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 the very beginning: the 1930 Best Picture winner All Quiet on the Western Front. 

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The film is based on the German novel by Erich Maria Remarque, which follows a young, naive soldier named Paul through events of the First World War. Remarque’s novel, inspired by his experience fighting in the trenches, paints a horrifying, monotonous, and ultimately pointless picture of war. Paul is dispatched to complete various futile tasks on the front, watching his comrades die agonizing deaths with little rhyme or reason. As opposed to the prevalent view of war at the time—honorable, glorifying, heroic—the novel took a definitive anti-war stance. It enraged many readers (especially in Germany where the book was banned during the Nazi era) while delivering harsh truths to a population fueled by propaganda, and with relatively few ways to understand what war actually looked like.

Now post-Vietnam War, post-Cold War, and post-Iraq War, the anti-war sentiments of All Quiet seem commonplace and even quaint.

The fact that you were probably assigned the book in a high school English class and that the original film is in black-and-white contribute to the misconception that this is a run-of-the-mill war epic. At the time of the film’s release, however, merely two year’s after the book’s publication in German, and one-year post-English translation (nearly a decade before World War II), All Quiet was revolutionary. 

Nearly a century after the American film, a German remake, which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, feels as timely as ever. In a period of growing nationalism and increased violence, the message of war’s futility and human toll feels like a necessary reminder. Like the novel and the 1930 film, this new adaptation from German director Edward Berger, isn’t terribly concerned with a streamlined plot (because war itself rarely has one). Rather it’s more of a mish-mash of grizzly, muddy, bloody moments covered in rats, in piss, in shrapnel, in severed limbs, and in the ever-present toxic masculinity. 

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While the new film strays from the book in many regards (especially in its eleventh-hour battle sequence), it does stay true to the novel in premise and theme.

A group of impetuous young German schoolboys, led by Paul (newcomer Felix Kammerer) enlist in giddy excitement, trotting off to certain death while singing upbeat tunes and daydreaming about the glory, wealth, and women who will await their return. A masterful opening sequence that follows the garments of previous German casualties, their uniforms stripped from mangled bodies, stitched up, scrubbed, and handed to the euphoric new recruits, shalacks the film with ominous foreboding from its first scene. The crew is then whittled away one by one in a series of battles, wartime mishaps, and body horrors, cementing for viewers that there is no glory in war. 

While there may be no glory in war, there is most certainly glory in war movies. Berger’s vision, expertly shot by cinematographer James Friend, is as breathtakingly gorgeous as it is brutal. The haunting, misty vistas (set against an eerie piano score from Volker Bertelmann) are Nat Geo in spooky season. Even as the runtime approaches the 2.5-hour mark, Berger is concocting new ways to artfully depict how goddamn horrible war is. Scenes of tank warfare, of hand-to-hand combat in a bomb crater, and of flamethrower deaths will be branded into my mind for eternity. The film, distributed by Netflix, looks EXPENSIVE, and the practical effects go a long way, much as they did with almost Best Picture winner 1917. However, unlike Sam Mendes’s one-shot masterpiece or Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge, which presents war as at least somewhat heroic, All Quiet’s beauty is 100% in service of showing how disgusting war is. 

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The 2022 German submission for the Academy Awards, All Quiet is almost guaranteed an Oscar nomination in the Best International Feature category. And as we’ve seen with Drive My Car, Flee, Another Round, Cold War, Roma, and of course Parasite, the increasingly international Academy is not afraid to nominate non-US films in other categories. Cinematography, Score, Sound, Film Editing, Makeup (those yellow teeth!), and even Picture seem within reach, especially since this year seems without an international juggernaut frontrunner to this point. It should be mentioned that Daniel Brühl appears here in a supporting role (as he seems contractually obligated to appear in any movie involving Nazis) relegated to a series of non-battle scenes that add more bleakness to the story. 

Despite premiering late in the TIFF lineup and being over two hours long, I was engrossed the entire time in this beautiful horror.

With a Netflix debut at the end of October, All Quiet on the Western Front has the potential for plenty of eyeballs as awards season heats up. It’s one of the most artfully rendered and least “oorah”-shouting war films in recent history—I’m looking at you, Top Gun: Maverick. And while the Germans may have suffered a painful loss in World War I, they have a cinematic triumph here.

Hey! I’m Matt. You can find me on Twitter here. I’m also a staff writer at Buzzfeed.

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