As long as there’s still war, we’ll need anti-war films.
All Quiet on the Western Front (now on Netflix) marks the third time Erich Maria Remarque’s classic 1929 novel has been adapted for film. Director Lewis Milestone’s 1930 film won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars, and if Edward Berger’s new take on this story about a German soldier’s experiences during World War I finds some promotional traction in the coming months, it might have an outside shot at following suit.
The Gist: A peaceful morning. The forest is crisp with the chill of early spring and tinted blue. A family of foxes huddles in a den, sleeping peacefully. An overhead shot of an open expanse comes into focus: Bodies, nipped by frost. Soldiers. In the German trenches, a soldier named Heinrich is ordered to climb up and out and dash across a sloppy muddy hellscape. Terror on his face. Bullets zing by. Men around him fall. Explosions kick up dirt. Haze. Heinrich doesn’t make it. The next morning, a man grasps Heinrich’s body and strips off his coat and boots. The coat is stuffed in a large laundry bag, which is delivered to laundresses who wash the garments in a giant vat of water tinted red with blood. North Germany. 1917. The third year of the war.
A city, bustling, far from the battle. A group of boys who are barely men laugh and tease each other and are riled into a competitive nationalistic fervor. They sign up to fight and are convinced they’ll soon stomp victoriously through Paris. Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer) steps up to receive his fatigues. His coat has a nametag in it: Heinrich. He shows it to the clerk who tears it out and explains that it must have been too small for that soldier and this happens all the time. Something to do with this situation happens all the time, and it’s not getting an ill-fitting coat.
Before long Paul and his friends blur into the drab gray-green ranks of the Kaiser’s infantry, assembled at the Western Front, a seemingly endless line of trenches cutting through France. To call the scene chaos is to perversely understate what happens there: In an attempt to push the front forward, German men are ordered to charge through the sloppy bombed-out no-man’s-land and murder French soldiers. Paul peeks over the edge of the trench and fires his rifle and the return fire pings madly off his helmet and knocks him backward off his perch. He soon dashes through the mud and smoke and somehow survives the tumult, which appears to have accomplished nothing. Later he sits blankly in the trench and another soldier offers him a miserable chunk of dry bread and he takes it and wolfs it down.
