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This film, directed by Edward Berger from a script he wrote with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell , is the first German-made version of Erich Maria Remarque ’s famed novel about World War I, written in German and published in 1928. The first film adaptation of the book, released in 1930, was American, directed by Lewis Milestone, and kind of a landmark of early American sound filmmaking. It was well received and considered so powerful that it was thought a potential deterrent to future war. That turned out to be erroneous. (And Remarque himself contended that he had not intended to write a pacifist testament so much as to plainly depict the agony of the young recruit at war.)

A second version, in 1979, directed by Delbert Mann (a “dreary” director, per Andrew Sarris) and starring Richard Thomas , then famous for his portrayal of saintly earnest John Boy Walton on “The Waltons,” didn’t have close to the same impact. Nor, I suspect, will this rendering (and I do mean “rendering” in more than one sense) of the story, which nonetheless is Germany's official film submission to the Academy Awards this year.

At two and a half hours, it’s as long as the 1930 version, but packed with quite a bit more plot. It jettisons the early scenes in the novel and film in which young German students are goaded by an ardent super-patriot professor into joining the military and saving the fatherland. Instead, this film sets its sights on the head-spinning carnage of warfare by showing how young enlistee Paul Bäumer ( Felix Kammerer ) gets his wrong-sized uniform: the clothing has been recycled off of a corpse.

Like “1917” before it, and like the better films that continue to inspire a concentratedly grisly mode of war picture (the epochal Russian film “ Come and See ” is explicitly referenced at least once, as is the more recent, and more problematic, “ The Painted Bird ”), “All Quiet on the Western Front" is state-of-the-art in shoving your nose in realistic-seeming carnage and possibly inducing hearing damage in laying on the ear-splitting aural experience of a fire-fight. The in-the-trenches tracking shots that Stanley Kubrick crafted for “ Paths of Glory ” (a movie that culminated in a point that actually made sense, unlike this muddle) are now steady hand-held digital panoramas of exposed viscera and agonized writhing. Filmmakers have arguably lost the plot, turning “War is hell” into a “Can you top this?” competition.

Within all the action, the narrative of young Bäumer making his way, learning what it is to kill, and trying to forge fellowship in his untenable situation plods along. Berger adds some material too. There’s a parallel storyline in which real-life German vice-chancellor Matthias Erzberger tries to broker a peace with the French and others. This is not present in Remarque’s book. So why’s it here? I reckon several reasons: first, to demonstrate that in the Great War, there really WERE some “good Germans,” which when you think about it is neither here nor there in this scheme, as the reader/viewer is meant to at least have some empathy for Paul, who is after all a German soldier. And the intransigence of some of the French delegates in these scenes will bring to mind the years-long humiliation Germany was subjected to by the Armistice agreement, which helped bring about the rise of Hitler. The Erzberger narrative is also intended, one supposes, to build suspense: will the Armistice go into effect before the worst can happen to the characters we’ve come to care about? (Presuming one has indeed come to care about them, which was not my own experience here.)

But this is not the only special pleading the director puts forth. Late in the film there’s a sequence when Paul and his older army friend Katczinsky ( Albrecht Schuch ) go to steal a goose (to eat, not to adopt as a pet or anything) from a French farm and run afoul of a dead-eyed French boy. I won’t “spoil” the sequence. But I will say that, apart from committing the cinematic sacrilege of using the same Bach choral prelude that Tarkovsky put in his “Solaris,” it is very invested in villainizing French farm boys. To which I can only ask, well, what were the Germans even doing in France at that time anyway?

Ultimately, I found this kind of whataboutism more amusing than disquieting. Maybe I’m just whistling in the dark. 

In select theaters today, on Netflix October 28th.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Rated R for strong bloody war violence and grisly images.

147 minutes

Felix Kammerer as Paul Bäumer

Albrecht Schuch as Stanislaus "Kat" Katczinsky

Aaron Hilmer as Albert Kropp

Edin Hasanović as Tjaden Stackfleet

Devid Striesow as General Friedrich

Daniel Brühl as Matthias Erzberger

Moritz Klaus as Frantz Müller

Sebastian Hülk as Major von Brixdorf

• Edward Berger

Writer (novel)

• Erich Maria Remarque
• Lesley Paterson
• Ian Stokell

Cinematographer

• James Friend
• Sven Budelmann
• Volker Bertelmann

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‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Review: The Spectacle of War

Edward Berger’s German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel aims to rattle you with its relentless brutality.

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By Ben Kenigsberg

In his auteurist film history “The American Cinema” (1968), the critic Andrew Sarris compared similar scenes in two World War I films, King Vidor’s “The Big Parade” (1925) and Lewis Milestone’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930), the first screen adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel. Vidor, Sarris felt, had a more satisfying approach to showing two soldiers from opposite sides in a shell hole, one dying. Vidor emphasized the faces of his characters, Sarris wrote, rather than pictorialism and spectacle.

The first sequence of Edward Berger’s new German-language adaptation of Remarque’s novel announces about as loudly as possible that it’s on the side of pictorialism and spectacle. It opens with a landscape: a quiet wood and mountains, seemingly at sunrise. A fox sucks from its mother’s teat. A Terrence Malick-like shot looks upward at impossibly high and peaceful treetops.

Berger then cuts to an aerial view of drifting smoke, which clears to reveal an array of corpses. A barrage of bullets suddenly pierces the near-still composition, and the camera turns to show the full extent of the carnage and the muck. This is war as a violation of nature. And that’s even before Berger trails a scared soldier named Heinrich (Jakob Schmidt), who charges ahead in a pair of unbroken shots — take that, “1917” — only to die offscreen. In a device that owes something to the red coat in “Schindler’s List,” Heinrich’s uniform will be stripped from his body, cleansed, stitched up, shipped to Northern Germany and eventually reused by Remarque’s protagonist, Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), who notices someone else’s name on the label.

Does this version of a literary classic go hard or what? In truth, opting for pure bombast — a pounding, repeated three-note riff by Volker Bertelmann, who did the score, never fails to quicken the pulse — isn’t necessarily an ineffective way of translating Remarque’s plain-spoken prose. Berger has more tools at his disposal than Milestone did with the challenges of the early sound era, yet those advantages somehow make this update less impressive: The magnification in scale and dexterity lends itself to showing off. Still, the movie aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.

This “Western Front” places its faith in big set pieces and powerful images. Even the scope has been widened. Berger cuts between Paul’s experiences in the trenches and cease-fire talks between Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), who chaired Germany’s armistice commission, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France (Thibault De Montalembert). The 72-hour deadline that Foch gives Erzberger to sign adds an element of ticking-clock suspense to the overall narrative, albeit by departing from Remarque’s first-person point of view.

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Movie Reviews

Movie review: 'all quiet on the western front'.

Rob Schmitz

The Netflix adaptation of "All Quiet on the Western Front," the classic novel about the horrors of World War I, was directed by a German man and is in the German language.

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‘all quiet on the western front’ review: a visceral take on the german anti-war classic.

Close to a century after Lewis Milestone's Oscar-winning film, Edward Berger offers a German adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's World War I novel.

By John DeFore

John DeFore

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Patriotic young men are as disposable as potato peels in All Quiet on the Western Front , Edward Berger’s new adaptation of the novel that gave us the 1930 Lewis Milestone movie of the same name. For some, seeing this German book rendered by a German will be reason enough for a remake; for many others, especially those reliant on history-ignoring Netflix (where this Front will debut next month), the original might as well not exist.

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A prologue encapsulates the story’s message pretty succinctly. Caught in a battle his side is losing, a young soldier named Heinrich musters his courage, tosses his spent rifle aside, and charges heroically at the enemy with a shovel. A scene later, the hero lies in a truck full of corpses, whose uniforms are salvaged, washed and mended. The bullet hole repaired, Henrich’s jacket is passed on to a fresh new recruit who has no idea it was ever worn.

That recruit is Paul (Felix Kammerer), who is so eager to enlist in the Great War with a handful of friends that he forges a permission slip he’s supposed to get a parent to sign. (It’s worth pausing to let that sink in, right?) The boys are welcomed with puffery — commanding officers who call them the “greatest generation” and urge them to fight for “the Kaiser, God, and the Fatherland,” in that peculiar order. Soon they’re thrown out into a wasteland where, for months, opponents have killed each other to gain and lose a few yards of dirt.

A different kind of end comes. We’ve been getting breathers once in a while, shifting focus to the luxurious trains and commandeered mansions where French and German authorities make decisions. While German army commanders are prepared to toss as many young bodies on the fire as are needed, politicians understand they’ve already lost, and a faction led by Daniel Brühl’s Matthias Erzberger finally secures a ceasefire. But General Friedrich (Devid Striesow) decides to launch a doomed offensive in the war’s final minutes, ignoring the human cost.

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‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ starkly depicts the horrors faced by young warriors

Netflix’s visually sweeping adaptation of the great antiwar novel focuses on the german teens doomed on the battlefield..

A young German soldier (Felix Kammerer) tries to stay alive during World War I in “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

The teenage volunteer soldier is bursting with excitement and pride, keen to fight for the glory and greatness and superiority of his homeland. When he’s handed his uniform, he’s as excited as a ballplayer getting called up to the big leagues — but he pauses when he sees another man’s name sewn inside the collar.

“Excuse me,” he says to the officer handing out uniforms. “It already belongs to someone.”

“Ah yes,” comes the reply. “It was probably too small for the fellow. Happens all the time.”

The officer rips off the tag and hands the uniform back to the young soldier, saying. “Here. It’s yours.” As the young man walks away, the camera pans down to the floor under the table, and we see dozens of discarded name tags. Indeed, the uniform did belong to someone else — someone who is dead. As we already know from the prologue, when soldiers in this war have been killed in action, civilian women wash and repair the uniforms, and they’re recycled — just like the steady but dwindling supply of young men who have been marched off to fight in a brutal, bloody, horrific and losing war.

Time and again in director and co-writer Edward Berger’s brilliant and bruising and epic adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s famous anti-war novel “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the theme of the disposable, willing but naive and often doomed young warrior is brought home in stark and unforgiving fashion, as in the above scene, or when a soldier who is new to the front is given a small bag after a deadly battle and told to fill it with the dog tags of his fallen comrades, so their families can be informed they’re gone.

This is the third adaptation of Remarque’s World War I novel, following the 1930 Lewis Milestone classic that won the Academy Award for best picture and drew the wrath of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (with the film being outlawed in Germany for the better parts of two decades because it was deemed anti-Germany and so effectively portrayed the human cost of war), and an impressively mounted and well-acted 1979 television film starring Richard Thomas.

Making great use of 21st century technology, this latest version is the most visually sweeping and impressive version yet, and it comes close to matching the original for its visceral, gut-punch effect. Like so many of the greatest war films, from “Paths of Glory” to “Platoon” to “Saving Private Ryan” to “1917,” this is a difficult and at times heart-wrenching viewing experience, but it’s also a technical marvel, a carefully considered character study and, yes, a timely reminder that the young people who fight and sacrifice and kill and die in wars are pawns in a complex and often maddeningly unnecessary larger chess game.

To be sure, “All Quiet on the Western Front” traffics in any number of war movie clichés, e.g., the first soldier to panic and make a break for it is almost certain to get killed, and the upbeat guy with the glasses will be found dead in a trench, his broken and bent glasses by his side, and the wounded buddy who asks his friend how bad those injuries are will instantly realize he’s a goner. Still, those clichés exist because they’re often reflective of the larger truths about war.

With principal photography taking place in the Czech Republic and director Berger and cinematographer James Friend filling the screen with slightly saturated color tones that convey an air of urgency but also a feeling of the world of a century ago, “All Quiet on the Western Front” puts you in the mud-covered, rain-soaked, blood-spattered boots and uniforms of the young German soldiers fighting the French on a 400-mile stretch of land snaking through France and Belgium — the decisive theater in World War I, with millions dying as the front remained relatively static throughout the war.

The story is told primarily through the experiences of young Paul Bäumer (film newcomer Felix Kammerer in a powerfully effective and empathetic performance), a 17-year-old infantryman who forges a parental permission slip so he can join the fight for “the Kaiser, God and the Fatherland,” as a superior officer puts it. Paul and his buddies sincerely believe they’ll be marching victoriously through Paris within a matter of weeks — but as soon as they’re plunged into the battle, they realize it’s all about survival from day to day. Heroics are made of desperation; the best one can hope for is to keep one’s head down, follow orders and dream of one day returning home, to the simple but miraculous comforts of a warm bed, a decent meal, and someone to love.

Even as Paul and his mates alternate between quiet moments of reflection and sudden and deadly outbursts of battle, Germany’s political and military hierarchy already knows the war has been lost. The always compelling Daniel Brühl is magnificent as Matthias Erzberger, a real-life German politician who worked tirelessly to secure a cease-fire as quickly as possible in order to spare more lives, while the equally impressive Devid Striesow makes for a unconscionable villain in General Friedrich, who orders a sure-to-be-catastrophic offensive in literally the last hours of the war.

For Friedrich, it’s all about national pride and going out in a blaze of glory. Easy for him to say, as he’s nowhere near the Western Front.

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Review: A World War I Drama That’s Dutifully Competent and Dull

Edward Berger's German remake is done in the standard existential bombs-bursting-in-earth mode, but it's been made with no special flair and says nothing new.

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Over the course of the war, the land “capture” on the Western Front was meager; the location of the front line never moved by more than half a mile. So why did all those soldiers die? For no reason. Because of a tragic — one could say obscene — historical accident: that in WWI, the means of fighting was caught between an older, “classical” mode of stationary combat and the new reality of long-distance slaughter made possible by technology. By the end of the war, 17 million men had fallen between those cracks.

Yet the pale, gentle-hearted Paul, whose newly issued uniform has come off the corpse of a fallen soldier (a point meant to illustrate the endless cycle of death in WWI), somehow fights on and survives. He strikes us as a mild young man, yet there’s a ruthless killer inside him. Whirling to shoot one soldier, then knife another, he becomes, in essence, a desperate action hero, and I put it that way only because I didn’t find his acumen on the battlefield especially convincing. Berger, as a filmmaker, wants to bring us “close” to war, but the horror in “All Quiet on the Western Front” is in your face and also rather tidy in its presentation. Maybe that’s why it feels numbing.

The great war films aren’t reticent about mixing personal drama into the combat. They feature characters as edgy and defined as their theater of violence. But the new “All Quiet on the Western Front” is two and a half hours of dramatic minimalism, as if this were somehow a measure of the film’s integrity. The soldiers, including Paul, are barely sketched in, and you’re frankly relieved when the movie cuts to conventional scenes of the German vice-chancellor, Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), as he tries to broker a peace with the French generals who have trounced the German army. The negotiations are one-sided; the French, who hold all the cards, want surrender on their terms. But we register, behind Erzberger, the implacable never-say-die resentment of the German officers, which will of course be carried forward into the next war.

Stanley Kubrick, with “Paths of Glory,” made what is still the greatest movie about trench warfare, and he wasn’t shy about involving us in actual drama. “All Quiet on the Western Front” lumbers along, so that even once the armistice is struck there’s still another combat episode, all to demonstrate, with overly highlighted tragic irony, that the body count in World War I kept escalating for no reason. Anyone sane would agree with that. Yet “All Quiet on the Western Front” is the war movie as thesis statement. It keeps making its point, leaving you less shattered than empty.

Reviewed at IFC Center, Oct. 27, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 152 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release of an Amusement Park Films production. Producers: Malte Grunert, Daniel Dreifuss, Edward Berger. Executive producers: Daniel Brühl, Lesley Pateron, Ian Stokell.
• Crew: Director: Edward Berger. Screenplay: Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson, Ian Stokell. Camera: James Friend. Editor: Sven Budelmann. Music: Volker Bertelmann.
• With: Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Aaron Hilmer, Moritz Klaus, Edin Hasanovic, Adrian Grünewald, Thibault De Montalembert, Devid Striesow, Daniel Brühl.

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All Quiet on the Western Front Review

A relentlessly grim reminder of the horrors of war..

All Quiet on the Western Front is now streaming on Netflix.

All Quiet on the Western Front isn’t the first film to show us that war is hell. It isn’t even the first movie to tell this particular story – the 1930 version of All Quiet on the Western Front was an Oscar winner in its own right. However, director Edward Berger’s take on the World War I epic novel is as poignant as ever.

Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) is a teenager, and he’s desperate to sign up to serve his country. He’s been sold a lie – promises of glory and heroism by the military men and politicians who are happy to throw German youths into the meat grinder. He just doesn’t know it yet.

Berger’s take on this classic war story is excruciatingly grim because it has to be. His focus on the propaganda compared to the harsh reality of life in the trenches is subtle and unflinching, with a particularly gut-wrenching scene showing Paul collecting his uniform – no idea that the clothes on his back had been scavenged from the dead.

The subtle bleakness is everywhere, and when Paul arrives in the trenches he’s given a harsh lesson: it’s time to shape up or drop dead where you stand. And that’s just the start of it. The fantasies of heroism and valor are quickly torn away as the realities of war kick in. Nothing could prepare him, and that’s the point – nobody has even tried to. He’s just more meat for the grinder as the German war machine rumbles on.

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Kammerer may be a newcomer, but his performance is nuanced and chilling in equal measures. Bäumer isn’t just out of his depth – each and every moment of life on the front lines leaves him desperately trying to catch his breath. Kammerer captures every moment with an agonizing depth that he wears on his sleeve throughout. This truly incredible performance highlights the horror of a young soldier forced to confront every nightmare imaginable. Bäumer is under the lens, as every moment pushes him further away from the young man he was.

Thankfully, it’s not all relentlessly bleak. All Quiet on the Western Front is punctuated with some truly wonderous moments of camaraderie, as you might expect from a war film. But as you also might expect from an anti-war movie, it walks a fine line between humanizing and glorifying its lads. Kammerer certainly holds the film together with his heartbreaking central performance, but it’s really an ensemble effort as we get to know the other soldiers he’s been thrown into the trenches alongside.

Albrecht Schuch pulls out a blinder of a performance as the strangely upbeat Kat, a roguish, likeable German soldier who will go to any length for his pals. Equally, Edin Hasanovic adds yet more to the group as Tjaden Stackfleet. There’s a charming scene in which the group rustles a goose from a local French farm, showing these boys at their best in between the screams and machine gun volleys.

But these touching moments don’t last for very long, and that’s entirely the point. All Quiet on the Western Front is a stark reminder of the humanity lost to war on both sides of the trenches. One particularly horrifying scene sees Bäumer facing the reality of his own actions after stabbing a French soldier to death. There are moments like this throughout All Quiet on the Western Front – grim reminders that it shouldn’t have come to this, alongside pointed warnings that we should never let it happen again.

The Top 10 World War II Movies

Berger’s grim depiction of military leaders and politicians as unflinching, single-minded monsters is certainly to be expected but is pierced by the story of Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) whose role in the final moments of the Great War unfolds parallel to Bäumer’s personal tale from the trenches. Of course, their stories are entwined as Erzberger chases an end to the horror. But we’re constantly reminded how much distance there is between the military leaders and the boys in the trenches, and it serves as a striking counterpoint to any heroic notion that the war is for the good of the homeland.

Meanwhile, a quietly haunting score occasionally punctuates the visceral rhythms of the German war machine with grinding inevitability. The calm of political office is always shattered by the crackle of machine guns and the screams of terror.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a brutal, bloody, and frighteningly realistic interpretation of the original 1929 novel. Berger is meaningful in capturing the horrors of war, echoing the anti-war sentiments in a fresh, but thoroughly bleak way. The carnage that unfolds as soldiers go over the top is beautifully shot, both visceral and heart-pounding. The trenches have never looked so real, and Kammerer’s instinctive performance gives us an innocent face to attach to the abject horror of the Great War. All Quiet on the Western Front is a harsh reminder of the sheer inhumanity of war. It will be a tough watch for some, but you’re rewarded with one of the most poignant anti-war stories of all time.

War never changes, but All Quiet on the Western Front gives us a fresh look at the age-old horrors.

All Quiet on the Western Front is just as bleak as you might imagine, with an unflinching examination of the horrors of war. It’s a brutal, exhausting, and raw reminder of the evil humanity is capable of inflicting upon each other, and it couldn’t be more timely. Felix Kammerer stuns as Paul Bäumer with stand-out performances from Albrecht Schuch and Edin Hasanovic. The attention to detail is phenomenal, with director Edward Berger retelling this classic story in a new and interesting way. All Quiet on the Western Front is a grim, harrowing march towards an inevitable conclusion that’s held together by a minuscule thread of humanity. It’s a tough watch, but believe me, it’s worth every wince-inducing moment.

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All Quiet On The Western Front Review

21 Apr 1930

138 minutes

All Quiet On The Western Front

Few films, to this day, have struck as powerful an anti-war message as Lewis Milestone’s extraordinary evocation of the tragic folly of war. Arguably, still the greatest WWI movie, his tender portrayal of innocent German youth is juxtaposed with the harrowing immediacy of trench warfare, shot with a telling verisimilitude many modern filmmakers, with all their tools, have failed to match.

Even more than the visceral evocation of trench life, with all its wanton squalor, the philosophical underpinnings of the film reach deep into the heart and head. At the opening, in the dreamy almost fairy-tale safety of their school life, they are resolved, thanks to the stirrings of their teacher, to sign up and fight the good fight. What becomes hastily clear amongst the mud and blood of fellow comrades and shadowy enemies alike is that there is no good fight to be fought, only a terrible one, where victory is a pointless as defeat.

Such a determined, for the time radical message, the soul of Remarque’s novel, finds its most focused point in the scene where Paul, whose eyes we follow to the battlefront, is trapped in a bomb crater in no-man’s land with a French solider, dying from the wound he gave him. Assaulted by remorse, he vainly tries to save him, prying through his clothes to find a name, a person beneath the victim.

The dialogue may feel arch and stagy by today’s standards, the verbose speeches over fallen comrades are hardly realistic, but they are telling, and no concessions are ever made to moral notions of good versus evil (especially as we are seeing it from the German point of view). All is madness, chaos and inescapable loss, captured with poetic and perfect simplicity in the motif of a butterfly watched by Paul from his trench, a reminder of the butterflies he would trap and pin in a glass case as a boy.

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All Quiet on the Western Front

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Director Lewis Milestone's brilliant anti-war polemic, headlined by an unforgettable performance from Lew Ayres, lays bare the tragic foolishness at the heart of war.

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Nearly one hundred years after Lewis Milestone adapted Erich Maria Remarque ’s groundbreaking novel, German filmmaker Edward Berger has brought All Quiet on the Western Front to life with a fresh perspective—and the first German adaptation of a story deeply ingrained into the very DNA of the country. Set in the midst of World War I, the film’s focus narrows on Paul Bäumer ( Felix Kammerer ) and his small group of friends that get lured into war by the promise of heroism and patriotism. But there are no heroes in this war, a fact that Berger makes evident throughout the film. Paul might be the film’s protagonist—the heart and soul of the story that the audience sees the world through—but this is not a hero’s journey. All Quiet on the Western Front is a welcome departure from a long line of profound World War I films such as Sam Mendes ’ 1917 or, more recently, Operation Mincemeat because there is no one to root for and there is no positive outcome on the horizon. It’s an interesting choice, but one that delivers a more honest and devastating story.

Berger and fellow screenwriters Ian Stokell and Lesley Paterson faithfully adapt Remarque’s somber approach and biting critique of war, by painting a brutal picture of its horrors, yet it is designed to allow the audience to arrive at its own emotional conclusion as the credits roll. War is hell and for a little over two and a half hours, All Quiet on the Western Front displays its ghastly horrors without ever venturing into voyeuristic consumption, opting instead to unsettle its audience with bleak realities and sobering truths. Throughout the film, Berger cuts away from waterlogged trenches and the mangled corpses of bright young men lured into early graves, to showcase the serenity of nature. The dichotomy between life and death stands in stark contrast with the horrors on display, even as a generation dies, creeks continue to flow, seasons change, and fox kits are born. Cinematographer James Friend brings about the perfect visuals, marrying the stunning, sweeping scope of their locations with the bristling intimacy of death and mortality.

In his first performance on-screen, Kammerer proves himself as a promising newcomer on the global stage. Paul Bäumer is not an easy role to take on; the physicality of the role alone might crush a performer, and that’s without considering the great emotional toll undertaken to portray the shame, depravity, and agony of war. Paul is the heart of the film, and Kammerer effortlessly bares his soul to the audience as the war takes and takes and takes from his character. His performance is made even better by those around him, who revel in quiet moments of humanity with him and mourn with him for the ghosts of men who have quietly been dying as they lived.

RELATED: 'All Quiet on the Western Front' Director Ed Berger on Remaking the Material From the German Perspective | TIFF

A long time ago, American anthropologist James Deetz posited that the past can be seen most fully by studying the small things so often forgotten, and this seems to be the unexpected thesis of Berger’s adaptation. His cast of characters finds favor with the audiences through small, tangible personal effects that carry through the film. For Franz ( Moritz Klaus ), it's a handkerchief from a passing paramour named Eloise—a trinket that brings a moment of reprieve to his fellow soldiers as they relish in the femininity her existence brings to the testosterone-laden bunks; for Kat ( Albrecht Schuch ) it’s a matchbox that he keeps a beetle within—a beetle that escapes war with its life when the men are left for the beetles to consume; for Albert ( Aaron Hilmer ) it's a poster that he finds that allows him to escape the horrors and dream about the women he’ll never know; and for Ludwig ( Adrian Grunewald ) it's the glasses he is given by the military to replace his own spectacles. But more profound is the fact that Paul has no touchstone, no trinket in his pocket that helps to carry him onward, because he carries those around him— Franz, Kat, Albert, Ludwig, and Tjaden ( Edin Hasanovic )—to the front lines with him.

Unlike previous adaptations of Remarque’s novel, Berger instills All Quiet on the Western Front with historical elements that further underscore the shame of war. This element takes shape in the form of real-life historical figure Matthias Erzeberger ( Daniel Brühl ), who helped Germany forge a path towards an armistice with France, and was later assassinated for those efforts. There is also the fictionalized career general, who balks at the idea of peace treaties and is so enraptured with the idea of patriotism that he is driven to lead an army of beleaguered soldiers to their deaths, rather than embrace the cease-fire that waits for them on the horizon. Both figures symbolize the costs of peace: warmongers will always march their soldiers into the maw of death, while they watch from lofty seclusion, while the peacekeepers risk their safety for the promise of a better future.

All Quiet on the Western Front has a stunning sound design; one that sets teeth on edge and rattles within the chests of its audience. As the war machine wages on, Berger utilizes the jarring and ominous music of a harmonium to break through moments of reprieve like a hammer striking an anvil, signaling the ever-waging war that is larger than its cast. It cuts through quiet moments, shattering serenity and echoing like a reminder of how war destroys beauty.

Over one hundred years ago World War I devastated a generation, ten years ago there was a war that never truly ended, and presently a war wages on with flames of devastation that no one wants to stoke. Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front offers the same reminder that Remarque’s novel presented: nationalism kills only for the glory of ego and offers shallow graves in foreign lands instead of heroic homecomings. It is impossible to watch the film without being affected by the horrors of pitting man against man to placate the egos of tyrants with chips on their shoulders. The first adaptation came at the onset of even worse horrors than World War I, and it’s hard not to wonder if this adaptation might be able to sway the masses to lower their angry fists before it's too late once again.

All Quiet on the Western Front is currently playing in select theaters and comes to be on Netflix on October 28.

• Movie Reviews
• All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

All Quiet On The Western Front Review: A Bleak, Beautiful, Anti-War Film [TIFF]

War is a horrific, futile waste of human life. This is the basic message of Edward Berger's "All Quiet on the Western Front," a war film based on the 1928 German novel of the same name. The film, which had its world premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, is a powerful condemnation of warfare, presenting audiences with a grueling, wretched depiction of the physical, financial, and psychological toll that The Great War had on the German people. Rather than portray its characters as glorious heroes bravely fighting for their country, or even ending the film on an optimistic note, "All Quiet on the Western Front" is tragic from beginning to end, and is relentlessly, almost unbearably, bleak. 

That's the point. It's the ultimate anti-war war film.   

The original novel, written by Erich Maria Remarque, was a huge hit internationally. It was adapted by universal in 1930 for the highly acclaimed war epic "All Quiet on the Western Front." Berger's film follows the same basic beats as the pre-code film, but is updated for contemporary audiences with awe-inspiring visuals, a haunting, industrial score, and much,  much  more violence. This is not a film for the weak of heart: Just watching the intense bloodshed and suffering playing out on the big screen is enough to give anyone nightmares. What's even more distressing, though, is remembering how many people actually lived through that. For however grueling the characters' plight appears, most of us will never fully understand what life in the trenches was actually like. 

A harrowing look at WWI

Berger's film is masterfully shot and paced, offering crisp, evocative World War I images. Although we've had some really impressive features on the topic in recent years, including Steven Spielberg's "War Horse" (2011) and Sam Mendes' one-shot film "1917" (2019), "All Quiet on the Western Front" feels revolutionary. This may be partially because we're getting the German perspective of events; it feels like most Hollywood war blockbusters ("Saving Private Ryan," "The Thing Red Line," "Dunkirk," etc.) are set during World War II and position the Americans and the Allies as the heroes against Nazi Germany and the Axis powers. "All Quiet on the Western Front" goes back to that first world conflict, and honestly presents the circumstances that led Germany's youth to want to fight in the war and the disastrous repercussions. 

I think a bigger factor, however, is Berger's sharp eye for dramatizing events — both the epic, large-scale battle scenes, and also the quiet, private moments in between. "All Quiet on the Western Front" really puts the audience  in  the action. The story focuses on one soldier, Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), who lies about his age to excitedly enlist alongside his chums. These young men — practically boys — are actually happy to go to war, joking and singing on their way to train. The generation has been brainwashed by propaganda and authority figures to see the front lines as an opportunity for glory and excitement — they're fighting for their fatherland, but they're also seeking out adventure. But we, the audience, already know better. 

Rather than start the film with Paul, Berger instead opens with a montage that demonstrates the endless, faceless cycle of death that leads up to Paul entering the war. In those opening scenes, unimaginable numbers of young men are slaughtered on the battlefield. Their corpses are recovered en masse, and diligent workers reclaim what equipment is salvageable. Then it's an industrial assembly line of washing, repairing, and repackaging the uniforms for the next batch of eager young recruits. It's the same kind of industrial meat-grinder view of warfare that Roger Waters is singing about on "The Wall," and it's one that doesn't often get included in these kinds of movies. When Paul gets his uniform, he notes that it already has a name tag on it. He's told it was returned because it was "too small" and that this happens all the time. We know the truth is much darker: Someone died in that jacket. 

Another brick in the wall

It's very clear in "All Quiet on the Western Front" that the powers that be (the "fat pigs" as the soldiers call them) don't care about their soldiers — they care about appearances and pride. The closest thing to a villain in this film is a general (played by Devid Striesow) who will not admit defeat. He sends his boys out to die for no other reason than his apparent misguided belief that it is more "honorable" to die in battle than to starve in retreat — but he, of course, will remain behind, plotting the next move from the comfort and safety of his base of operations. 

Berger emphasizes the disparity between the wealthy elite who are dictating the war, and the young boys being used as cannon fodder, with visual cues. Juxtaposed with the hazy, blue-tinted desaturated scenes of Paul on the front lines — where the cold reality of imminent death is ever-present — are warm, lush offices and railway cars, where men dressed in vibrant colors enjoy hot coffee, fresh pastries, and fine wine — all while lounging by crackling, welcoming fires. It's a subtle effect that offers a mature, nuanced perspective on the politics and priorities at the time. What the general actually says isn't really what's important: What matters is that he's in a position of luxury while his people — many of whom are under the age of 18 — are suffering in squalor. It's not the message of his words but the message of his actions that counts. 

Paul's coming-of-age journey in "All Quiet on the Western Front" is a tragic, haunting narrative. There's no happy ending: when Paul's story is over, another soldier steps into place. Whenever one boy dies, another, younger new recruit arrives to continue the cycle. The Armistice stopped the fighting, but — as hinted at in Berger's film — the conditions contributed to a politically unstable Germany, which set the stage for the Nazi party take-over and the subsequent outbreak of World War II. The next generation of soldiers is constantly fed into the system — whether it be over months, years, or decades — corrupted by fallacious ideology and nationalist pride, only to be used, abused, and then destroyed. This is not a problem we've overcome as a society — look at the disturbing rise of terrorist groups, white nationalists, and even neo-Nazis over just the last decade. "All Quiet on the Western Front" wants us to be aware of this absolute, horrifying truth — that we are all, still, just bricks in the wall — so that one day, just maybe, we can find a way to end the cycle for good. 

/Film Rating: 9 out of 10

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All quiet on the western front (2022), common sense media reviewers.

Intense, lengthy adaptation has gruesome war scenes.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

There's nothing glamorous or cool about war. Soldi

Soldiers stick together and watch out for each oth

The film is set in Europe, stars a German cast, an

In battlefield scenes, men are killed individually

Soldiers mention "dirty girls," the "Holy Virgin's

In the English subtitles: "s--t," "hell," "damn,"

Some people smoke cigarettes and drink wine or oth

Parents need to know that this German-language adaptation of the class novel All Quiet on the Western Front is a gruesome, two-and-a-half-hour depiction of the horrific realities of war. In battlefield scenes, men are killed individually and in mass in grisly ways, from stabbings to amputations, from getting…

Positive Messages

There's nothing glamorous or cool about war. Soldiers on all sides are just young people with lives and dreams. War takes this from them seemingly at random. Those who survive are forever changed by what they've witnessed and done.

Positive Role Models

Soldiers stick together and watch out for each other. They form a brotherhood that some hope to carry on after the war is over. They also obey commands and fight their hardest. Paul feels guilty after watching an "enemy" soldier die a slow death. Some soldiers lose their will to live after all the horrors they've seen. One government official who lost his son in war works for peace; another purposefully sends men to die in battle mere minutes before peace is declared.

Diverse Representations

The film is set in Europe, stars a German cast, and is shot in German with some French.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

In battlefield scenes, men are killed individually and in mass in horrific ways, from stabbings to amputations, from getting run over by a tank to being shot, exploded, set on fire, drowned in mud, gassed to death, and more. The film shows death in close-up detail. There's a lot of blood.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Soldiers mention "dirty girls," the "Holy Virgin's thighs," "the clap," a woman's breasts, and kissing a wife upon return from war.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

In the English subtitles: "s--t," "hell," "damn," "bastard," "arse," "for Christ's sake," "My God."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Some people smoke cigarettes and drink wine or other liquor.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this German-language adaptation of the class novel All Quiet on the Western Front is a gruesome, two-and-a-half-hour depiction of the horrific realities of war. In battlefield scenes, men are killed individually and in mass in grisly ways, from stabbings to amputations, from getting run over by a tank to being shot, exploded, set on fire, drowned in mud, gassed to death, and more. The film shows death, mutilation, and psychological torture in close-up detail. There's a lot of blood. We witness it all through the eyes of a young recruit who transitions from enthusiasm to horror to guilt, sorrow, and resignation. Men smoke cigarettes and drink wine or other liquor. There's less salty banter between soldiers than in some other all-male films, though there's mention of "dirty girls," the "Holy Virgin's thighs," "the clap," a woman's breasts, and kissing a wife upon return from war. In the English subtitles, language includes "s--t," "hell," "damn," "bastard," "arse," "for Christ's sake," and "My God." To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (8)
• Kids say (32)

Based on 8 parent reviews

Actually a good WWI movie

What's the story.

Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer) is a young man who doesn't want to be left behind when all his friends head off to fight in World War I at the start of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. He forges his parents' signature and enlists. All the new young recruits are pumped with energy and enthusiasm about fighting for their country. Within mere hours after setting off with their troops, these men realize just how terrible the conditions are for soldiers, and how devastating war is on the psyche. Men die by the thousands, including all of Paul's friends. An older soldier, Kat (Albrecht Schuch), takes him under his wing, but nobody can truly be protected in the trenches and on the battlefields on the disputed western front. Meanwhile, the liberal politician Matthias Erzberger ( Daniel Bruhl ) works to sign a peace deal with France in time to save some lives.

Is It Any Good?

Not every viewer will be willing or able to sit through two and a half hours of epic, bloody, graphically violent war reenactments. But those who do make it through this third film version (and the first in German) of the classic German novel, All Quiet on the Western Front , will be rewarded with a subtly humane tale of friendship, endurance, and the value of human life. The violence serves the story and its message. Director Edward Berger and team have done a jaw-dropping job of choreographing battlefield scenes, shooting them often at eye level and embedded in the trenches, giving the viewer the impression of being in the mix. A disquieting score relies heavily on single, melancholic beats that come and go with the action. Newcomer Kammerer is excellent as the wide-eyed recruit who barely withstands each passing day of tragedy.

Quiet is shot in grey, blue, and brown tones, and painstakingly conveys the soldiers' horrific, near-starvation, mud-caked, boot-soaked conditions. These are compared in overlapping scenes with the exquisite luxuries military leaders are afforded. Soldiers are killed, dismembered, exploded, set on fire, and sent into a last deadly battle just minutes before the armistice. The film has a clear theme of how little the lives of the young men seem to matter to some of the higher-ups, or to the enemy. "Soon Germany will be empty," one character says. End credits tell us almost 17 million people died in World War I, three million battling uselessly over the western front. Scenes capture how single trenches get passed back and forth on the same fought-over land between opposing sides for years, and how the uniforms of the dead are practically yet cynically washed, sewn back up, and handed out to new recruits, with perished soldiers' names on labels ripped out and tossed to the floor.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about why the young men are so eager to go to war in All Quiet on the Western Front . What did you think of the scene at the beginning where they are cheering about their turn to go to the frontlines?

The film depicts the realities of war quite graphically, with grisly scenes of death for nearly the full 2.5-hour running time. What do you think was the filmmakers' intention with this? Could the film have given the same horrific portrayal of war without so much graphic violence? Why or why not?

Who was fighting in World War I and why? Where was the western front being fought over in the film? Where could you go for more information?

If you've seen either of the earlier film adaptations or read the original novel, how does this film compare? Is this film a remake or a new adaptation?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : October 28, 2022
• Cast : Felix Kammerer , Albrecht Schuch , Daniel Bruhl
• Director : Edward Berger
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Book Characters , Friendship , History
• Run time : 148 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong bloody war violence and grisly images
• Awards : Academy Award , BAFTA - BAFTA Winner
• Last updated : June 20, 2024

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Review: War is hell (again) in Netflix’s new adaptation of ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’

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“All Quiet on the Western Front,” directed by Edward Berger, is hardly the first movie to argue — quite persuasively — that war is hell. It is, however, the first filmed adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s seminal World War I novel in which the Germans actually speak German. The book’s prior screen incarnations — Lewis Milestone’s Oscar-winning 1930 film , Delbert Mann’s 1979 telefilm — featured platoons of English-speaking actors cast as men with names like Kropp, Müller and Tjaden, a choice that made for some cognitive dissonance but scarcely mitigated their dramatic power or purpose. And that purpose — to de-glorify the horrors of trench warfare, mock the foolish vanity of nationalism and condemn the futility and cruelty of mass death — is one that should transcend barriers of language and culture anyway.

Even so, this solid, stirring new adaptation, which will represent Germany in the Oscar race for international feature, sets a noteworthy precedent. There’s an undeniable power in seeing Remarque’s once-serialized novel — an antiwar statement so definitive that it was duly banned by the Nazis a few years after its 1929 publication — brought to the screen in its original tongue. The sight of actual German actors in these roles can only lend authority to Remarque’s lament for a generation of men — his generation — who were “destroyed by the war,” even as it serves to bolster the movie’s horrifyingly visceral realism.

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The technical virtuosity of this “All Quiet on the Western Front” is apparent from its nightmarish opening vision of a charred battlefield strewn with barricades and bodies, a graveyard of broken flesh and twisted metal. It’s 1917, and thousands of German and French soldiers have already died here, casualties of a years-long struggle on each side to gain just a few hundred meters of ground. In a bold early flourish, Berger (who wrote the script with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell) tracks the progress of a dead man’s uniform as it’s stripped from its wearer’s body, transported, laundered and pressed back into commission — one tiny, reusable cog in the grinding machinery of war.

That uniform will soon drape the body of Paul Bäumer (a very good Felix Kammerer), a fresh-faced young man who, along with his eager schoolmates, has heeded the call to fight for “the Kaiser, God and the Fatherland.” But despite the near-certain victory they’ve been promised, something other than glory awaits them as they march across miles of scorched earth and into the trenches of Northern France. There is a stunning baptism by fire as enemy bombardments send Bäumer and his comrades scurrying for shelter. And then there is the ritual of tag collection so as to identify the newly dead, a process that will become — like a heavy, synth-enhanced three-note progression from Volker Bertelmann’s score — one of the movie’s grimmer motifs.

For a while there is the tedium of waiting, but also the consolations of camaraderie. The fine actors playing Bäumer’s comrades (they include Aaron Hilmer, Moritz Klaus, Adrian Grünewald and Edin Hasanovic) bring just enough spark and shading to enliven the classical war-film convention of one distinguishing trait per soldier, the one exception being the excellent Albrecht Schuch as Bäumer’s most trusted ally, Stanislaus Katczinsky. He’s a good man to have around, whether you’re killing time in an outdoor latrine — Berger honors Remarque’s ode to the joys of public defecation — or stealing a farmer’s goose for supper in one of the movie’s more suspenseful passages.

Hunger and thirst are constants; so are other appetites, to be sated only by a suggestive poster image or, for the lucky ones, a romp with a passing farm girl. In these moments, Berger captures the sometimes surreal idleness of war — the uneasy tension of being both a hostile, occupying force and a starving, lusting man in a foreign land. The idleness, of course, is only a respite in a movie that, as it descends back into the trenches and piles on the carnage, sometimes feels like its two-and-a-half-hour running time and sometimes feels like an eternity.

I tend to reject the widely held notion that the best, most persuasive war films are those most adept at turning violence into spectacle, as if state-of-the-art verisimilitude were the genre’s highest aspiration. Whatever its flaws or merits, this “All Quiet on the Western Front” will not settle the long-standing debate over whether there can even be such a thing as an antiwar film, especially since even the most nightmarish re-creation of armed combat threatens to become — with the enhancements of digital pyrotechnics, blood-gushing prosthetics and ear-splitting, seat-rattling sound design — an inadvertently thrilling experience. For the most part, though, Berger keeps horror rightly at the fore, never more so than when Bäumer, trapped in close quarters with a French soldier, is confronted by the undeniable humanity of his enemy.

That agonizing scene, like many others, comes straight from the novel. There’s one hefty subplot that doesn’t; it follows the real-life German negotiator Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) as he travels to sign an armistice with France, determined to end the war quickly and spare his badly beaten nation as much humiliation as possible. Brühl, the most internationally recognizable member of the cast, makes an engaging enough guide, but the decision to include this principled voice of pacifism bespeaks a lack of confidence in the movie’s point and the audience’s ability to grasp it. And while it’s instructive to witness the luxuries enjoyed by the lofty and powerful — the tea, the wine, the pastries — in contrast with the soldier’s miserable starvation diet, it’s ultimately a mistake to cut away from Bäumer and his comrades, removing us from the physical and psychological hellscape to which they’ve been abandoned.

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’

In German and French with English subtitles Rated: R, for strong bloody war violence and grisly images Running time: 2 hours, 28 minutes Playing: Bay Theatre, Pacific Palisades; available Oct. 28 on Netflix

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All quiet on the western front review: youth & war meet in searing wwi drama.

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Writer-director Edward Berger, who co-wrote the screenplay with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell, is not trying to reinvent the wheel with All Quiet on the Western Front , but it's an effective adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel, one that offers viewers something distinct. The performances are as realistic as the story it is telling. The production design and cinematography add layers of authenticity reserved for only the best war movies, and the costumes genuinely feel lived in. World War I films are a dime a dozen, and at a certain point they can all blend together, but All Quiet on the Western Front makes a strong case that it deserves to stand out from the herd.

Paul (Felix Kammerer) and his contemporaries romanticize the idea of patriotism and want to fight for Germany in World War I. His commitment is such that he lies about his age to enlist. After a rousing speech, he and his compatriots are certain they have made the right decision and head into battle. En route to a medical camp, his squadron has to give up their vehicle, so others can survive. On foot, the realities of battle begin to set in. Paul loses friends and nearly his mind in service to Germany and must learn what war means — not only to the world at large, but to himself.

Related: 10 Visceral War Movies Like All Quiet On The Western Front (2022)

All Quiet On The Western Front is not a particularly special film. It is in fact very straightforward in terms of plot. But just because it's a certain type of story that's been told over again, it doesn’t mean there isn't something new to offer. In the case of All Quiet on the Western Front, a bevy of strong performances and an acceptance of history is all the film needs to stand out. Kammerer plays the part of the fool very well; his wide-eyed naiveté is acted to perfection. There are three key moments where he captivates with that same talent in different ways: When he is buying everything the military is selling him, when he is scared, and in the small, blissful moments when he is arrogant enough to think that happiness can last.

The supporting cast's performances are effective as well. Every soldier is ramped up on adrenaline to the point that it's very easy to believe they are willing to risk their lives. This is apparent even when they are joking around outside of battle. Albrecht Schuch gives a rousing performance as Paul's illiterate comrade Stanislaus Katczinsky. As Kammerer's character reads him a letter from home, Schuch emotes through held back tears and very few words. The resulting effect is gut-wrenching, and the actor seems to make time stop with his moving performance. In a much more limited role, Daniel Brühl’s portrayal of politician and writer Matthias Erzberger is calm, yet deep. His scenes are a testament to what believing the words on the page can do for a performance.

The themes expressed in All Quiet on the Western Front are subtle, but dig deep. As Brühl's character tries to make larger-than-life humanitarian changes, Kammerer's Paul believes in the power of one man's ability to affect a cause. And characters like Schuch’s are already instilled in the system, but are so disillusioned by the current state of affairs that they are essentially sleepwalking through one of the most violent times in history. The action depicted in the film comes when one least expects it, but when it does, it hits hard.

The haunting shots of empty landscapes — that could be safe or riddled with enemies — make for an intense viewing experience. All Quiet On The Western Front does not live and die by each round of ammunition, it thrives through personal connections and incredible shots of stunned faces covered in soot. There is an inevitable dullness that sets in with period pieces like this one, but Berger has control of the screen and immerses the audience in a time when war was a focus.

Next: All Quiet On The Western Front Trailer Reveals Netflix's Brutal WW1 Movie

All Quiet on the Western Front is streaming on Netflix as of October 28, and is also playing in select theaters. The film is rated R for strong bloody war violence and grisly images.

All Quiet on the Western Front

Based on Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 novel, All Quiet on the Western Front is a World War I movie following Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) as he quickly realizes that war isn't about becoming a hero, but rather just surviving the terrifying experience. The film received critical praise upon release and even won four Academy Awards.

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The oscars 2023 complete guide: winners & where to watch every best picture nominee, all quiet on the western front ending explained (in detail).

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Movie review: 'All Quiet on the Western Front'

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

"All Quiet On The Western Front," the classic novel about the horrors of World War I as told by a German soldier, has been retold as a movie by a German director. It's out on Netflix today. And as NPR's Rob Schmitz reports, it's a visually stunning and powerfully acted rebuke of war from a country that lost two world wars. And just to note, this story contains the sound of cinematic gunfire.

ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: The first scenes of "All Quiet On The Western Front" are, well, quiet. The sun is rising. A fox feeds her kits in their burrow. The forest above slowly wakes, and a gentle rumble signals a coming storm.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUFFLED BOOM)

SCHMITZ: But it's not thunder.

(SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE)

SCHMITZ: It's the western front of World War I in occupied France, and it's anything but quiet.

(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSION)

SCHMITZ: For the next two hours and 20 minutes, viewers of this latest adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's seminal 1929 novel accompany German soldier Paul Baumer's journey from an innocent, idealistic young man into a hardened, cold vessel whose soul has gone missing amidst the bodies, mud and trenches of what's known as the Great War.

SCHMITZ: This is the third adaptation of the novel. The most popular one came in 1930, just a year after Remarque's novel was published to wide international acclaim. And the Hollywood film with American actors playing German soldiers won the Oscar for best picture. But this adaptation is the most loyal one to the novel. The actors are German. So is the language, and so is the director.

EDWARD BERGER: You know, as a filmmaker, hopefully, you make films that somehow come from, you know, something inside.

SCHMITZ: Edward Berger, director of "All Quiet On The Western Front," says that insight is like your DNA.

BERGER: And my DNA is made up from history lessons, from being born in a country that twice in the last century succumbed to its self-destructive impulses or destructive impulses and started two world wars and brought terror into the world. And, you know, that leaves a tremendous amount of shame and guilt and horror. And - I mean, I remember my entire childhood, I was ashamed whenever someone asked where I'm from, that I had to say Germany.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SCHMITZ: Throughout Berger's film, the machine of war looms over these German soldiers like an inescapable fate. Combatants die, and armies of sewing machines recycle their uniforms for the next victims. The soundtrack, an ominous three-note blast from an instrument called the harmonium, conjures approaching death.

SCHMITZ: But what makes Berger's adaptation even more German are the scenes he adds to illuminate the sentiments behind Germany's role in not only this war but the next one, too.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT")

DANIEL BRUHL: (As Matthias Erzberger, speaking French).

SCHMITZ: Berger added the real-life character of Matthias Erzberger, a hapless German politician who was chosen to negotiate an armistice with the French after heavy German losses and who tries to get whatever tiny concession he can from a French general.

BRUHL: (As Matthias Erzberger, speaking French).

SCHMITZ: "Be fair to your enemy. Otherwise, he will hate this peace," says Erzberger, a foreshadowing of what's about to come - a country impoverished by war, leading to the rise of right-wing fascists who are hellbent on avenging the last one by starting another one.

THIBAULT DE MONTALEMBERT: (As General Foch, speaking French).

SCHMITZ: In response, the French general says, "Fair? You speak of fairness?" before ordering Erzberger to sign the armistice. And he does. Three years later in real life, Erzberger is assassinated by German nationalists.

Erzberger isn't Berger's only addition. There's also a fictionalized German general who, upon learning of the armistice, forces his troops to fight until the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

BERGER: And I wanted to put it in to say, listen; this was just the beginning. This was just the beginning of a much bigger terror and horror and the justification of many more vicious acts to follow.

SCHMITZ: In fact, the original film adaptation of this novel left its own trail of vicious acts when it was screened for the first time in Berlin in 1930. Members of the Nazi Party didn't like how the film portrayed war in its cruel and grim reality, and they didn't like that the studio that put it out, Universal, was run by a Jew. Remarque scholar Edward Smith says they bought up a block of 300 seats at the Berlin premiere.

EDWARD SMITH: This block of people let go mice. They threw stink bombs. They threw sneezing powder into the air, and they began screaming and yelling and creating loud interruptions and - to the point where the police had to be invoked.

SCHMITZ: And for days thereafter, the Nazis, led by propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, staged demonstrations and speeches that eventually got the movie and Remarque's book banned. The book is one of the first the Nazis burned in a series of public burnings.

This time around, the German reaction to the film is mostly positive. Some of the only criticism is that it's too violent, especially at a time when war has returned to Europe and is on everyone's minds. Berger says he conceived this film prior to all of this but could tell it was coming.

BERGER: It just felt like we already knew this was heading towards confrontation - you know, this confrontational discourse got bigger and bigger between people, between parties.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character, speaking German).

SCHMITZ: He says the rhetoric from populist leaders in Europe and the U.S. delivering messages of division, self-sufficiency and shunning any efforts to bring countries together - these were the very ideas that Berger says led to the Great War and to Erich Maria Remarque's breakthrough novel chronicling it and to his own film that reminds us all that if it's war we want, this is what we'll get.

SCHMITZ: Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Berlin. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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• DVD & Streaming

All Quiet on the Western Front

• Biography/History , Drama , War

Content Caution

In Theaters

• Felix Kammerer as Paul Bäumer; Daniel Brühl as Matthias Erzberger; Albrecht Schuch as Stanislaus "Kat" Katczinsky; Moritz Klaus as Frantz Müller; Aaron Hilmer as Albert Kropp; Edin Hasanovic as Tjaden Stackfleet

Home Release Date

• October 28, 2022
• Edward Berger

Distributor

Movie review.

Green. Warm. Barely worn.

Paul Bäumer sees the name stitched on the uniform label— Heinrich —the name of someone else. Standing in line, in his underwear, he shows the name to the official who gave it to him. The uniform, Paul says, must belong to someone else.

“Probably too small for the fella,” the soldier says. “Happens all the time.” He rips the nametag off the uniform and lets it drop to the floor—joining dozens of others that lay scattered at his feet.

The uniform wasn’t too small for Heinrich. But it doesn’t belong to him. Not anymore.

While Heinrich never came back, the uniform did. The bullet holes were stitched shut. The blood was bleached away. Here, in World War I, the uniforms last longer than those that wear them.

They must. Wool is scarce. Men are not.

But that is changing. As the Great War grinds on in 1917, it grinds up the youth of Europe. Paul is part of a dwindling generation, sent into battle carrying little more than patriotic fervor.

“You have a chance to earn the right to wear the uniforms you’ve been given!” Paul’s teacher exhorted his class just days earlier. “The future of Deutschland lies in the hands of its greatest generation!”

And so inspired, Paul and his friends signed up. No matter that Paul was 17—too young to volunteer without his parents’ permission. No matter that his parents never, ever, would’ve given that permission. But the German army isn’t rigorously double-checking parental signatures these days—not with the war in its fourth year. One forged signature later, and Paul’s a soldier, marching proudly to the front.

The uniform has seen more of battle than young Paul has. In its fabric, perhaps, memories stay stitched. The mud, the blood, particles of mustard gas, the ever-so-faint stench of burned flesh.

Paul sees not: He only sees the road ahead this bright sunny day, as he and his closest friends march to the front. He hears only the songs of his fellow soldiers, ready to kill some Frenchmen. He smells only glory.

Soon enough he’ll smell what war truly stinks of.

Positive Elements

All Quiet on the Western Front is as scathing an indictment of war as you’ll ever see. And perhaps that observation in and of itself is a back-handed positive. To be reminded of war’s horrors is also a reminder not to jump lightly into conflict.

But in the midst of war, people (all men, given the movie’s 1917-18 timeframe) bond together in ways that, perhaps, would be impossible in peacetime. When soldiers suffer through so much together—when they’re asked to save one another’s lives potentially with every sunrise—they become, very much, like brothers.

We see that here. Paul is “lucky” enough to spend much of his time in the war still with his best friends from school. But he also makes a new friend, too—perhaps his best friend. Stanislaus Katczinsky—“Kat” for short—has been on the front a little while longer than Paul and his schoolmates. He makes a special effort to help Paul, especially, acclimate to the front. Over time, the two become almost inseparable, and they do their own part to help each other and their mates survive each day as it comes.

It’s only much later in the movie that we learn how different Paul and Kat are from each other—so different that in peacetime, they’d likely never speak. When the educated Paul suggests they should hang out occasionally after the war, Kat reminds him he’s an illiterate cobbler. “What are we going to do?” Kat asks. “Sole shoes together?”

As the war winds down, we see some historical figures try to cobble out an armistice. Central in that drive is Matthias Erzberger (a real historical character), who does his best to end the war in order to save thousands upon thousands of lives. “Let us find mercy where we can,” he tells his fellow Germans, hoping the French will bend their Armistice demands a bit. “But for God’s sake, let’s bring peace.”

Spiritual Elements

That scene above isn’t the only time we hear Erzberger invoke God’s name. In real life, the political figure was a prominent member of Germany’s Catholic Centre Party, and the movie perhaps hints that Erzberger’s Catholic faith helps drive some of his ambitions to stop the war.

Other than that, though, faith suffers alongside the men.

Paul and his friends go to a Christian school—or at least so it would seem from a cross hanging on the window (which the audience stares at as the teacher thunders his martial pep talk).

The next time we see a cross on a wall is at a church serving as a makeshift hospital, filled with patients and limbs and blood and screams. We hear snippets of Scripture from the war-weary (and, for the moment, celebrating) soldiers, asking for God’s mercy and referencing the “Lamb of God.” It’s hard to tell whether these drunken, celebrating soldiers are being particularly devout: One rushes up to Paul and shouts, “Knock on the monastery door and you’ll find only thieves and scoundrels!”

We hear crude jokes and remarks that make allusions to both Jesus and the thighs of his mother, Mary. A German general tells his soldiers that God is on their side.

Sexual Content

During a lull, one of Paul’s friends, Albert Kropp, leaves with a trio of three girls. He returns late in the evening, carrying a handkerchief from one of the young maidens as a souvenir. He describes the quality of the woman’s skin to Paul and mentions her breasts, and Kropp’s friends pass around the handkerchief to smell and jokingly pocket.

Another friend of Paul’s, Ludwig, watches Kropp leave with the ladies, and he’s clearly wishing he was brave enough to join. (Kropp goes temporarily AWOL for the encounter.) He talks longingly of physical intimacy, telling his friends that if there was no war, he’d be quite active in that department. “I wouldn’t put on trousers for eight days,” he says. Later, Ludwig runs into a poster that depicts a young (clothed) woman. He tears the portion of the poster that features the woman and takes it with him. The poster fragment seems to become almost like a real woman to Ludwig, and when Paul eyes the “two” of them (perhaps wondering about his friend’s sanity), Ludwig asks Paul if he’s jealous.

We see men shirtless. There’s a reference to combing pubic hair. Kat describes how beautiful his wife is to Paul, and a letter from her may have a bit of a double entendre in it. Kat advises fellow soldiers to stick their hands in their underwear if they’re cold. An officer compares a dirty gun to a “dirty girl.”

Violent Content

All Quiet on the Western Front is about the horrors of war, and it depicts those horrors graphically. I won’t detail every moment of violence here; rather, let’s deal with the subject more broadly, while perhaps touching on a couple of the movie’s most difficult moments.

People—countless people—are shot and killed. More are sliced or stabbed, via axe, bayonet and dagger. The movie wants to make the carnage we see personal : The hand-to-hand battles here don’t feel so much like war as flat-out murder. (The movie contrasts these horrifically brutal scenes with moments spent with the German’s commanding general, who’s sitting by the fire and gorging himself on fine food. “It’s been 50 years of no war,” he tells an adjunct as he wipes grease on his pantleg. “What’s a soldier without war?”)

World War I introduced a legion of new ways to kill, though, and we see those in action. Soldiers get run over by tanks, and we see their bodies reduced to meat and squirting blood. Others are immolated by flamethrowers. Scores of bodies are found in a building—victims, we’re told, of a gas attack. Grenades are thrown and find their marks. Artillery rounds explode, sending people flying, both alive and dead. Buildings collapse on still-living soldiers. Some make it out, some do not.

Corpses (mainly of men, but also of horses) lie everywhere. One of Paul’s first duties is to take part of the German version of dog tags to identify the dead: He finds a friend of his, his face mauled by an explosion, a leg missing at the knee. Soldiers walk through pools of blood. Half of a human carcass hangs from a tree, 30 or 40 feet in the air. It was blown there, we’re told, by an artillery blast.

But that’s not enough carnage, apparently, to drive the point home.

In one excruciating scene, we see a French and German soldier fight in the crater left by an artillery shell. The German finally stabs the Frenchman several times, but the man won’t die. Instead, he chokes and gurgles on his blood until the German stuffs dirt into the man’s mouth. It’s still not enough: For minutes—perhaps hours—this small struggle for life goes on, The German holding his ears as the Frenchman gurgles, until the German decides to save the man instead. He looks at the bloody wounds, wipes the dirt from his face and around his mouth. Only then does the Frenchman breathe his last. The German finds his wallet, and a picture of the man’s wife and daughter.

In another scene, a wounded man (who bears some terrible injuries to his leg) receives food and a fork. He promptly stabs himself several times in the neck with the utensil, bleeding out as his friends try to save him and another soldier, cold-eyed, looks on—as if to say that such atrocities are as common as mosquitos.

Back at the Armistice discussions, Erzberger and others talk about the casualty rates of the war: About 40,000 soldiers died in the preceding weeks before discussions began. When one German looks at the Armistice and is aghast at the proposed conditions—that Germany wouldn’t be worse off if they just followed the war to its conclusion—Erzberger adds: “Except with a few hundred-thousand extra deaths.”

Crude or Profane Language

Most of the movie is in German, and there’s some discrepancy between what we hear in the English dubbing and what we read in the subtitles. With that context in mind, we’re exposed to two f-words and about 10 s-words. Also uttered: “a–,” “b–tard,” “d–n,” “h—” and the British profanity “bloody.” God’s name is misused five times, once with the word “d–n.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Officers and government officials drink wine. During one scene of revelry, soldiers seem to be pretty drunk.

Other Negative Elements

Kat, Paul and other soldiers spend quite a bit of time talking while using the latrine. (We see their bare legs, but nothing else). Several people urinate, and one accidentally urinates on his shoe when his train stops unexpectedly.

Paul and Kat raid a farm a couple of times, once successfully making off with a dead goose. “When you’re starving, you’ll do anything,” Kat says. They’re hailed as heroes when they return with their booty.

A general makes a tragic, monstrous decision.

As the war drags to a close, Paul confesses to Kat that he’s worried about returning home. War has changed him. It has changed all of them.

“All anybody wants to know about are the battles we’ve been in,” he says. And both he and Kat know that what they’ve seen and experienced, they’ll never tell anyone. It’s too horrible. Too painful.

All Quiet on the Western Front comes, then, with an inescapable irony: The horrors that Paul would always want to keep hidden are the same horrors the film does its best to portray.

The original book, by Erich Maria Remarque, was published in 1929. And it’s just as bleak, just as brutal. Some European countries—often as they prepared for war—labeled the book antimilitary propaganda. Just four years after it was published, Germany’s new Nazi regime declared it “degenerate” and made it one of the first books to be thrown in its bonfires.

Certainly, both the book and the movie drive home the idea that war is waste: senseless, needless, immoral waste.

Perhaps there’s a place for such works. Certainly, All Quiet on the Western Front is a well-made film, achingly bleak and horrifically brutal as it is. But we know, by its end, that even if Paul survives the war, part of him will have died on that Western Front. The rest of him will be haunted by what he’s seen, and heard, and lost.

“We are forlorn like children and experienced like old men,” Paul says in the book All Quiet on the Western Front ; “We are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.”

If Paul is lost—if he wishes he could unsee what he’s seen—perhaps we, too, should be wary of seeing what he’s seen. Even on the safety of a screen. Even on the comfort of the couch.  

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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“All Quiet on the Western Front” has been riding a wave of renewed buzz since it dropped on Netflix last week. Could it become the first German movie to ever be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar?

It could be helped along by relevancy. The message of “All Quiet” is a loud one: war is hell. 

Based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 World War I novel , the German film on Netflix is unsparing in its portrayal of the horrors of battle.

It’s sensory-overload, tough-though-rewarding viewing. Gargantuan and detailed (and with English subtitles), it’s a rotten shame the movie has been mostly relegated to TV streaming and not getting a wide theatrical release. The film deserves the grandest canvas — not an old Dell laptop.

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

Running time: 148 minutes. Rated R (strong bloody war violence and grisly images.) On Netflix.

As we’ve come to expect from this well-worn genre, armies pour out of the trenches to find bombs and bullets, and characters we love die along the way. The key difference — and this is true to the book — is that there is no bravery or valor here, no rousing soundtrack of bold victory, nothing remotely good. 

The movie also doesn’t play up the enemy. During the most harrowing scene of director Edward Berger’s film, German soldier Paul (Felix Kammerer) repeatedly stabs a gun-toting French solider to save his own life. But he doesn’t die instantly. The man wheezes and convulses for minutes. Scared and ashamed, Paul begins to clean the soldier’s face. Shattering stuff.

“All Quiet” makes the point, just as Sam Mendes’ “1917” so memorably did in 2019, that the Great War was fought by kids with their whole lives in front of them. Much of a generation of Europeans was needlessly lost to the violence.

That horrible fact is nodded to in another scene, when Paul’s pal Kat (Albrecht Schuch) distraughtly observes a room littered with his compatriot’s corpses, and says, “Soon, Germany will be empty.”

The grotesque and traumatizing reality of war was not what Paul expected to find after his teacher, Kantorek, extolled the virtues of fighting for the fatherland. “The Kaiser needs soldiers — not children!” he shouts to smiles and rapturous applause from students. Paul and Co. enthusiastically enlist.

Almost immediately upon arriving on the battlefield, though, Paul comes face to face with constant death and agony. The shell-shocked realization brings to mind reports of young Russian soldiers , who had no idea they were being sent off to an actual war in Ukraine.  

Berger blends the fighting into a congealed mass of ceaseless, bloody conflict. Gregarious generals don’t draw up ingenious plans and there is no nervous anticipation for the next frightening encounter. It’s non-stop, virtueless brutality.

Occasionally the carnage is broken up with somber ceasefire negotiations between the Kaiser and France. The talks are a needed respite, but also the least successful aspect of the movie.

Making his screen debut as Paul is the gut-wrenching Kammerer. The talented newcomer has a malleable face that abruptly morphs from wide-eyed schoolboy optimist to tortured soul. In a film with no obvious warmth or lightness, his authentic presence gives the film a beating heart and soul.

“All Quiet on the Western Front” is Germany’s submission for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, and now that there are ten Best Picture slots it has a shot at consideration for the top prize as well. Keep in mind, though, that remakes almost never win, and Lewis Milestone’s 1930 version itself won Best Picture. Plus, it’s extremely rare for a foreign language film to make it into that category.

While I preferred the cinematic sweep and novelty of “1917,” as far as recent World War I films go, “All Quiet” rings truer to the lifelong wounds war imparts, long after the bombs have stopped and the smoke has cleared.

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Rotten Tomatoes® Score

If two writers and a director of the caliber responsible for [the film] had been allowed money and opportunity an original work the result would have to produce been far more exciting. What they have done has power, but it is spread all over the place.

No film detailed the horrors of World War I better than Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front. A technically groundbreaking film that doubles as an extremely powerful anti-war message. Just as compelling in its time as it is today.

All Quiet on the Western Front remains profoundly moving.

The film also deserves high praise for its dynamic camera work, editing, production design, and other technical aspects that contribute to its authenticity and relatability almost one hundred years later.

This is one of the best films Universal had produced. [Full review in Spanish]

Mr. Lewis Milestone, the Russian who directed it, has made the most remarkable film I have ever seen. His battles scenes alone are astonishing.

Here is a photoplay which carries a wallop in every scene. Without doubt, it is as mighty a weapon against war as any infernal machine might be for conflict. After seeing it, there can be few to argue in favor of shedding the blood of any nation's youth.

It enormously earns its reverence and celebrated place among war films and epics. Make no mistake. This film's resonance has not diminished with time or changing movie tastes.

I went to see the film with the idea at the back of my mind that Hollywood would "murder" Remarque's powerful indictment of war. My fears were groundless, for Lewis Milestone's treatment of the story could not be improved upon.

If ever there was a play aimed to bring about permanent peace, this Universal picture, directed by Lewis Milestone and produced by Junior Laemmle, is it.

Additional Info

• Genre : Drama, Action
• Release Date : April 27, 1930
• Languages : English
• Captions : English
• Audio Format : Stereo

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