Film Review: All Quiet on the Western Front

This war-cynical epic picked up seven awards at the 2023 BAFTAS, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Foreign Language Film. Here’s why…

Premise

Impressionable teenager Paul (Felix Kammerer) signs up for World War I towards its end, after witnessing a rousing nationalist speech, so exposing him to the horrors of trench warfare, while sternly pacifist politician Mattheas (Daniel Bruhl) strains every sinew for a peace deal.

Opinion

Many people expected The Banshees of Inisherin and Everything Everywhere All at Once to be the main contenders for Best Film at the various Awards this year.

But they were eclipsed at the BAFTAs by All Quiet on the Western Front, a gritty anti-war film based on the 1929 book by Erich Remarque, which had its first screen adaptation in 1930 and won big at the Oscars that year. As well as various technical categories it won best director, best cinematography and best foreign language film.

Perhaps it’s not so surprising. The war in Ukraine has focused many minds on the futility of battle and warfare, and the last rendition of the book was for the small screen in the 1970s, so perhaps it was time for a remake.

Arguably the last anti-war film to be so effectively and efficiently poignant was Sam Mendez’s epic, 1917. Certainly, the cinematography (another gong for the film) and production values for All Quiet on the Western Front matched those of Mendez’s opus.

The movie starts with a battle scene during which a young German soldier is shot dead. If anything was to prepare you for the fact that this was going to be a cold, gritty, expose of the horrors of war, then this was it.

The corpse is stripped of its uniform, which is then cleaned up and repurposed for the next starry-eyed trench and battle fodder, Paul. Paul is handed his uniform, which doesn’t quite fit, but which the previous wearer’s name tag was still stitched on, perhaps a premonition of death?

As we trace the bizarre fate of Paul’s uniform with him – which reveals the cold ruthlessness of the German war machine in those days, the film develops into more of an ensemble piece, as Paul develops relationships with four comrades, together with a more experienced soldier called Kat, who has grown completely cynical about the war, who grows into something of a father figure. One keen moment of camaraderie is when several of them are sitting at a log serving as a latrine.

The performances are excellent, poignant even, and the haunted look of Felix Rammerer as it becomes more and more intense is a tour-de-force.

Edward Borger’s direction is deliberately cold and oppressive: how is anyone to extricate themselves from this situation other than by death by starvation, a bullet, or a stray shred of shrapnel? The stagings were meticulously designed; and the CGI interventions, as is to be expected these days, slotted seamlessly and effortlessly into the narrative.

The final irony is that pacifist Matteas Ergberger is embarking on one last push – not for another futile over-the-top attack - but for a peace deal and armistice. The juxtapositions there add a certain pained irony as the film progresses.

As peace progress seems to be made at a snail’s pace, the lot of the soldiers in the trenches appears ever more futile: food runs out, trench-foot and the perishing cold wheedle their way in.

And if they evade that then they are likely to be sacrificed in futile fashion by distant generals whose perverse forms of leadership cause some trench fodder to be killed to no end just days before the armistice. One general even exhorted his exhausted troops to go over the top immediately, so they could have one more strive for glory with the enemy before 11 o’clock.

Both the battlefield scenes and the peace negotiations expose the top of the German Army as being culpable: behind the times, dispassionate, out of touch, and devoid of effective and meaningful strategy and tactics.

The cinematography is flawless, and the lights and film grains are well-chosen to reflect this most abject and hopeless of times.

In this way, Edward Borger has created a movie that places handcuffs on its audience and drags them deep into the trench mud itself at the point of a bayonet. There’s no escape from the shock of it.

That’s a good thing cinematographically, as well as socially. At a time when our WW II veterans are reaching the end of their natural lives, and there are no WW I veterans left, it is the responsibility of storytellers and documentary producers to bring it to our attention and remind us what it was like and that we should never go there again.

Verdict

4.5 stars from me, rather than 5, primarily because the film edited out the brief leave homecoming sequence from the adaptation, which would have been extremely effective and disturbing as Paul’s family would have had to assimilate what Paul once had been, and what he had become (disillusioned and one of the Kaiser’s Trained Killers, in equal measure).

It could have been extremely moving but would have added another 15 or 20 minutes to a movie that was already 2 hours and 20 minutes long, so arguably Borger and his editing team exercised the better part of valour in this respect.

Finally, the book and the 1930 film were eulogized by North America and most Western European Nations in the 1930s, and banned and burned by the Nazis at much the same time. It is, then, a reassuringly eloquent and inspiring thing that this movie can once again enlighten hearts and minds about the futility of war, at the precise time Putin is waging his unprovoked and deeply wasteful and destructive conflict in Ukraine.

It won’t be surprising, then, if schools and colleges play the movie as an annual event to their pupils as they study their set texts for public exams.

An undoubted classic, it’s a must-see and a considerable feather in Netflix’ cap.