Not a remake, say the team behind 2022’s All Quiet on the Western Front, referring to the legendary 1930 movie anyone would be a fool to try and remake. More another adaptation of the book it was based on, they say, Erich Maria Remarque’s serialised novel from 1928 about the grim reality of the First World War from the average soldier’s point of view.
This is true. I’ve seen both, and the 1930 version less than six months ago, so can easily see what’s different in this adaptation. Absent, for example, is the class element – they were posh boys in the 1930 film and one of their great bugbears once they’d joined the army was being ordered about by someone who was their underling out on civvy street. Present is the inclusion towards the end of the negotiations around the armistice which finally brought the war to a standstill in 1918.
But, as said, not a remake. Though for all their many differences, the two movies do tell the same story, of a German whelp called Paul (Felix Bäumer) joining the army at the instigation of a patriotic teacher high on “Kaiser, Gott und Vaterland”, and his through-thick-and-thin friendship with older, wiser comrade-in-arms Stanislaus “Kat” Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch).
This relationship is the thread that will lead us from sleepy German hamlet into the thick of war and dreadful slaughter in France, then back as the soldiers regroup some miles back from the front, before finally heading out again into yet more blood and guts as young men are sent over the top into a hail of enemy fire.
The 1930 film had a mostly blank canvas to work on, though the Rudolph Valentino silent vehicle The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had prepared the way. This 2022 reiteration treads what is the now-familiar ground of the war movie – getting to know the guys, training, deployment, plus hijinks in the men’s downtime and then the shock of losing someone you’ve come to know as death arrives on the scene – so director Edward Berger (who did Deutschland 83, first and best of the Deutschland TV series) needs to up the ante somehow. He does that with depictions of extremely brutal death – a man is blown to a pulp in an early sequence in the trenches, setting the tone for what follows – and with a concern for the abject pointlessness of it all.
Daniel Brühl is the focus for that side of the story, as the decent German, Erzberger, who just wants the slaughter to stop and is negotiating with the French and discovering that French Marshal Foch (Thibault de Montalembert) wants nothing less than the total humiliation of the Germans. This is a German production (for Netflix) and since the harshness of the terms of the armistice and eventual peace settlement are often cited as reasons for the rise of Hitler, it’s understandable the weight this is given.
The other prong of that devil’s fork is the “stab in the back” legend (Dolschstoßlegende), which Berger and his co-writers embody in the shape of German General Friedrichs (Devid Striesow), a full-blooded warmonger scornful of the cowards and social democrats back home campaigning to end the war who sends his men out to fight in its dying minutes before the ceasefire comes into effect, knowing some will die for nothing – the logic of glory, no matter how stupid, how bloody, is all-consuming.
Berger retains one key scene from the first film almost shot for shot, where Paul, not long before the bugles sound for the ceasefire, kills a Frenchman in a bomb crater in one-on-one combat. The Frenchman simply refuses to die. Then eventually does. Then Paul is overtaken by the realisation of what he’s done – and what he’s been doing all this time – and desperately attempts to “unkill” the dead man.
It’s technically glorious. Berger’s cameras are inspired by Lewis Milestone’s in the 1930 movie and move fluidly, while the sound design, also impressive in the 1930 film, booms and quakes as Volker Bertelmann’s expressive score makes much use of stabbing snare drums and growling bass synths. And it’s timely, specifically with Europe at war in Ukraine while more generally the likes of Steve Bannon and men like him who will never fight themselves misguidedly and with no lessons learned from history peddle the notion of the “cleansing war”. Here, Berger says, is how pitiless and filthy war actually is.
All Quiet on the Western Front – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
