“All Quiet on the Western Front” is a story I heard described as a brutal, honest, and depressing depiction of World War I through the eyes of young German soldiers. Among the several film adaptations of the antiwar novel written by Erich Maria Remarque, a German WWI veteran, I watched the most recent 2022 Netflix iteration in German with subtitles.
The film follows the journey of Paul Bäumer, played by Felix Kammerer, and his group of friends who enlisted in 1917 to serve Germany in WWI. The starry-eyed youngsters enter the war with their heads filled with ideas of honor, glory, and being brave heroes for the fatherland. Many young men left the battlefield as either broken men or corpses. Bäumer and his friends were no exceptions. This is an instance of how the movie weaves together different scenes not just for pacing, but to show contrasts. The dazzling expectations and the muddy, blood-stained reality of the war. The hungry, human infantry and the prideful, callous military high command with plenty of food.
One thing that I want to address is the movie took some liberties with the narrative. I knew the gist of the original story, and some scenes were either not included or new ones were written to fit the new version. When looked at independently from previous adaptations, I don’t think the Netflix iteration loses the inherent antiwar message, and the modern film techniques drive home how pointless and scarring the “Great War” was. The one part of Remarque’s work that I think would have made this a stronger film would be Bäumer’s sojourn to civilian Germany and realizing how much he has changed, and how little the people back home can understand what he experienced in the trenches, returning to the comfort of his war comrades at the front lines.
This is a dark look at WWI, and I wouldn’t recommend it if you want to watch a movie about wartime heroics. Perhaps a slightly altered version of Remarque’s epigraph in his novel would say it best: “This [movie] is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”