"All Quiet on the Western Front" Review: A Beautiful, But Pointless, Remake

It sure is brutal, but no amount of death can mask the lack of meaning in this limp adaptation of the iconic novel.

November 3, 2022

On November 11, 1918, after four years of conflict, representatives of France and Germany boarded a train in the Forest of Compiègne to sign the November Armistice. The Allied Powers, whose principal players were Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France, had whittled down the Central Powers of Europe to only Germany and now sought an end to the First World War.

French Marshal Ferdinand Foch had combatted a series of German attacks along the Western Front with his legendary “Hundred Days Offensive,” a succession of counters by the Allied powers that, coupled with the Revolution of 1918, left Germany with no choice but to accept the terms of the Armistice.

A man like Foch, emboldened by a war-clinching victory of his design, was not going to waste an opportunity to further stroke his ego. The November Armistice was his instrument, built by his self-importance, validated by his victories, and played with all the tact of a mack truck. The terms were abundant, forcing Germany to surrender thousands of locomotives, artillery, and aircraft, but the most alarming condition was one that affected the entire world:

Hostilities would get terminated on the Western Front… within six hours of signature.

Six hours to fight a war that was already over. Six hours for prideful men to sentence their own to death. Six hours to escape the horror of war forever. Six hours to know that you’re only six hours away. Six hours for men of power, far from the trenches, to toast the end of the then-deadliest conflict in human history while 2,738 soldiers died needlessly on its final day.

After all, as Sean Bean told us in Troy, war is “young men dying and old men talking.” Six hours is brief for the Frenchmen aboard a train. After all, victory is assured. For the men forced to see freedom on the horizon past no man’s land, it feels like a lifetime of possibilities. No time will ever move more slowly, suspending them between hope that it drags on long enough to ensure survival and longing for a quick, yet favorable, conclusion.

Movies serve a vague purpose in capitalizing on the world. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing atrocities committed there have sparked international outrage. Unfortunately, All Quiet on the Western Front imagines itself as something outside its reach. Yes, war is bad, and the one in Ukraine has arrested a global audience, but only insofar as we have no other conflict involving white people occurring on such a massive scale.

Even so, how many of us, if we were honest, genuinely care outside a passing acknowledgment? All Quiet on the Western Front thrives when it depicts the tragedy of war; it pulls no punches with what it means to take to the battlefield. Friends don’t receive glorious deaths: they die as any other, more brutally than we can fathom, their faces smothered in blood, eye blue and protruding, corpses lying in the mud. They fire away before begging for mercy, staring down the barrel of a flamethrower that torches them alive. Even the hero, the very man through whose eyes we see the tragedy unfold, cannot withstand the onslaught of suffering. Mere moments from salvation, he too will get claimed, pierced through the heart, and left to die in the trenches. No one is safe. War does not take sides.

Thanks?

We can congratulate ourselves on the ethical empathy we feel by pondering the pointlessness of war, but beyond that generality, a movie has to say more. In 1930, the original film seemed profound to audiences with fresh eyes to a young, evolving form of storytelling. The biggest film ever produced was The Birth of the Nation; talkies had debuted with The Jazz Singer just one year prior; three years later, Cavalcade would take Best Picture at the Academy Awards, a film typical of 1930s Hollywood, where creating a compelling narrative meant stuffing every conceivable event over a long period of time into a movie. Film was young.

In this light, the original All Quiet on the Western Front felt like it had something valuable to say: war was bad, death was sad, and soldiers were mad. We know now, as countless conflicts have saturated the global news for decades, including Ukraine, that no film will ever do justice to the horror of war. Its ability lies solely in exposing perspectives not yet widely understood, the specifics of that horror. It may not be fair, but it is the reality of covering a topic so widely experienced by your audience, directly or otherwise.

All Quiet on the Western Front disappoints for many reasons, but melodrama is its most egregious fault and the sole obstacle to it illuminating that which has gone largely unspoken. We know of PTSD, the struggles of adapting to life on the homefront after years of combat, and the difficulty faced as one feels patriotism give way to confusion and resentment. The film closes tight on Paul’s eyes countless times to pound the point home; he is horrified at times, terrified at others, but more than anything, he’s lost. His gaze is always aimless, staring blankly into the smoky abyss of no man's land. In most scenes, he is going through the motions, trudging along in a war he does not understand that has destroyed his delusions.

Unfortunately, the extent of the film’s meaning is that aimlessness, the commentary on the senseless nature of war and what it does to the human spirit. The boys begin the film wide-eyed and optimistic, looking forward to combat and the glory waiting on the battlefield. Germany will get honored by them: men at arms willing to die for Kaiser and country. The music, a dark cloud cast over the boyish idealism, foreshadows the story so well it’d have been better off cutting to black as they march to basic training. All the film ever says gets spoken in those opening minutes, which makes the remaining 140 relatively pointless.

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A movie can insist on telling a story on its terms, but you can't cook a whole chicken in a microwave. We shouldn’t need familiarity to inspire empathy or reflection, but we do. The choice to leave those things to the whims of an idea, that of a group of friends trotting off to war only to discover its brutal reality, forces us to think about the countless war films that have taken aim at the same concepts and executed them far better. We don’t know Paul or any of the boys or the idyllic life that’s given them such a sense of patriotism and wonderment; they’re just pieces on a chessboard or cogs in a wheel. It could get argued that the vague characterization challenges us to care more for what they experience than the fact it’s happening to them, but the film demands our care for something too familiar. Paul sees his friends get blown up and has their guts plaster his face; he almost dies time and again, but what does that all mean? That war sucks? We didn’t need All Quiet on the Western Front to know that.

The result is a film that forces reflection solely in its visual moments. We feel it in the urgency of the slow reloading of WWI rifles, as a French soldier begs for mercy, during the mad dashes through no man’s land, as the French tanks move slowly through the smoke and fog, and during the incineration of men with their hands held high in surrender. We ask ourselves how people can do this to one another and understand why these men were never the same when they returned from the war: we were not meant for this. No one is.

Sadly, the constant returns to melodrama sink even those moments. We roll our eyes as Paul lies with a dead French soldier in the dirt, hiding from enemy fire. He kills the man before he can get killed himself and soon finds the man's personal belongings. The film expects us to believe that at no point prior did Paul consider that the men he killed had families and lives to which they longed to return, that all the consideration the film tries to extract from us somehow got lost on its protagonist. If the aim was to show the detachment of war, which forces men into primality and abandonment of empathy, it misfired. Tragedy is the film’s bread and butter; too often does it strike Paul for us to believe he never realized the gravity. Death is a constant, and he has watched it claim hundreds of nameless allied soldiers and his friends. An enemy in a pit so deep into the film seems hollow. In war films, timing is essential. Elements that would tug at the heartstrings early on feel forced and insincere once too much time has passed.

It’s why some of the deviations from the source material fail to land. Tjaden’s suicide feels like tragedy for the sake of tragedy, death for the sake of making extra sure we know to what extent war inflicts horror. Paul dies in the end, mere seconds before the Armistice takes effect, with screechy string music by his side, in case you weren’t aware of the devastation of his ending.

All Quiet on the Western Front thus succeeds similarly to 1917, a fellow WWI flick. In the moments it tells its story solely through the action, it gives its audience something upon which to reflect, to inspire the necessary awe to explore the desired thematics in new ways. Unfortunately, it does what 1917 wisely does not, which is veer off that course under the mistaken belief that it's capable as an actual narrative. As a result, it fails to make an impression beyond those key visual displays and becomes, thematically, precisely what it claims to be: all quiet on the western front.