A review of the newly released German-language World War I movie on Netflix, „All Quiet on the Western Front.“
One of the many enduring images in director Edward Berger’s adaptation for Netflix of the seminal World War I novel All Quiet on the Western Front — beyond, for example, the wanton, nightmarish violence of close-quarters trench warfare — is actually a series of juxtapositions.
The film opens and closes, for example, with shots of a forest shrouded in mist and a mountain range looming in the distance — as if to suggest, with those identical bookends, the utter uselessness of everything that occurred in between. In the opening moments, All Quiet on the Western Front then throws viewers immediately into the chaos of a pitched battle that feels like a combination of the D-Day landing scene in Saving Private Ryan, mixed with the epic scale of that final over-the-top charge in 1917.
Soon enough, we follow the journey of a dead soldier’s jacket, which the German war machine collects and repurposes almost as good as new so that a fresh recruit can don it before heading to the front. And a German official gives a full-throated, jingoistic speech to a crowd of too-eager German boys, urging them to fight for “the Kaiser, God, and the Fatherland” while also reminding them that war is not a game of chess involving individual pieces — but, rather, reliant on a body of men fulfilling their collective duty.
Netflix’s All Quiet on the Western Front (which debuted on the streamer on Friday, October 28) then spends the rest of the movie basically putting the lie to that promise, showing us that war — at least, this one — is in fact little more than a game of chess between great powers.
But rather than pieces on a board moving in accordance with a larger purpose, the conflict in All Quiet on the Western Front feels like it’s all tactics and no strategy.
