All Quiet on the Western Front trailer reaction

Felix Kammerer as Paul Bäumer in All Quiet on the Western Front

Update: I finally watched this new version of All Quiet on the Western Front, and in theatres! I had mixed feelings about it. You can read my long, ambivalent review here.

Here’s a movie I’ve been hoping for and imagining for myself for more than twenty years. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was one of my two great high school discoveries—the other being The Lord of the Rings—and the very first book I ever ordered from Amazon. (The listing for the mass market paperback, which has been through at least two cover redesigns since I was in high school, helpfully informs me that I last ordered a copy on February 8, 2000, a date that might as well be written in cuneiform.) All through college I fiddled with screenplay adaptations and filled notebooks with storyboards, especially for the sweeping crane shots of no-man’s-land I envisioned. I watched the 1930 and 1979 adaptations. But most importantly I read and reread the book. It absorbed me every time.

This new adaptation has been in the works for a long time, and, having a fan’s proprietary interest in it, I’ve checked in on it regularly for years. Directors came and went. Most recently I learned that it had been reimagined as a German-language adaptation—the first time this German novel has been filmed in the author’s native language—with Daniel Brühl attached to star. I was skeptical about the casting—Brühl was around forty when I first heard about his casting, and though youthful in a Matthew Broderick way I thought he’d still be a hard sell as high schooler-turned-soldier Paul Baümer.

And, two days ago, a trailer finally appeared.

I don’t have much to say in this initial “reaction,” except to encourage y’all to check the trailer out and, of course, to read the novel if for some reason you haven’t. But I do have a few notes and observations.

The trailer is a teaser, and so above characters, plot, or message it is selling a mood. It works. What Netflix has chosen to give us here is both eerie and beautiful—not to mention intense. Previous film versions have never shied away from the violence described in the novel but this version appears to make it very direct and personal, and the attention to atmosphere—the wet, the cold, the textures of clothing and earth and mud and steel, the darkness splintered by the light of flares—gives even this minute or two of footage a tactile quality that could make its action hit very hard.

Brühl, as it turns out, is not playing the protagonist, Paul Baümer. Wikipedia lists him as Matthias Erzberger, a politician who signed the armistice on behalf of Germany’s interim government in November 1918 and was eventually assassinated by the nationalist Organisation Consul. (I read an autobiographical novel by a former OC member last year.) Erzberger does not appear in the novel, which maintains a pretty cynical and mistrustful stance toward all politicians of whatever stripe. What role Erzberger and his appearance will play in this version of the story is unclear to me.

The actor who does play Baümer, Felix Kammerer, is appropriately young and fresh-faced. He even looks strikingly like the infantryman on the jacket of the first English edition of All Quiet. His youth and the youth of his friends, a “generation destroyed by the war” as Remarque puts it in the novel’s epigraph, is an important aspect of the story. The contrast between young, eager Paul and his classmates and Paul as the last, numb, embittered survivor lends the novel a lot of its power, as evidenced by the way just about every war novel since as imitated it.

I’m not sure yet, based on this trailer, who is who among the boys who enlist with Baümer, but the group looks good and short clips of hijinks behind the lines convey some of the fun the novel occasionally brings in—which is also a reminder of these men’s relative youth and immaturity.

One standout, and potentially a big improvement over both previous adaptations, is the actor playing “Kat” Katczinsky, an older soldier and mentor to the youths of Paul’s generation. The 1930 adaptation cast the gruff, burly, bulldog-faced fifty-year old Louis Wolheim as Kat, and the filmmakers behind the 1979 version clearly had Wolheim in mind when they cast Ernest Borgnine—who was over sixty and looked and acted like it—in the same role. Wolheim was brilliant in the part, but as portrayed in both films so far Kat is a far cry from the character in the novel: an unassuming reservist of about forty whose thin frame, stooped shoulders, and drooping mustache disguise his capability and good sense. Albrecht Schuch is the right age and has the right unassuming appearance (including the mustache this time!) to give us the character readers have imagined for nearly a hundred years. Here’s hoping.

I said I didn’t have much to say, so I’ll stop there. Judging just by the two minutes we have, this adaptation looks good. Its cinematography and attention to detail and atmosphere look to be on par with those of 1917, the best World War I film in a long time, and if it tells the novel’s story well it could refresh Paul Baümer and his doomed schoolmates for a new audience.

In the meantime, read the novel. Watch one of the previous adaptations, too, as both have their strengths. The 1930 one starring Lew Ayres is by far the better, and has some really intense pre-Code battle scenes, and the 1979 one has a brilliant turn by the late Ian Holm as Corporal Himmelstoß, Paul’s drill instructor. And for some bracing counterprogramming that will enrich both All Quiet on the Western Front and itself, read Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, which is the German war classic that I’ve been imagining as a movie for the last several years. Maybe they’ll get to that one next.