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.
We will agree to disagree about the film. But I think the reason it exists is that the German version of the novel entered the public domain, so it was cheaper to produce. I don’t really think there was another reason it was made.
My thoughts precisely. This movie just doesn’t do anything new (or particularly interesting for that matter).
One important noteworthy thing about this adaptation is that it is (primarily) in German. It’s a German film by a German director with German actors speaking in German adapted from a novel written in German by a German. All of the previous adaptations were English-language versions by non-Germans, and that was not a coincidence as the book was banned by the Nazis, who fed off resentment at how Germany was treated after World War I and had no tolerance for a book that basically took the German government to task for pursuing this utterly pointless war. So the film is significant and novel in that sense.
As a huge fan of the Remarque novel (dare I say that it is Remarque-able?) who read it in high school and re-read it about a year ago, as well as a big fan of both the silent and sound versions of the 1930 film, I found this adaptation’s additions and revisions to the novel’s narrative to be puzzling. In addition to the scenes at home that were excised that Keith mentioned, some of the other key moments from the book and the 1930 film are absent here, and characters’ fates are altered for no apparent reason except perhaps to further drive home the point that war is hell. The movie makes that point perfectly well, and the plot alterations and added scenes of the negotiations (with the end titles literally spelling out for you just how stupid World War I was) are overkill.
Having said that, it was interesting to see this story told with all the bells and whistles available today to depict warfare with such gory realism that were less available in 1930, and the film is visually impressive. (I say “less available” in 1930 and not “unavailable” because somehow “Wings” managed to film some of the greatest aerial battle scenes the movies have ever seen in 1927.)
Ultimately, although I would have preferred the film to have been more faithful to the novel, it deserves to exist for its visual achievement, the significance of it being in German for the first time, and it can’t hurt to expose a new generation of people to the history of World War I, which very well may have been the dumbest and most pointless war that has ever been fought, at least when factoring in the extent of the suffering and destruction. There may have been skirmishes that were fought for more stupid reasons, but I don’t think there has ever been a conflict on the scale of World War I that was so utterly pointless.
Totally agree. I view this and Triangle of Sadness very similarly. Two movies that exist purely to make a single point, and they make it by about the 40 minute mark. Then you’re just left to sit through another 90+ minutes of an uninteresting story with uninteresting characters.
I wish you offered the ability to sign up for email notifications of new posts. I really like your book reviews (and I LOVE baseball).
I’ll look into this!
While I agree that emails announcing new posts would be appreciated, the periodic (aperiodic?) KLaw emails list all new posts, although in some cases several weeks after the posting date. Also, I recently added meadowparty to my start-up setup so each morning I learn if a new post has appeared in the last 24 hours. I wish I’d made that update years ago.
I disagree that this isn’t pertinent because war has changed so much- The fighting right now in Eastern Ukraine is actually shockingly similar. It’s a lot of trench warfare and artillery still causes 80+% of the casualties at the front and even has M2s at the front that are serving the same purpose as they did then. If anything to me it has been a reminder when you hear “never again” on the pure senseless destruction of WW1 and WW2 it’s more of an idealistic message – history is repeating itself live time and that is a message worth paying attention to.
Because I thought the 1930 original was so powerful, and because of the Oscars hype, I went to see this remake. I was thoroughly disappointed. The original was an anti-war film, maybe the very first one, and it delivered the message superbly (I’ve never read the book). This new one wasnt so much an anti-war film as it was a dramatization of the insanity of a particular war and of a particular general. It had a lot of what I hate about modern movies, that is it tries to overwhelm and intimidate you w a lot of special effects and violence under the guise of “realism” and thinks this is an adequate substitute for good story-telling. I dont agree that it even was a fine film. Would much rather watch the original.