One of the many enduring images in director Edward Berger’s adaptation for Netflix of the seminal World War I novel All Quiet on the Western Front — beyond, for example, the wanton, nightmarish violence of close-quarters trench warfare — is actually a series of juxtapositions.
The film opens and closes, for example, with shots of a forest shrouded in mist and a mountain range looming in the distance — as if to suggest, with those identical bookends, the utter uselessness of everything that occurred in between. In the opening moments, All Quiet on the Western Front then throws viewers immediately into the chaos of a pitched battle that feels like a combination of the D-Day landing scene in Saving Private Ryan, mixed with the epic scale of that final over-the-top charge in 1917.
Soon enough, we follow the journey of a dead soldier’s jacket, which the German war machine collects and repurposes almost as good as new so that a fresh recruit can don it before heading to the front. And a German official gives a full-throated, jingoistic speech to a crowd of too-eager German boys, urging them to fight for “the Kaiser, God, and the Fatherland” while also reminding them that war is not a game of chess involving individual pieces — but, rather, reliant on a body of men fulfilling their collective duty.
‘Somehow, this isn’t how I imagined it’
Netflix’s All Quiet on the Western Front (which debuted on the streamer on Friday, October 28) then spends the rest of the movie basically putting the lie to that promise, showing us that war — at least, this one — is in fact little more than a game of chess between great powers.
All Quiet on the Western Front brings us a masterful look at the brutality of war. It is a difficult film to watch, but it’s presented in the most visually stunning way. From cinematography to editing, this is a pure filmmaking showcase… A truly unforgettable experience. Wow. pic.twitter.com/x4rthbiVlB
— Austin Burke (@theBurk3nator) October 16, 2022
But rather than pieces on a board moving in accordance with a larger purpose, the conflict in All Quiet on the Western Front feels like it’s all tactics and no strategy. Two sides pummeling each other, until one is either backed into a corner or runs out of naive boys to throw into the meat grinder. Feckless politicians and generals dither over a ceasefire proposal, while the horrific and indiscriminate slaughter continues. Old men talk and young men die.
“Gentlemen,” an officer tells the new and still relatively hopeful German recruits as they ride to the front, “you will be fighting in a godforsaken s–thole … Welcome to the 78th Reserve Infantry Regiment. We are now on the Western Front.”
In the eyes of General Friedrich (played by Devid Striesow) — who eats nice meals and puffs on a cigar while he watches the fighting from the safety of an estate balcony, all while complaining bitterly about how different things were when his father fought under Bismarck — war is planned and fought in the aggregate. Soldiers are numbers, dots on a map, and replaceable.
On the front line, Paul Bäumer (played by Felix Kammerer) and his friends Albert, Frantz, and Ludwig don’t have the luxury of looking away from the sight of flamethrower-wielding French troops burning men to death, or that of a tank rolling on top of and crushing a soldier to a pulp, or of soldiers shooting each other point-blank and hacking away at the enemy with any sharp object they can frantically grab.
All that nationalistic fervor they had back home has brought them here, to a kiling field where staying alive is as much the product of dumb luck as it is soldiering.
All Quiet on the Western Front
At one point, the mud-caked Germans are ordered to do something about all the standing water in their trench that’s made it impossible to keep their boots dry. They use their helmets to bail out water over the top of the trench … while it’s still raining. “Somehow, this is not how I imagined it,” Ludwig laments.
Later marching through a field, one of the Germans looks up to see a man dangling high up from a tree branch. Must have been a huge explosion, he is told. Poor fellow was blown right out of his clothes.
One of the Germans muses about how they’ll all function after this is all over. “We’ll be like travelers who belong in another country elsewhere.”
This movie — which Germany is submitting as a contender in next year’s international Oscars category — ultimately renders first the First World War as one of the most catastrophic and consequential global failures of the 1900s. The closing screens tell viewers that the fighting at this point, at this moment, during the conflict had settled into more or less “positional warfare.” Tens of thousands of men dying at a front line that had barely moved by the war’s end. For practically nothing.
The ceasefire marks the end of the war — at the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, on the eleventh month — but it’s not a happy end. And it doesn’t come before General cigar-puffer decides to throw the men back into the fight at the last possible moment, simply to have gone down by striking a terrible blow. The men morosely note the time. Dying at the finish line feels like the cruelest death of all.
Netflix’s conclusion of the story syncs up with the ending in the novel, so tersely rendered thus:
“He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.”
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