All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) takes cover in Netflix’s All Quiet on the Western Front

Last Sunday night, as Netflix’s new German-language version of All Quiet on the Western Front was winning four Oscars, I finally got the chance to watch the film. This was thanks to a limited one-night theatrical release. I’m really grateful I got to watch it on the big screen, with high-quality theatre sound. I can’t imagine how watching this on a TV, tablet, or phone would diminish it.

I have, however, had a hard time writing a review of the film. I’ve been fiddling with this—fighting with it—since last Monday. As I wrote last fall, I have anticipated a new film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front for more than twenty years, and as I wrote in my movie year-in-review, I had had enough of the new film spoiled for me to be anxious about just how good of an adaptation it is.

Sure enough, having seen the film I am of two minds about it. So I’ve decided to approach the film from two angles.

As a film

Considered purely as a film, this All Quiet on the Western Front is effective and technically impressive. Sunday night it quite rightly won Oscars for production design and cinematography, and I think its makeup and sound, for which it was nominated but didn’t win, and its costume design, for which it wasn’t even nominated, were award-worthy as well. The care taken over its locations, sets, costumes, and how all of these were photographed give the movie a remarkable tactile quality. Not only does the film look and sound great, it also feels real.

The lead performances are also good, especially Felix Kammerer as young Paul Bäumer and Albrecht Schuch as the gruff veteran Kat. Kammerer in particular proves extraordinarily expressive in an underwritten lead role. His boyish scarecrow frame from which his oversized woolen uniform hangs and his enormous blue eyes, which stare out disconsolately from beneath his enormous steel helmet, really sell him as a teenager in over his head, going from wide-eyed enthusiasm to shellshock. Schuch, as I had hoped, offers a Kat more true to the mentor and expert scrounger of the book than previous versions but excels most by showing the bond between himself and the younger men he takes under his wing. Bäumer and Kat’s relationship is perhaps the best thing about the movie.

The battle sequences, which I have seen praised to the heavens, are excellently staged and shot. Long gliding Steadicam shots follow the characters in mad dashes across no-man’s-land and through the trenches. A raid in which Kat and another older soldier named Tjaden—about whom more below—work their way through the French lines and stumble upon a well-stocked field kitchen is especially involving. The filmmakers also depict the fevered brutality of hand-to-hand combat with bayonets, shovels, and fists clearly and realistically.

Again, as a film, this All Quiet also has weaknesses. One of its four Oscars was for its score. I found it distracting—jarring bleats of dubstep and seemingly random snare drum hits punctuate quiet scenes, an obvious intrusion of the modern into painstakingly authentic visuals. Some of the supporting roles are not well performed, especially a German general added to the story by the filmmakers (again, more below), although this weakness has more to do with the writing than the actors. And the film’s tactility and brutality sometimes feel gratuitous, like slasher-movie squick that is only there for shock value.

This last criticism is the hardest for me to formulate, probably because it has to do with the film’s overall tone and approach to the material. It also points toward the film’s most fundamental problem. An analogy from the film itself occurs to me: in one of the film’s final moments, Bäumer, fighting a poilu with his bare hands only minutes before the armistice, has his face shoved into the muck at the bottom of a French trench and he almost smothers. The in-your-face quality of the violence—the grossness, the muck, the squirming, the goopy sound effects—is supremely unsubtle.

That lack of subtlety is my most serious criticism of this finely crafted movie. And, as I hinted above, this, its tone, and its horror movie sensibility are also indicative of its most basic fault—it is a bad adaptation of the novel.

As an adaptation

This film is not All Quiet on the Western Front. I’m not sure I’d call it an adaptation, more another World War I story very loosely using elements of the novel. I got the sense even before the film was half over that the filmmakers had approached the novel as raw material to be cut up and repurposed. I’d estimate about 20% of the book is here, mostly in isolated incidents, visuals, and individual lines of dialogue.

Whatever, right? You can’t get everything in. An adaptation has to adapt. These are all things I’ve said myself, and they’re true. The problem is the basic approach, structure, and attitude of the film, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes All Quiet on the Western Front great that informed these decisions.

That the filmmakers view the novel as raw material is clear from the fates the characters suffer. In the novel, Kropp, the smallest and sharpest of Bäumer’s classmates, is wounded with Bäumer, loses a leg, and contemplates suicide as he thinks ahead to civilian life as a cripple. Movie Kropp attempts to surrender to the French and is torched with a flamethrower, thrashing in agony in the omnipresent mud as Bäumer watches. Tjaden, a lanky chowhound with a special hatred for their drill instructor (Corporal Himmelstoß, AWOL) survives the novel and even appears in its underwhelming sequel, The Road Back. Movie Tjaden is wounded and kills himself with a fork in the field hospital. Kat’s death, one of the most poignant scenes of the novel and both previous film versions, is altered so that rather than suffering a minor wound and being killed by shrapnel as Bäumer, unaware, carries him to the aid station, he is shot by a scowling French farmboy while stealing eggs and bleeds to death.

I go into detail here not only because the alterations are so extreme but because most have clearly been made for shock value. (People in the theatre visibly jumped and turned away in disgust when Tjaden started stabbing himself.) The film is as subtle as a sledgehammer.

The structural changes are more extreme. Huge sections of the story are missing entirely. Bäumer and his friends’ training under the martinet Corporal Himmelstoß, Bäumer’s time home on leave, Bäumer’s time recovering from his wound with Kropp in a military hospital—these subplots, which are not only thematically important but provide crucial moments in Bäumer’s character arc, and many smaller incidents are gone.

All of this has been left out in order to facilitate the strangest artistic choice made by the filmmakers: to compress the years-long story of the novel into the final three days of the war. Following a brief prologue set in the spring of 1917, the film picks back up with Bäumer and his comrades on November 8, 1918. Their activities at this time—patrolling, scrounging, flirting with French farm girls, reading the mail, going up to the front again—are intercut with the peace mission of Matthias Erzberger, the Centre Party politician who met French Marshal Ferdinand Foch and signed the armistice that ended the war.

Did that summary sound like it had turned into the introduction to a Wikipedia article to you? That’s how out of place this subplot feels. The inclusion of Erzberger and the armistice negotiations—scenes around which Bäumer’s entire story has been reorganized—wrecks the film.

The problem with jettisoning large parts of your source material and inserting a lot of original material—Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies also come to mind—is the almost inevitable mismatch in quality. Great novels become classics for a reason. Who do you think you are to improve them? If you’re going to do this, you had better insert really, really good material, something that tonally and thematically enhances and reinforces the point of the original. Occasionally this works—the Coen brothers’ True Grit pretty seamlessly blends verbatim adaptations of Charles Portis’s novel with scenes and dialogue of their own—but more often it weakens things.

Where All Quiet adds to the novel, it falls back on the hoariest World War I clichés available. Erzberger’s real-life mission spurs the fictional General Friedrichs, in the last few hours of the war, to launch an attack on French positions out of spite. This is pure invention. (A few historians have pointed out that if you want a real historical example of a hardass general who got his men killed on the last day of the war for no reason, you should be looking for an American.) Friedrichs is a cartoon character: an overweight, goggle-eyed Prussian with a shaved head and handlebar mustache who fulminates against the Social Democrats over champagne in his chateau while his men die in the mud. I can’t fault the actor; he does his best with a caricature. But a caricature it is.

These changes also grant the film an omniscience that is pointedly lacking in young Paul Bäumer’s narration in the novel. Like any soldier, all he knows of the war is the bit he sees, which in a trench is little enough. Bäumer himself says that the only important things to him are the purely practical things—food, sleep, boots, a comfortable toilet seat, the best weapons for hand-to-hand combat—in the little patch of the war where he and his friends are trying to survive. What matters in the novel, all that matters, is Bäumer, his friends, his slow-motion destruction. He is quite explicitly a stand-in for an entire generation. Roping in Erzberger and Foch gives the film a top-down political perspective that Remarque quite rightly chose not to give his narrator. In this way the film achieves political awareness at the expense of the thing that made the story powerful.

That’s a lot of detail, but I don’t mean to be laborious. I want to illustrate specifically the results of the filmmakers’ artistic approach to Remarque’s novel. All of these problems, as I suggest above, stem from a misapprehension of what All Quiet on the Western Front is meant to say and what it is that makes its message so moving.

Irony and pointlessness

I’ve seen a number of critics and online fans of this new film, when someone has dared to point out how badly it deviates from the book, argue that the changes don’t really matter. Two representative examples pulled from YouTube: “[Y]ou’re missing the point of it all: this is the movie that best depicts the meat grinder that was this war,” and, speaking of clichés, “To people that say that it isn't an accurate adaptation, at the end of the day, the book’s point was to make people understand that war is hell and no movie has come close to eliciting that feeling to me like this.”

But here’s the thing—none of that is, in fact, All Quiet on the Western Front’s point.

This should be obvious. “War is hell” is a platitude. It’s a cliché. It’s a substance-free statement that can be used as both excuse and condemnation; one can apply it to any conflict and people will nod piously. (Remember that the man who made that expression famous died in 1891; he was not talking about the industrialized slaughter of conscripts in World War I but the much smaller-scale wars of nationalist suppression he ruthlessly waged against Southerners and Indians.) But platitudes stretched to movie length are boring. And is there anyone today who doesn’t “understand that war is hell”? Why bother with the obvious?

I’d argue instead that what makes All Quiet on the Western Front a tragedy is not the horror of what happens in major assaults, trench raids, nighttime patrols, or artillery barrages, but its pointlessness.

One of the things I’ve come to admire about Remarque’s novel over more than twenty years and many readings is its deep and subtle irony. Remarque suffuses his story with irony. Positively, this creates nuance reflective of the complexity of real life. When he arrives at the front for the first time, for instance, the hated drill instructor Corporal Himmelstoß turns out to have redeeming qualities after all, not least real physical courage. Negatively, Bäumer and his friends find that nothing they do matters.

The book is full of examples. Every major episode makes this point. Steal food, earn a medal, get ahold of some nice comfortable boots, trick out your personal toilet seat, convince a French girl to sleep with you, avoid catching your head in the telephone wire over the road, learn how to identify artillery shells by sound, tell the cook that the entire company is here for lunch, tell the people at home what the war is actually like, be brave, be cowardly—none of it makes a difference. That, not the hellishness, the dismemberment, or the filth and discomfort, is what makes modern war terrible.

The book’s two climactic episodes drive the point home. In the first, Kat receives a minor leg wound from some shrapnel. Bäumer carries him to an aid station only to find that, at some point along the way, more shrapnel has hit Kat in the head and killed him. Bäumer didn’t even notice. All that effort and Kat dies anyway. The second is the novel’s famous concluding note, the only part not written in the voice of Bäumer himself:

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.

The irony is not that a huge, horrific attack was ordered by a bonehead general just hours before the armistice—something that would be remarkable—but that the snuffing out of one young soldier’s life is not worth noting. It doesn’t even matter specifically what day it is. “All quiet” or, to translate the original literally, “nothing new.”

Both of these incidents make it into the movie and both are altered according to the filmmakers’ vision, and both lose the nuance and subtlety that make the novel so poignant.

Remarque’s novel is painful because the reader is won over by a band of young men whose worth Remarque makes obvious and whose destruction he shows to be pointless. The film is painful because it screams in your face for two and a half hours. One of these is not only a more truthful dramatization of modern war, it is better art, and it will be remembered far longer.

Conclusion

I’ve just spent a hundreds of words being the “The book was better” guy, but when a book is as good as All Quiet on the Western Front it pays to respect it. This film simply uses the title.

I do, however, want to end on a note of praise. Where the film does stick closely to the book it excels. Again, most of the material taken from the book consists of individual images (a naked corpse high in a tree, blown out of its uniform by a trench mortar), repurposed scenes (the novel’s darkly humorous and ironic opening scene at a field kitchen, shifted in the film to the final act and made another moment of horror), or specific lines of dialogue, but one sequence in particular stands out as an example of what the filmmakers might have done with a closer, more faithful adaptation.

One of the most celebrated scenes in the novel, one rendered in all three film versions now, is that in which Bäumer takes cover in a crater during a French counterattack and stabs a French soldier who unwittingly jumps in next to him. Both are left isolated in no-man’s-land, and Bäumer watches the Frenchman die, choking on his own blood, for hours. After that he goes through the man’s wallet and learns about the man he has just killed.

This All Quiet dramatizes this sequence brilliantly, and is one of the few places where I’d say more realistic gore has improved upon previous versions. The Frenchman’s death is agonizing; watching it wrecks not only Bäumer but the audience. And going through the dead man’s effects to find his name, his occupation, a photo of his wife and daughter quietly achieves what the entire rest of the movie has laboriously striven with noise, blood, and guts to do.

That’s a credit to Remarque. As for this film, it was for me a huge If only.

If you’re looking for World War I-branded action in an authentic pitch of icky horror, if you just want a war movie produced to the highest technical standards of modern filmmaking, if you want to see Saint-Charmand tanks onscreen for the very first time, or if you’re trying to dissuade someone from joining the military—all reasons I’ve seen given out to watch this film—then perhaps this All Quiet on the Western Front is worth seeing. But if you’re looking for a film version of the novel, this just isn’t it.