A landscape in the misty forest, a fox sucking from its mother’s teat, and then a look up into the sky. The peacefulness doesn’t last long. An aerial view shows smoke and then a scenery full of corpses. This is a war, not a walk in the forest.
A scared soldier named Heinrich is forced to advance forward with his rifle to seize a few more meters of land, but he dies. His uniform is washed and distributed to new recruits. One of them is the German youngster Paul Baumer, who, captivated by patriotic narratives, enlists in World War I. “Just too small for the fellow. It happens all the time!” says the quartermaster when Paul notices Heinrich’s name on the uniform. He then removes the name tag, which is thrown to the floor together with many others.
Straight from its opening scene, Edward Berger’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” reveals its intentions; for the next two and a half hours, viewers will watch a brutal but eloquent statement on the insanity of the Great War, which led to almost 20 million deaths and was fought by young adults who often died to capture just a few meters of land each time. “Soon, Germany will be empty”, one of Paul’s comrades says when they come across a room full of corpses. It was a generation which was unnecessarily lost to violence.
This third adaptation of the popular Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel is the first one with German actors and a German director, and that plays a role in the way the plot is approached. Edward Berger approaches it not as an external observant but as someone who, as he said, “comes from a country that twice in the last century succumbed to its destructive impulses and started two World Wars and brought terror into the world… I remember my entire childhood, I was ashamed whenever someone asked where I’m from, that I had to say Germany”.
During the film, you can see this statement depicted as a criticism (or national self-criticism) in various cases: from the way German nationalism is expressed even by everyday citizens, like Paul’s professor who passionately tells their naïve students that “the Kaiser needs soldiers, not children!”, to the hawkish German General Friedrich who sends his exhausted soldiers to the Western Front for an ultimate desperate attack right before the armistice takes effect, while condemning the Social Democrats for “selling our Fatherland” and sipping wine in his lavish castle.
In general, Berger wants to clearly distinguish the soldiers that fought that ferocious war from those taking the decisions, making that way also an overall war statement. While the former ones were drawn into a battle destined to fail, eating dry bread and becoming one with the muddy battlefields, the latter ones were giving orders from their protected areas, enjoying their rich meals and satisfying their political and military ambitions.
Europe paid a heavy price for those ambitions. And when the German representatives, under Matthias Erzberger, met the French ones to sign the armistice, they faced a non-negotiable 72-hour deadline. Then Erzberger tells French representatives that if peace brings more misery than war, Germans will resent it. Here Berger makes a reference to what’s about to come in the following years of WWI. Indeed, after the war ended, nationalist groups started to form; Erzberger was labeled as a criminal for the humiliating peace treaty he signed, and then right-wing terrorists murdered him.
The combination of brutal realism, impressive cinematography and accurate depiction of the characters’ struggles and challenges makes the latest “All Quiet on the Western Front” one of the best anti-war movies of the century. But it fails in one way: Although it definitely deserves to be watched on a big -cinema- screen and not just on a TV one, it was released for Netflix and has been only played in selected cinemas worldwide. That’s a pity.
