One of the most realistic and harrowing film experiences of the year, All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen Nichts Neues) takes the viewer into the infamous trenches of the First World War alongside an innocent 18-year-old German conscript, Paul Bäumer, who leaves school to participate in the great patriotic adventure. In the two and a half hours of almost unremitting warfare that follow, strewn with corpses and body parts, director Edward Berger and an exceptional technical team hammer home the anti-war message of Erich Maria Remarque, author of the literary classic on which it is based, in one of Netflix’s most lavish and expensive productions to date.
Shot with soulful expressiveness in hues of dirty blue and gray and cleanly cut to the rhythm of a mournful 3-note motif played on a harmonium and scattered snare drum beats, the film has an essential, modern minimalism that invites the viewer into its fields of horror. Told from the German side – that of frightened, shell-shocked boy soldiers who have no idea what they are in for by enrolling in the Imperial Army – it offers a different viewpoint on the Great War. Its setting in the German trenches is grimly realistic and bitterly anti-heroic, recalling Westfront 1918 directed by G.W. Pabst in 1930, many of whose actors had fought in the war, or maybe Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 Paths to Glory. Another film of 1930, Lewis Milestone’s American adaptation of Remarque’s book, won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Now writer-director Edward Berger steps up to the plate with a true contender that has earned nine Oscar nominations, in a year in which the war in Ukraine has made the subject sadly topical, along with the worrisome air of nationalism and propaganda that has been spreading across Europe.
Berger, a writer and director whose career has nimbly switched between television and movies (Jack, 2014), leaps into the thick of the action in a nerve-jangling opening attack, in which a young soldier named Heinrich fights with sheer terror on his face on the battlefield. In the next scenes, his filthy clothes, caked with mud and blood, are boiled clean and mended before being reassigned to the naïve, fresh-faced schoolboy Paul (Felix Kammerer, a perfectly cast Everyman with an enormously expressive face). Like all the other excited students, he has been easily duped by the principal’s empty rhetoric about performing noble deeds for the Kaiser, the fatherland; for the Iron Cross he will bring home.
The soft focus and gentle pastels of the school scenes, enlivened by the schoolboys’ red caps, give way to a harsher palette as Paul and his schoolfriends find themselves tramping through a razed gray field on their way to the Western front. It is Spring 1917 and the war has been going on for three years without either side gaining ground. What makes it even more senseless is the wanton waste of lives we see on screen.
On his first day at the front, a lieutenant takes one look at Paul comically trying to put a gas mask on and sentences, “You’ll almost certainly be dead by dawn.” But he survives, while all around him are shot in the face or blown up by bombs in non-stop gunfire and explosions, all seen from his P.O.V. As the camera rises over the battlefield and flooded trenches for a sweeping overhead shot (a visual strategy that relieves any incipient feeling of monotony), D.P. James Friend masterfully shows us the extended horror Paul is immersed in.
Another survivor who becomes his best buddy is the lucky soldier Katczynski a.k.a. Kat (Albrecht Schuch), a simple fellow with an eye for edible farm animals. The theft of a goose is suspensefully shot and sets the scene for an emotional end to their friendship later on. Being illiterate, Kat gets the younger Paul to read him a letter from his wife and thinks uneasily of going back to civilian life. This interval away from the war (though undercut by Volker Bertelmann’s sobering score) is a relaxing change of pace for soldiers and viewers alike, but it is not destined to last.
Although the screenplay is quite faithful to Remarque’s book, one important character has been written in by Berger and his co-writers Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell. This is high-ranking diplomat Matthias Erzberger (played by Daniel Brühl), a real historical figure who led the German delegation negotiating an end to the war with the French and British. As the war winds down, Paul & company march on a mission to find 60 missing recruits, while nearby a luxuriously appointed train carrying Erzberger and his associates chugs towards a rendezvous with the Supreme Allied Commander Foch (Thibault de Montalbert) beside a forest, bizarrely recalling something out of a Sergio Leone western.
When the armistice is signed at last, early in the morning, the cease-fire is set for 11 a.m. that same day. In a mirror image of Sam Mendes’ 1917 in which two young soldiers travel through no man’s land to deliver a message that will call off a doomed offensive attack and save lives, this story concludes with the absurd, suicidal order of a German general disgruntled with the peace treaty. It leads into the film’s greatest battle scenes and a frightening array of tanks, flame-throwers and inhuman hand-to-hand combat, ghastly scenes of wide-scale death shot through with a contradictory pictorial beauty that avoids all pathos and makes this one of the finest anti-war films out there.
Director: Edward Berger
Screenwriters: Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson, Ian Stokell, based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque
Cast: Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Aaron Hilmer, Moritz Klaus, Adrian Grunewald, Edin Hasanovic, Daniel Brühl, Thibault de Montalbert, Devid Striesow Friedrichs, Andreas Dohler, Sebstian Hulk, Luc Feit, Michael Wittenborn
Producers: Edward Berger, Daniel Marc Dreifuss, Malte Grunert
Executive producers: Daniel Bruhl, Lesley Paterson, Thorsten Schumacher, Ian Stokell
Cinematography: James Friend
Production design: Christian M. Goldbeck, Ernestine Hipper
Costume design: Lisy Christl
Editing: Sven Budelmann
Music: Volker Bertelmann
Sound: Markus Stemler, Frank Kruse, Lars Ginzel, Stefan Korte, Viktor Prasil
Visual effects: Frank Petzhold, Kamil Jaffar, Viktor Muller, Markus Frank
Production companies: A Netflix presentation of an Amusement Park Films (Germany), Rocket Science (UK), Sliding Down Rainbows Entertainment (U.S.), Gunpowder Films, Anima Pictures production
World sales: Rocket Science
In German, French
148 minutes
