All Quiet on the Western Front took home nine nominations for this year’s Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best international Feature (as Germany’s submission). It is, as you might know, adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel of World War I. It’s big, and epic, and certainly lets you know where everyone involves stands on the subject of war. (They think it’s bad.) It’s also a film that doesn’t have any good reason to exist.
Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) is our protagonist, an idealistic and nationalistic 17-year-old in Germany who signs up to fight for the fatherland in 1917, more than halfway through World War I. He and his schoolmates are quickly disabused of any notions of war as heroic or noble, as they’re thrown right into trench warfare and find one of their number dead before they can fire their first shot. We follow them through the next eighteen or so months, till the Armistice, as one by one they’re killed in battle, often in circumstances that might be ridiculous if they weren’t so tragic. Along the way, we see them hungry, disillusioned, bored, and filthy, along with occasional reminders of the use of chemical weapons that marked World War I for particular brutality. The film cuts away to scenes of negotiations between German and French leaders or discussions among German brass, all of which take place in relative luxury – and clean, dry conditions – compared to the sodden trenches in which Paul and his mates fight and die.
I had to read Remarque’s novel in high school and hated it, yet somehow, despite looking incredible, this film doesn’t do the book justice. There’s a key passage in the book where Paul goes home to visit family from the front and finds that he’s already changed enough that he can’t relate to his relatives and friends any more. They don’t understand what he’s been through, and he’s not the same person they knew before he went to fight. The film omits it entirely, in favor of those stolid scenes of generals and diplomats. The latter provides that strong contrast – there’s a scene where one of the men is upset because the croissants were clearly not baked that same morning – but it also wrecks any momentum the war story has, and it doesn’t help the character development in the way that the book’s scene where Paul goes home would have, something he doesn’t really get until a bit much later in the film when he’s trapped in no man’s land with a French soldier.
The movie does look fantastic, though, even when it’s gruesome. There are tremendous aerial shots of the battlefields, tight shots of the men in battle that put you uncomfortably close to the action, and trenches that I assume they just reused from 1917. One of the Oscar nominations came for Makeup and Hairstyling, and you can see why; these men look disgusting. There’s a clear commitment here to verisimilitude, and while I can’t say this is what World War I really looked like, it’s definitely what I think World War I really looked like.
All Quiet on the Western Front is about two and a half hours long, and not brisk, which gave me a lot of time to think about the bigger picture (pun intended), and I couldn’t escape the conclusion that this film doesn’t need to exist. We don’t really need an anti-war movie, not of this sort, at least, when war hasn’t looked like this in a hundred years, and so much fighting today is done via drones that separate killer from victim. We don’t need another World War I movie, especially since we just had one four years ago, and that war doesn’t have the more enduring lessons to impart that World War II or Vietnam or Iraq (the second one) do. And this movie has nothing new to say about war or the book, which has been filmed at least twice before, including the 1930 American version that won Best Picture. New takes on existing films should bring something new, and this one can only offer better cinematography and makeup.
I can’t believe this film got nine nominations while Decision to Leave, South Korea’s submission for the Best International Feature Film award, was shut out. There’s no comparison here – Decision is an original story, a better story, better acted, and with more to say. Argentina, 1985 is better. La Caja, which didn’t even make the shortlist, is better. All Quiet is more technically ambitious, but it’s nowhere near as compelling as those films, and I don’t think the point of the Best International Feature award, where countries from all over the world should be competing on equal footing, is to reward the film with the biggest budget. This is a big movie, and a fine one, but it is absolutely not a great one.