a moment of reprieve to his fellow soldiers as they relish in the femininity her existence brings to the testosterone-laden bunks; for Kat ( Albrecht Schuch ) it’s a matchbox that he keeps a beetle within—a beetle that escapes war with its life when the men are left for the beetles to consume; for Albert ( Aaron Hilmer ) it's a poster that he finds that allows him to escape the horrors and dream about the women he’ll never know; and for Ludwig ( Adrian Grunewald ) it's the glasses he is given by the military to replace his own spectacles. But more profound is the fact that Paul has no touchstone, no trinket in his pocket that helps to carry him onward, because he carries those around him— Franz, Kat, Albert, Ludwig, and Tjaden ( Edin Hasanovic )—to the front lines with him.

Unlike previous adaptations of Remarque’s novel, Berger instills All Quiet on the Western Front with historical elements that further underscore the shame of war. This element takes shape in the form of real-life historical figure Matthias Erzeberger ( Daniel Brühl ), who helped Germany forge a path towards an armistice with France, and was later assassinated for those efforts. There is also the fictionalized career general, who balks at the idea of peace treaties and is so enraptured with the idea of patriotism that he is driven to lead an army of beleaguered soldiers to their deaths, rather than embrace the cease-fire that waits for them on the horizon. Both figures symbolize the costs of peace: warmongers will always march their soldiers into the maw of death, while they watch from lofty seclusion, while the peacekeepers risk their safety for the promise of a better future.

All Quiet on the Western Front has a stunning sound design; one that sets teeth on edge and rattles within the chests of its audience. As the war machine wages on, Berger utilizes the jarring and ominous music of a harmonium to break through moments of reprieve like a hammer striking an anvil, signaling the ever-waging war that is larger than its cast. It cuts through quiet moments, shattering serenity and echoing like a reminder of how war destroys beauty.

Over one hundred years ago World War I devastated a generation, ten years ago there was a war that never truly ended, and presently a war wages on with flames of devastation that no one wants to stoke. Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front offers the same reminder that Remarque’s novel presented: nationalism kills only for the glory of ego and offers shallow graves in foreign lands instead of heroic homecomings. It is impossible to watch the film without being affected by the horrors of pitting man against man to placate the egos of tyrants with chips on their shoulders. The first adaptation came at the onset of even worse horrors than World War I, and it’s hard not to wonder if this adaptation might be able to sway the masses to lower their angry fists before it's too late once again.

All Quiet on the Western Front is currently playing in select theaters and comes to be on Netflix on October 28.

• Movie Reviews
• All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

All Quiet On The Western Front Review

14 Oct 2022

All Quiet On The Western Front (2022)

This is the third cinematic adaptation of the famous novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a screed so powerful in its evocation of the realities of war and so determined in its pacifism that it was among the many books to be systematically burned by the Nazis. The first film adaptation arrived in 1930, just a year after publication, winning Best Picture at the third Academy Awards; it was then made into a TV film with Ernest Borgnine in the late 1970s. Now, with the book a staple among schoolchildren around the world, it gets another turn. This is a book so seminal, it seems, that every generation gets a cinematic turn.

This new version from director Edward Berger (perhaps best known in the UK for directing Patrick Melrose ) might be the loosest take yet — here, Paul Bäumer does not briefly return home, jaded and disillusioned, as he does in the novel — but the story loses none of its power or its anger for it. A furious prologue begins not from the perspective of Paul, but another impressionable young German recruit, who quickly finds himself at the wrong end of a French bullet. Then, with a remarkable macro perspective, Berger’s camera tracks the journey of his uniform, as it is cleaned of mud and blood, reupholstered and recycled, to be sent back into the line of duty. The vast machinery of total war has rarely been depicted as viscerally or as coldly as this.

It’s all stunningly shot, with production values that rival that of Sam Mendes’ 1917 .

That uniform ultimately ends up in the hands of Bäumer (Felix Kammerer, hugely impactful even when caked in mud), who is naively inspired by a disturbingly nationalistic speech to join the military effort. He and a cluster of teenage friends sign up excitedly; 18 months later, they are all either war-weary or dead. The route of this soldier’s journey will be relatively familiar to anyone who has seen a war film before (especially if it’s one of the two previous adaptations of this book), but the execution is hugely impressive.

These soldiers are sent over the top endlessly, almost repetitively, leaving us with nothing but a sense of futility. Berger’s direction remains hard-nosed throughout. Trench warfare is depicted as nothing but a failure of thoughtless, egomaniacal generals; if hunger doesn’t kill them, their orders to go over-the-top will. It’s all stunningly shot, with production values that rival that of Sam Mendes ’ 1917 ; at times, it almost wades into horror territory, helped in no small part by the booming, anachronistic synths of Volker Bertelmann’s score. The whole experience is doom-sodden and helpless. More than anything, this is a war film that gets under your skin, and into your bones.

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All quiet on the western front (2022).

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 8 Reviews
• Kids Say 33 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Intense, lengthy adaptation has gruesome war scenes.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this German-language adaptation of the class novel All Quiet on the Western Front is a gruesome, two-and-a-half-hour depiction of the horrific realities of war. In battlefield scenes, men are killed individually and in mass in grisly ways, from stabbings to amputations, from getting…

Why Age 16+?

In battlefield scenes, men are killed individually and in mass in horrific ways,

In the English subtitles: "s--t," "hell," "damn," "bastard," "arse," "for Christ

Some people smoke cigarettes and drink wine or other liquor.

Soldiers mention "dirty girls," the "Holy Virgin's thighs," "the clap," a woman'

Any Positive Content?

There's nothing glamorous or cool about war. Soldiers on all sides are just youn

Soldiers stick together and watch out for each other. They form a brotherhood th

The film is set in Europe, stars a German cast, and is shot in German with some

Violence & Scariness

In battlefield scenes, men are killed individually and in mass in horrific ways, from stabbings to amputations, from getting run over by a tank to being shot, exploded, set on fire, drowned in mud, gassed to death, and more. The film shows death in close-up detail. There's a lot of blood.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

In the English subtitles: "s--t," "hell," "damn," "bastard," "arse," "for Christ's sake," "My God."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Soldiers mention "dirty girls," the "Holy Virgin's thighs," "the clap," a woman's breasts, and kissing a wife upon return from war.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

There's nothing glamorous or cool about war. Soldiers on all sides are just young people with lives and dreams. War takes this from them seemingly at random. Those who survive are forever changed by what they've witnessed and done.

Positive Role Models

Soldiers stick together and watch out for each other. They form a brotherhood that some hope to carry on after the war is over. They also obey commands and fight their hardest. Paul feels guilty after watching an "enemy" soldier die a slow death. Some soldiers lose their will to live after all the horrors they've seen. One government official who lost his son in war works for peace; another purposefully sends men to die in battle mere minutes before peace is declared.

Diverse Representations

The film is set in Europe, stars a German cast, and is shot in German with some French.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Parents need to know that this German-language adaptation of the class novel All Quiet on the Western Front is a gruesome, two-and-a-half-hour depiction of the horrific realities of war. In battlefield scenes, men are killed individually and in mass in grisly ways, from stabbings to amputations, from getting run over by a tank to being shot, exploded, set on fire, drowned in mud, gassed to death, and more. The film shows death, mutilation, and psychological torture in close-up detail. There's a lot of blood. We witness it all through the eyes of a young recruit who transitions from enthusiasm to horror to guilt, sorrow, and resignation. Men smoke cigarettes and drink wine or other liquor. There's less salty banter between soldiers than in some other all-male films, though there's mention of "dirty girls," the "Holy Virgin's thighs," "the clap," a woman's breasts, and kissing a wife upon return from war. In the English subtitles, language includes "s--t," "hell," "damn," "bastard," "arse," "for Christ's sake," and "My God." To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (8)
• Kids say (33)

Based on 8 parent reviews

Actually a good WWI movie

What's the story.

Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer) is a young man who doesn't want to be left behind when all his friends head off to fight in World War I at the start of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. He forges his parents' signature and enlists. All the new young recruits are pumped with energy and enthusiasm about fighting for their country. Within mere hours after setting off with their troops, these men realize just how terrible the conditions are for soldiers, and how devastating war is on the psyche. Men die by the thousands, including all of Paul's friends. An older soldier, Kat (Albrecht Schuch), takes him under his wing, but nobody can truly be protected in the trenches and on the battlefields on the disputed western front. Meanwhile, the liberal politician Matthias Erzberger ( Daniel Bruhl ) works to sign a peace deal with France in time to save some lives.

Is It Any Good?

Not every viewer will be willing or able to sit through two and a half hours of epic, bloody, graphically violent war reenactments. But those who do make it through this third film version (and the first in German) of the classic German novel, All Quiet on the Western Front , will be rewarded with a subtly humane tale of friendship, endurance, and the value of human life. The violence serves the story and its message. Director Edward Berger and team have done a jaw-dropping job of choreographing battlefield scenes, shooting them often at eye level and embedded in the trenches, giving the viewer the impression of being in the mix. A disquieting score relies heavily on single, melancholic beats that come and go with the action. Newcomer Kammerer is excellent as the wide-eyed recruit who barely withstands each passing day of tragedy.

Quiet is shot in grey, blue, and brown tones, and painstakingly conveys the soldiers' horrific, near-starvation, mud-caked, boot-soaked conditions. These are compared in overlapping scenes with the exquisite luxuries military leaders are afforded. Soldiers are killed, dismembered, exploded, set on fire, and sent into a last deadly battle just minutes before the armistice. The film has a clear theme of how little the lives of the young men seem to matter to some of the higher-ups, or to the enemy. "Soon Germany will be empty," one character says. End credits tell us almost 17 million people died in World War I, three million battling uselessly over the western front. Scenes capture how single trenches get passed back and forth on the same fought-over land between opposing sides for years, and how the uniforms of the dead are practically yet cynically washed, sewn back up, and handed out to new recruits, with perished soldiers' names on labels ripped out and tossed to the floor.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about why the young men are so eager to go to war in All Quiet on the Western Front . What did you think of the scene at the beginning where they are cheering about their turn to go to the frontlines?

The film depicts the realities of war quite graphically, with grisly scenes of death for nearly the full 2.5-hour running time. What do you think was the filmmakers' intention with this? Could the film have given the same horrific portrayal of war without so much graphic violence? Why or why not?

Who was fighting in World War I and why? Where was the western front being fought over in the film? Where could you go for more information?

If you've seen either of the earlier film adaptations or read the original novel, how does this film compare? Is this film a remake or a new adaptation?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : October 28, 2022
• Cast : Felix Kammerer , Albrecht Schuch , Daniel Bruhl
• Director : Edward Berger
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Book Characters , Friendship , History
• Run time : 148 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong bloody war violence and grisly images
• Awards : Academy Award , BAFTA - BAFTA Winner
• Last updated : June 20, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Review: A Beautiful, Horrifying New Take on Classic Anti-War Story

Edward Berger’s film is the first German-language adaptation of a novel once banned and burned in that country

This review originally ran September 13, 2022, for the film’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

It’s overly simplistic to say that Edward Berger’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” reclaims that classic anti-war work for Germany, but it’s not entirely inaccurate.

Berger’s unflinching adaptation comes more than 90 years after Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel shocked a battered and increasingly nationalistic Germany by depicting the brutality of sending young men off to be butchered in World War I foxholes.

The film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, dives into those horrors, adds political context that resonates in 2022 and asks viewers to empathize with soldiers who were fighting on the losing (and the “wrong”) side of that war.

Given the power of its images and the terror we see in these young faces on the battlefield, it’s hard to imagine that the film won’t elicit that empathy.

There was nothing militaristic or partisan about Remarque’s novel, which is one of the reasons it was banned and burned by the Nazis when they came to power, thanks in part to stoking racist resentment of what was seen as a humiliating defeat in the First World War. The book was about humanity and inhumanity, and so was the 1930 Hollywood version directed by Lewis Milestone, that depicted the soldiers as Germans but had them speak English; that language choice both made it more palatable to English-speaking audiences and easier to take as the Everyman story that in some ways it was.

Berger’s “All Quiet” is different; it’s in German, with a largely German cast and no way to avoid the realization that the hell in which these young soldiers are being immersed — and the way in which they lost the war — will directly lead to the rise of the Nazis and to World War II. 

The Netflix film, which is Germany’s entry in this year’s Best International Feature Film Oscar race, follows in a long tradition of the depiction of war that goes back to Milestone’s version, but disappeared for a long while when World War II prompted Hollywood to embrace gung-ho war movies. It strips the glamor and heroism out of the genre to show the brutality of using young men as cannon fodder, while shocking the viewers with its brutality and tiring them with the seeming endlessness of the war.

( Endlessness might be the right word for viewers in 2022, given the conflicts that still wrack the globe more than 100 years after the events in this film.)

“All Quiet on the Western Front” starts with the bucolic landscape of Western Europe in 1917; we know we’re in for carnage, but first we see hills and trees, clouds sitting in a pink-tinged sky, fog slipping through the woods. It’s a technique Berger and his cinematographer James Friend return to again and again, deliberately placing their story in a world that would look like paradise if not for the blood squabbles of humans.

And “All Quiet” doesn’t give us time to bask in that beauty; before long, we’re in a short, brutal battle, and then the ground is littered with dead bodies. In a chilling sequence, soldiers strip the clothes off their dead comrades, leaving a pile of muddy, torn garments alongside the rows of black coffins. The film follows the clothes, not the men, as they’re taken to a factory to be scrubbed, washed, mended and ultimately given to new recruits – one of whom, 17-year-old Paul Bauymer (newcomer Felix Kammerer), gets his new uniform, looks at the name tag and points out, “This already belongs to somebody.”

“Yeah, it was too small for him,” lies the officer who’s inducting Paul. “Happens all the time.”

The sequence, and the rest of the film, is accompanied by a score from composer Volker Bertelmann (who often goes by Hauschka) that can scarely be called music, and is all the better for it: The sound is an aural attack, with sharp, staccato drumbeats punctuating some scenes and a trio of huge, foreboding chords (think of it as an industrial-rock version of the “Dies Irae”) hanging over others.

Paul and his friends are promptly shipped off to the Western Front, where all is decidedly not quiet, or comfortable. Wading through muddy trenches in the pouring rain, waiting to face the moments when they will inevitably be sent to run into the face of gunfire from better-armed opponents, the teenage boys can only mutter “this isn’t what I expected” as they are pulled into a terror that never lets up.

The faces of these boys are scary portraits in blood and mud, with pink cheeks occasionally visible beneath the grime and white eyes so bright they seem to be targets. And over and over, targets are exactly what they are, mowed down by French soldiers with machine guns, with tanks, with bombs and with flame-throwers.

This part of the story was the core of Remarque’s novel and Milestone’s film, but Berger departs from the source material to also spend time with the German high command, who send boys off to die and then plot their next moves in elegant drawing rooms and impeccably appointed train cars. Daniel Bruhl plays a government minister who can see that delaying the peace only means that more soldiers will die before Germany inevitably surrenders, but his arguments don’t persuade the officers who think that France’s non-negotiable conditions for a cease-fire will humiliate Germany (which, of course, they did, enabling the eventual rise of Adolf Hitler).

The film goes back and forth, with the older men bickering and the younger ones dying. The battles become more and more grueling, and the film makes you feel every moment of its two-and-a-half-hour running time; it’s utterly relentless, with occasional breaks to show an officer, watching the distant smoke from the balcony of his mansion where he’s staying or discussing post-war career prospects while listening to opera.

This is a war movie from the perspective of the losers, visually spectacular but by turns infuriating and heartbreaking. “All Quiet” is excessive, but it probably needs to be; the screenplay by Berger, Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell takes a dark story and makes it even darker. Like most formidable war movies, it’s hard to watch and hard to shake.

“All Quiet on the Western Front” opens in select U.S. theaters Oct. 7 and on Netflix Oct. 28.

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All Quiet on the Western Front Reviews

If two writers and a director of the caliber responsible for [the film] had been allowed money and opportunity an original work the result would have to produce been far more exciting. What they have done has power, but it is spread all over the place.

Full Review | Oct 30, 2023

No film detailed the horrors of World War I better than Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front. A technically groundbreaking film that doubles as an extremely powerful anti-war message. Just as compelling in its time as it is today.

Full Review | Jun 8, 2023

All Quiet on the Western Front remains profoundly moving.

Full Review | Apr 25, 2023

The film also deserves high praise for its dynamic camera work, editing, production design, and other technical aspects that contribute to its authenticity and relatability almost one hundred years later.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Oct 27, 2022

This is one of the best films Universal had produced. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Sep 1, 2022

Mr. Lewis Milestone, the Russian who directed it, has made the most remarkable film I have ever seen. His battles scenes alone are astonishing.

Full Review | Aug 2, 2022

Here is a photoplay which carries a wallop in every scene. Without doubt, it is as mighty a weapon against war as any infernal machine might be for conflict. After seeing it, there can be few to argue in favor of shedding the blood of any nation's youth.

It enormously earns its reverence and celebrated place among war films and epics. Make no mistake. This film's resonance has not diminished with time or changing movie tastes.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 26, 2022

I went to see the film with the idea at the back of my mind that Hollywood would "murder" Remarque's powerful indictment of war. My fears were groundless, for Lewis Milestone's treatment of the story could not be improved upon.

Full Review | Feb 19, 2022

If ever there was a play aimed to bring about permanent peace, this Universal picture, directed by Lewis Milestone and produced by Junior Laemmle, is it.

Full Review | Jun 10, 2021

Its presentation of bombardments and actual fighting is without doubt the finest and most convincing thing of its kind that the screen has yet offered to the public. Another feature is the magnificent acting of all those who are concerned in the picture.

Full Review | Apr 8, 2021

In a perfect world... this would be the war movie to end all war movies, so definite and forceful is it in its anti-war stance, while also exhibiting such grace as to place it among the best cinema has to offer in any genre.

A thoroughly effective cast enacts the events. There are many war scenes in All Quiet and tragedy presented directly and without sentimentality, but there Is levity and romance.

All Quiet on the Western Front will grip you and leave an indelible mark upon your soul.

[All Quiet on the Western Front] strips war of all its glory and bares its sickening brutality with a tragic grimness that spares nothing and leaves the spectator shaken and speechless.

How it was passible to attain such remarkable accuracy in the battle episodes is a story in itself. But the delicate and intimate touches in the production are exceptionally fine, and though the story is somber there is the relieving humor here and there.

Easily the greatest of the talkies.

There is not much characterization in the picture. This is another reason why it is not a masterpiece. Many times it seems like a news reel actually taken at the front during 1917. It is this photographic detail which limits it as a work of art.

The picture is splendidly acted. Louis Wolheim, veteran of a hundred stage battles, is a most remarkable Katcynski, and Mr. Ayres is equally effective as Paul.

All Quiet is, of all the productions derived from the war theme, the one which I would choose to have the final word.

Screen Rant

All quiet on the western front review: youth & war meet in searing wwi drama.

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Writer-director Edward Berger, who co-wrote the screenplay with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell, is not trying to reinvent the wheel with All Quiet on the Western Front , but it's an effective adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel, one that offers viewers something distinct. The performances are as realistic as the story it is telling. The production design and cinematography add layers of authenticity reserved for only the best war movies, and the costumes genuinely feel lived in. World War I films are a dime a dozen, and at a certain point they can all blend together, but All Quiet on the Western Front makes a strong case that it deserves to stand out from the herd.

Paul (Felix Kammerer) and his contemporaries romanticize the idea of patriotism and want to fight for Germany in World War I. His commitment is such that he lies about his age to enlist. After a rousing speech, he and his compatriots are certain they have made the right decision and head into battle. En route to a medical camp, his squadron has to give up their vehicle, so others can survive. On foot, the realities of battle begin to set in. Paul loses friends and nearly his mind in service to Germany and must learn what war means — not only to the world at large, but to himself.

Related: 10 Visceral War Movies Like All Quiet On The Western Front (2022)

All Quiet On The Western Front is not a particularly special film. It is in fact very straightforward in terms of plot. But just because it's a certain type of story that's been told over again, it doesn’t mean there isn't something new to offer. In the case of All Quiet on the Western Front, a bevy of strong performances and an acceptance of history is all the film needs to stand out. Kammerer plays the part of the fool very well; his wide-eyed naiveté is acted to perfection. There are three key moments where he captivates with that same talent in different ways: When he is buying everything the military is selling him, when he is scared, and in the small, blissful moments when he is arrogant enough to think that happiness can last.

The supporting cast's performances are effective as well. Every soldier is ramped up on adrenaline to the point that it's very easy to believe they are willing to risk their lives. This is apparent even when they are joking around outside of battle. Albrecht Schuch gives a rousing performance as Paul's illiterate comrade Stanislaus Katczinsky. As Kammerer's character reads him a letter from home, Schuch emotes through held back tears and very few words. The resulting effect is gut-wrenching, and the actor seems to make time stop with his moving performance. In a much more limited role, Daniel Brühl’s portrayal of politician and writer Matthias Erzberger is calm, yet deep. His scenes are a testament to what believing the words on the page can do for a performance.

The themes expressed in All Quiet on the Western Front are subtle, but dig deep. As Brühl's character tries to make larger-than-life humanitarian changes, Kammerer's Paul believes in the power of one man's ability to affect a cause. And characters like Schuch’s are already instilled in the system, but are so disillusioned by the current state of affairs that they are essentially sleepwalking through one of the most violent times in history. The action depicted in the film comes when one least expects it, but when it does, it hits hard.

The haunting shots of empty landscapes — that could be safe or riddled with enemies — make for an intense viewing experience. All Quiet On The Western Front does not live and die by each round of ammunition, it thrives through personal connections and incredible shots of stunned faces covered in soot. There is an inevitable dullness that sets in with period pieces like this one, but Berger has control of the screen and immerses the audience in a time when war was a focus.

Next: All Quiet On The Western Front Trailer Reveals Netflix's Brutal WW1 Movie

All Quiet on the Western Front is streaming on Netflix as of October 28, and is also playing in select theaters. The film is rated R for strong bloody war violence and grisly images.

All Quiet on the Western Front

Based on Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 novel, All Quiet on the Western Front is a World War I movie following Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) as he quickly realizes that war isn't about becoming a hero, but rather just surviving the terrifying experience. The film received critical praise upon release and even won four Academy Awards.

Where To Watch Every Oscars 2023 Best Picture Nominee Online

The oscars 2023 complete guide: winners & where to watch every best picture nominee, all quiet on the western front ending explained (in detail).

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‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Review: War Is Still Hell in German Remake

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. Netflix will release the film in select theaters on Friday, September 30 and streaming on Netflix on Friday, October 28.

“ All Quiet on the Western Front ” is one of those foundational texts that transcends clichés, because it invented them. Erich Maria Remarque’s 1928 novel and Lewis Milestone’s Oscar-winning 1930 film are cornerstones of the “war is hell” subgenre — which, in a post-”Apocalypse Now,” post-”Saving Private Ryan” era, has become more ubiquitous than the jingoistic war epics it was designed to counter.

There might be some fresh insight to be gained from a new adaptation of “All Quiet,” despite the ripple effects of its influence: War, sadly, has not ended because of films about how awful it is. And its futility and absurdity remain constant, even as its face evolves with the times. Sadly, Edward Berger’s handsome, but expected version of the story doesn’t add much to the canon except for some starkly beautiful imagery.

Berger’s “All Quiet” was produced in association with Netflix, and is the first German-language film version of Remarque’s novel, which was originally published in German. “All Quiet” was one of the works targeted by Nazi book-burnings, and this new film is an attempt to reclaim the novel as an essential work of German culture. It’s coming from inside the house, so to speak, and there is a certain Teutonic seriousness to the filmmaking as well as the subject matter. Just as polished but not quite as flashy as Sam Mendes’ “1917,” the film displays a similar level of commitment to historical detail, but presents its elaborately staged battlefield scenes in a relatively more plain spoken style.

Instead, Berger and cinematographer James Friend focus on color, such as it is. The palette here ranges from dried clay to blackened smoke, with little but rusty red blood and urgent orange fire to break up the muddy monochrome look of the Western front. Everything is wet — if it’s not raining, the recruits are crawling on their bellies through mud puddles, their uniforms soaked through with filthy cappuccino-colored water — and cold. The skies are overcast, the ground is barren and crunchy with frost, and the wind whispers through hushed groves of oak trees like the voices of the dead.

And there are many voices to be heard. “All Quiet on the Western Front” is a story of how naive boys become broken men, and the film opens with a young soldier being mowed down on the battlefield and thrown into a mass grave. His boots are pulled off of his stiff feet, and sent back to a factory where they’re cleaned up and given to another acne-scarred recruit who will join the boots’ previous owner in death soon enough. Throughout the film, German officers report back to their superiors with big, abstract numbers: 20,000 dead in an afternoon. 100,000 dead by the end of the week.

These abstractions are contrasted with the individualized trauma inflicted on Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer), a 17-year-old infantryman who joins up on a whim with a group of classmates who brag that they’ll be marching on Paris in six weeks. Instead, Paul and his friends — Paul’s best buddy Albert (Aaron Hilmer), their bespectacled school chum Ludwig (Adrian Grunewald), and the worldly Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch) — watch helplessly as their fellow soldiers are picked off in horrifyingly graphic ways over the course of 18 months.

Paul’s disillusionment is seen primarily in Kammerer’s eyes, which go from wide with fear to cold and dead as he begins to wonder if it might be better to join his comrades in death. Compared to Milestone’s “All Quiet,” Berger’s version spends less of its screen time hanging out with the infantrymen as they kill time between raids, chasing girls and geese across the French countryside like the teenagers that they are. This makes for both a bleaker and a less impactful film: The onslaught of death is more relentless (and numbing) here, yes. But we don’t know these young men as well when they do meet their deaths, which makes the loss hurt just a little less.

In its place, Berger inserts scenes set at German high command, where the clean linens, fine crystal, and plentiful food contrast as sharply with the soldiers’ experience on the front as the opinions of liberal politician Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) contrast with those of hawkish career soldier Gen. Friedrich (Devid Striesow). Erzberger’s goal is simply to end the war, and he rushes to accept a ceasefire despite its accompanying blow to German dignity; Friedrich, on the other hand, insists on keeping the bloodshed going until the very end as a matter of pride, which is easy for him to say from behind thick stone walls.

The showiest and most modern aspect of the filmmaking in “All Quiet” is its score, from Academy Award nominee Volker Bertelmann. Bertelmann’s music combines blasts of machine-gun snare drums with a blaring three-note sequence that recalls a famous snippet from Akiria Ifikube’s “Godzilla” theme, and creates a similarly ominous effect of something big, scary, and invincible coming to get the viewer. In this case, that thing is the literal manifestation of humanity’s more violent instincts rather than a metaphorical one.

That’s not to say that “All Quiet on the Western Front” doesn’t traffic in symbolism: Throughout the film, objects like uniforms, dog tags, and the aforementioned pair of boots stand in for the tragic and mind-boggling loss of life on the Western front during WWI. Late in the film, Paul rages at the idea that he can just set aside “two years of hand grenades like a pair of socks” once he returns home from the front. And indeed, for veterans of the First Great War, the physical and psychological damage was lifelong. And the echoes of their ordeal still resonate — and may well forever, as long as dutiful re-creations of their experience like this one keep coming out every few decades.

“All Quiet on the Western Front” premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. Netflix will release it in select theaters on Friday, September 30 and streaming on Netflix on Friday, October 28.

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All Quiet On The Western Front (2022) Movie Review – A nuanced and honest look at the grim reality of life in the trenches

A nuanced and honest look at the grim reality of life in the trenches.

The German anti-war movie “All Quiet on the Western Front”, was initially named “Im Westen nichts Neues” and it is inspired by Erich Maria Remarque’s historical novel. The events of this movie takes place in the concluding stages of World War One, depicting how the reality of war demoralizes soldiers through the tale of a young German soldier. Simultaneously, we follow the journey of a diplomat who attempts to stop the mayhem and rescue some lives along the way.

Paul Bäumer, a naïve teen, and his companions Albert and Müller, who all harbor romanticized and patriotic ideas about war, serve as the central characters of the storyline. Paul lies about his age in the documents in order to join the army and defend his country. He and his friends are eager to fight on the front lines, seize French territory, and triumphantly head back home. Sadly, once Paul finds himself inside a trench, unprepared and wearing another soldier’s outfit, things get worse.

When the young soldiers see the horrors of battle and witnesses the destruction firsthand, all the grandeur quickly fades away. The conditions for all the men on the front are still as bad as they were in their initial days, despite the possibility of peace looming in the distance. When the battle is over, they end up losing all the zeal and naivety with which they had begun.

All Quiet on the Western Front is not the first to depict how brutal war is. This specific story has been depicted in cinema before; in fact, the 1930 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front won an Oscar. The incredible novel about World War I, as adapted by filmmaker Edward Berger, is as moving as ever.

Berger’s interpretation of this well-known tragedy is profoundly gloomy. His nuanced and honest emphasis on the propaganda, in contrast to the grim realities of life in the trenches, is truly heartbreaking. One scene in particular is truly chilling, depicting Paul collecting his clothing without realizing that the garments on his back were taken from the dead.

Furthermore, the movie tries to paint war as an insatiable field of death, complete with reused uniforms, repeated destruction, and days of starvation, exhaustion, disease, and trauma. We see a glimpse of how the illusions of courage and valor are swiftly shattered as the actuality of battle kicks in. We witness how the soldiers are merely additional raw materials for the war machine.

The brutality of war helps to avoids celebrating any component of war, instead dwelling on the soldier’s daily struggles. The movie serves as a sobering reminder of the soldiers who died in battle on both sides.

The minimalist score by Volker Bertelmann frequently feels like sinister, enraged machinery. The cinematography is chilly, and while Paul does his tasks and becomes engulfed in fits of rage and hysteria, his face is usually covered with dirt or ash that makes him seem monstrous as a consequence of such a terrible war.

Kammerer may be a rookie soldier in the movie, but his portrayal is both nuanced and unsettling. Bäumer isn’t simply in over his head; he is frantically attempting to regain his composure on the front lines. Each scene is captured with painful intensity. This genuinely impressive performance illuminates the misery of a young soldier who must face every conceivable fear. Bäumer is in the spotlight as each passing second distances him from the youthful man he once was.

Schuch’s portrayal of a veteran soldier who has a grief-stricken family is a far richer and more brilliant character portrayal. Albrecht Schuch gives a memorable performance as the bizarrely optimistic Kat, a roguish, charming German soldier who will sacrifice everything for his companions.

Tjaden Stackfleet and Edin Hasanovic also add an additional dimension to the movie. In between the cries and bloodshed, there is a beautiful sequence where the squad steals a goose from a nearby French property, showcasing these soldiers at their best. Armed with outstanding sound design, cinematography, and string themes, All Quiet On The Western Front is one of the best war movies in recent times.

Read More: All Quiet On The Western Front Ending Explained

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• Verdict - 9/10 9/10

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