Spoiler Alert: This review will give away the ending of the movie
Netflix’s All Quiet on the Western Front, loosely adapted from the novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque, has been blasted by critics in Germany yet nominated for 9 Oscars in America.
How is this possible? I’ll get to what I think is going on here.
But first, was it a good movie to begin with?
You’ve seen this all before – until you’ve seen it this time
I’m not sure why I tried to watch this movie on a Sunday before a workweek. I felt like a full-grown adult who needed a blankie and a lullaby and couldn’t get to bed for a bit after this one. Some images of intentional and incidental deaths that look, sound, and feel all too real will be in my head for a while.
Let’s get this straight: The filmmaking here is masterful. All Quiet has a bit of a long runtime (2 hours, 23 minutes), but it wastes no space. It keeps its rails of plot progression mostly invisible, pointing to what it wants the audience to see while hiding the finger doing the pointing.
It’s a visceral movie, where the fighting is more of a GoPro camera in the trench than a wide shot of the battlefield. We follow Paul Baumer and his companions through (mostly) 72 hours of pure hell: mud, crashing metal, shouts and screams, blood, and fire. Jingoism is nowhere to be seen, with savagery and primal necessity taking its place.
What stands out to me:
Vicious Cycles
Sequences in the film repeat themselves, and intentionally or unintentionally, I got the vague sense of a sick, invisible war machine lurking in the background – unseen wheels that grind and turn systematically to bring men to their deaths.
The opening montage, in which the bloodied uniform of a dead soldier undergoes a sequence of washing and repair, then gets re-issued to an unsuspecting Paul, is art at its highest level. It grimly entertains, introduces the conflict and setting, foreshadows Paul’s dark future, and provides a glimpse into the workings/horrors of the war machine itself. It’s the type of sequence a high school history teacher doing a World War One lecture could show their students and say, “It was like that.”
Another example is at the end of the film when a young soldier is ordered to collect the dog tags (military name plates worn around the neck) from the dead bodies, including Paul himself, just as Paul performed this task after his first skirmish. The only difference between Paul’s death and this soldier’s survival is timing. This soldier begins his cycle just as the ceasefire is thrown into effect. Had the fighting continued, surely his number would eventually be up.
Animalism
Several times characters flip into instinctive, animalistic behavior, and these shifts are subtle but powerful.
One example is Paul and his companions breaking mid-fighting to desperately feast on a meal like a pack of beasts just after killing their enemies who were about to eat it, frantically jamming their fingers into the sauces and gobbling bread rolls and sausages.
Another example is when Paul stabs an enemy to death and, when the mad moment of self-defense has passed, flips to guilt, trying to preserve the Frenchman’s life. After searching the man’s body, Paul finds his journal and a photo of his wife and child. Paul pledges to the now corpse that he will find the man’s family, but he loses the journal out of his pocket later, only to be forced to move on, his vow discarded.
Scenes like this show that Paul is just surviving. His humanity is there; it keeps rising out of him. But there’s simply no time for him to grieve about the man he just impaled with a bayonet when the tanks are rumbling in for him.
No Private Ryans are going home, and that’s the point
With such a high volume of critically acclaimed war movies already made, it’s hard to stand out in this genre, even for a film based on an all-time classic anti-war novel. But All Quiet carves out a space for itself among the classics. There’s little joking or patriotism, no heroic quips under fire going on here: This is the scrap to stay alive in a stinking trench while the finish line to going home is inching away from you by powers unseen.
And that distinct lack of heroic or jingoistic spin makes this a great work. Men kill each other and then go home (the live ones, that is).
So why are the Germans upset about the movie?
Here’s where my mixed feelings about this film come into play.
I can’t speak for the German critics, but I think they’re hung up on evaluating the film as an adaptation rather than its own work, but with good reason.
The novel All Quiet on the Western Front is a legacy work, with millions of copies sold, translated into several languages, and noteworthy enough to be burned by the Nazis. Suppose this was a novel that was so important to the history of my country. In that case I could understand the perspective that an overseas film studio has captured it mostly in name and abused it for awards and profits.
It’s been an age since I read All Quiet in my high school English class, but I remember enough to say this movie is pretty loosely based on the novel, at best. For one thing, in the book Paul goes home from the Front on leave, finding himself disconnected from everyone he knew and disappointed with people’s perceptions of the war, only to go back to the Front and shockingly now feel more at home.
However, I don’t think the film adaptation completely departs from the novel’s thrust.
Firstly, how the movie transforms a naive Paul into a seasoned, reluctant killing machine by the movie’s end is in keeping with the way the novel showed that war stole the youth right out of a generation fortunate enough to survive its many horrors.
Second, Paul and his companions suffer and ultimately perish in a brutal, useless conflict, pushed to their deaths by the invisible forces of powerful men behind them. And while Paul falls very unceremoniously in the book at the final pages and the narration here is loud, vivid, and forceful, the update is as relevant now as the disillusioned message was in the past.
Not so quiet, but not so bad
Nothing seems to stir up critical controversy like an adaptation of a beloved work.
But if you can get around the fact that Netflix’s All Quiet isn’t a faithful adaptation of the novel, I’d highly recommend this movie. Its cinematic quality, stunning effects, and strong performances deserve your time.
And if you didn’t read the book in high school, check out a copy.
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