In ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ war has never looked worse and never looked better | TIFF review

All Quiet on the Western Front, the second adaptation of the novel of the same name, follows a group of young soldiers that learn the hard way that war is hell

All Quiet on the Western Front will be released on Netflix on October 28th.

For whatever reason (schadenfreude? To stare the harshest reality straight in the eye? A fascination with large machines?), for as long as humans have been making movies, they have been making them about war. The first ever Best Picture winner at the Oscars was Wings, a 1928 silent war film about a pair of fighter pilots. The highest-grossing film ever (adjusted for inflation) is Gone with the Wind, set against the backdrop of the Civil War. And Oscar history is littered with wartime films from classics like World War II-set Casablanca and The Bridge on the River Kwai (focused on a British POW camp) to more recent entries like Holocaust tragedy Schindler’s List and Iraq War-set The Hurt Locker. But one story has been a staple in the war film canon since t…