Directed by Edward Berger
Written by Ian Stokell, Lesley Paterson, Edward Berger
Starring Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Daniel Brühl
MPAA Rating: Rated R
Runtime: 147 Minutes
Now Streaming on Netflix

by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

The film begins somewhere near the middle. WWI, the Western Front, two trenches face each other. In the middle is a vast wasteland of death and all that venture toward the middle will inevitably die. The battlefield no longer resembles Earth as we know it. Just beyond the view of this war, life continues normally. The sun rises. Animals forage for food. A mother fox and her kits snuggle for warmth. The human animals on this planet, however, are locked into combat. A whistle blows and the two armies charge at each other. Bullets fly. Bayonets plunge into flesh. Blood soaks the ground.

At the end of the battle, clothes are stripped off the dead soldiers and then loaded into large sacks that are placed into trucks and driven back to Germany, the motherland, to be cleaned and repurposed. The blood is boiled out of the clothes and the nametags are removed, and the cycle begins anew.

This is where we meet Paul. He forges his parents’ signature on a form so that he can enlist and make his country proud by fighting for them. He is assigned a dead man’s uniform, whose nametag was never removed. They assure him that whoever had received the uniform simply didn’t find it a good fit and was given another. But we know the truth.

During training, Paul and his friends are fed the usual platitudes. War is honor. This battle is for the pride of the country. Blah-blah-blah. The moment they arrive to the trenches, all pretense is thrown out the window. This vision of war is the closest it has ever looked to Hell on Earth.

Francois Truffaut once famously said that it was impossible to make a truly anti-war film because there are still traditional heroes and villains within the mechanism of war. All Quiet on the Western Front is a powerful anti-war statement–both this 2022 version, the 1930 original and the 1929 novel, which all have a different, though equally tragic, ending for its main character.

I saw the original film when I was in high school. We watched in class while studying WWI. The original is every bit a masterpiece as the remake. It takes a special kind of movie to be old, very old, black and white, and in German, and rivet an entire classroom of jaded, shitty teenagers.

The closest the remake comes to truly looking like a nightmare divorced from what we know as reality is when the soldiers for the very first time witness a tank in action. They fire bullets at it, which bounce and ricochet off of its armor. It slams into the trenches and fires machine guns from either side of it and anything that gets near it is immediately destroyed. Flamethrowers march alongside it and set the wounded on fire to ensure that there are no survivors. The paradox of making an anti-war film is that scenes of battle will inevitably look heroic in nature. Nothing about these sequences have anything close to resembling heroism. They simply show, in an almost documentarian-like dryness, the absolute horror of combat.

Unlike the original 1930 film, which stayed with the soldiers on the front the entire film, the remake does break to show us the bureaucratic mechanism churning the war into action from the top. While the soldiers fighting and dying in the mud eat rancid food, the politicians sneer their noses at pastries that weren’t baked fresh that morning. Their clothes are pressed neatly. And they argue about pointless minutiae while they control the lives and fates of young men dying for their bullshit egotism.

All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the best films of the year. It is also one of the most difficult to watch. It has beautiful and quiet moments, and stomach-churning moments threatening every inch of every frame. You never know when violence is going to strike. Neither do the film’s characters. We’re thrust into the madness with them. We simply observe, with horror, as they try to survive to see another day.

It’s a brutal, honest film, like its predecessor, and the source material it’s based on. All Quiet on the Western Front is a must-see film, but it isn’t an easy one to sit through. It honors the dead of every war by not sugarcoating the truth. The truth is that sometimes battle isn’t glory. Sometimes people are fed into a death machine to support the egos of rich men. Sometimes people die for stupid reasons. And war is an awful, ugly thing that turns humans into monsters capable of unspeakable horror.