It’s spring 1917, the third year of war. In Northern Germany, a teenager forges his mother’s signature and joins the Kaiser’s army. His name is Paul Baumer, and his story will form the backbone of the best and most haunting war movie since 2008’s The Hurt Locker.
Based on the classic novel by Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front is a saga not just of trench soldiers but of generals, diplomats, and many others touched by the 20th century’s inaugural conflagration. Alternately harrowing and quietly mournful, Netflix’s film is eerily well-timed for our era of resurgent jingoism. One imagines Vladimir Putin watching it with a shudder.
The movie opens with an extraordinary, nearly wordless sequence designed to emphasize the First World War’s assembly line of suffering. Minutes after dawn, a rifleman named Heinrich follows his platoon “over the top” and into no man’s land. Upon his death, we see the removal of his clothes and boots, then the grim process by which his uniform is laundered, patched, and handed on to a fresh recruit. That recipient, Paul (Felix Kammerer), wonders aloud why another man’s name is sewn into his kit. “It’s yours,” the intake officer replies with a smile. Left unsaid is the obvious follow-up: “for now.”
Such moments of dramatic irony are at the heart of the film’s somber humanism. Watching Paul joke with his friends during their enlistment, we know better than he does the horrors that await. The same is true when a schoolmaster directs “the iron youth of Germany” to die willingly for their country. Despite the film’s involvement with the Central rather than the Allied Powers, one is reminded, in the latter scene, of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est,” perhaps the best English-language poem to come out of the Great War. As the British writer (and battle fatality) observed, paeans to heroic death are absurd when “blood-shod” soldiers are “drowning” in poison gas on scarred and nameless ground.
Comprising largely vignettes, All Quiet on the Western Front underscores the subjectivity of war as experienced by front-line soldiers. Here, Paul and his closest friend, Kat (Albrecht Schuch), steal a goose from a French farmer to feed their squad. There, the men circle up to discuss what postwar life will bring. (“We’ll be surrounded by women again.”) Punctuating these peaceful intervals are battle scenes that reveal not only the moral repugnance of trench combat but its strategic incoherence. In one particularly gruesome scene, Paul is trapped in a shell hole with a dying Frenchman, whom he can neither ignore nor bring himself to finish off. In a number of others, soldiers charge brazenly into machine-gun fire, fighting for land that, as Shakespeare had it, “is not tomb enough and continent to hide the slain.”
Directed by the talented Edward Berger (The Terror, Deutschland 83), the film is unblinking in its portrayal of military slaughter. Smartly, though, it dials back the bloodshed long enough to observe the men who prosecute the war from a great height. Chief among these is the deranged General Friedrichs (Devid Striesow), who spends his troops’ lives as if they meant nothing at all. Yet also present is a German peace delegation led by the courageous Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Bruhl), who would go on, in real life, to be assassinated by proto-Nazi extremists.
As one might expect, the tension between the movie’s hawks and doves fuels a Hollywood-esque heightening of events, particularly when Friedrichs orders a frontal assault mere minutes before the armistice. Nevertheless, the essential truths of both the war and the novel remain unchanged: Men really did die in the final seconds before the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918.
It is perhaps inevitable that All Quiet on the Western Front will be compared to 1917 (2019), the Sam Mendes picture that followed two soldiers on a mission behind enemy lines. Though that film was and remains very good, Berger’s is better, stepping in and out of the sweep of history to capture both grandeur and specificity. Two older texts stand out as clear influences. The first, Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), fused pastoral beauty and battle carnage to create a sense of divine grief. The second, Stephen Crane’s masterpiece The Red Badge of Courage, plumbed nature’s indifference to human self-destruction. Are the two notions contradictory? Perhaps. But Berger permits us either or both. A mist lies lovely on the field, a fox nurses her kits, and men are about to die by the tens of thousands.
To the extent that anti-war movies retain their power, it is because of filmmakers’ willingness to go beyond battlefield horrors to perceptions such as these. Remarque’s novel, first serialized in 1928, landed like a blow in Weimar Germany, selling millions of copies even as it scraped rancid wounds. (The Nazis would eventually ban and burn it.) Today, the novel’s lessons are mere restatements of already internalized ideas. The detachment of soldiers and civilians, the moral chaos of combat, the waste and pitilessness of battle: All are part and parcel of the West’s general war-weariness.
Given this reality, it is a significant accomplishment indeed that All Quiet on the Western Front manages to explore both the metaphysics of soldiering and its practicalities. “Man is a beast,” an older soldier tells Paul before handing him a canteen. “Drink.”
Graham Hillard is the author of Wolf Intervals (Poiema Poetry Series) and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.
