Explained: Why All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the great war movies of our time

The manipulation of tightly constrained spaces is key to shooting films across a lot of genres, really, but in the war movie it assumes even greater significance. The claustrophobia and mortal terror associated with life in the trenches, being pinned into a bunker by enemy fire, reconnaissance shots behind enemy lines — a World War movie, in particular, hinges upon several such set-pieces, where the audience is invited to share the sensory overdose of the average infantryman. Edward Berger’s German-language film All Quiet on the Western Front (which released on Netflix on Friday, October 28), an adaptation of World War I veteran Erich Maria Remarque’s classic 1929 novel of the same name, understands this reality quite well.

The narrative follows a group of teenaged German boys plucked out of school, literally, to enlist for the army in the name of patriotism, valour and a sense of duty. As the boys, including and especially the protagonist Paul Bäumer (played by Felix Kammerer, a young German actor who had never done a film role before this), realize soon enough, they were basically duped into fighting an ill-thought-out war. The full import of their thankless mission dawns upon them as they see their colleagues and friends wounded or worse; young Bäumer realizes that war is a machine that runs on the blood of the young and the naïve.

Several key scenes here will remind viewers of other recent war movies that have pushed the envelope in terms of cinematography and all-round cinematic craft — the trench scenes as well as snippets of open field warfare are reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Sam Mendes’ 1917. In one of the film’s many harrowing sequences of large-scale bloodshed we see the German army arriving at a battlefield where one of their regiments has just been decimated—in close-ups of Bäumer and his friends’ faces, we see how they are trying to hold their nausea back. A gigantic mound of dead bodies is then prepared by these boys, right next to a smaller mound of dead soldiers’ boots.

Once Bäumer’s psyche shows signs of irreparable damage, the film really kicks into overdrive. When we see the young man returning, all too briefly, to life as a civilian, we don’t need to know the plot to figure out what’s going to happen next—it’s written all over the soldier’s lost, disoriented face. Peace is what confuses him now, and inevitably he will return to the trenches that have already taken so much from him—his friends and comrades, his simplistic sense of right and wrong, in a sense his whole childhood, really.

The technical wizardry of the film is so potent that the 150-minute runtime feels a lot less, it has to be said. The camera keeps the audience hooked to Bäumer’s nightmarish descent towards the heart of the battle—when a dying comrade asks him to be brave “for those of us who didn’t make it”, when perhaps his best friend asks him casually whether he expected to live until sunrise, when he realizes his commanding officers do not, in fact, have his best interests at heart. Each of these moments is a big, emotional story beat and the film devotes just enough time to each—any more and we would have slipped into melodrama territory.

But All Quiet on the Western Front is far too smart to make that mistake; by any metrics this is one of the most impressive and thoroughly engaging war films you’ll ever see.

The book that scared the Nazis

In 1929, Eric Maria Remarque published the 200-page novel All Quiet on the Western Front, based on his own experiences as German World War I veteran. The next year, the Lewis Milestone film based on the book went on to win Oscars for Best Film as well as Best Director, making Remarque’s book globally famous. Sadly, the 1930s was the decade where the Nazis consolidated their hold on power in Germany, and they promptly declared Remarque a traitor and his book as dangerous heresy, written in order to denigrate the German war effort.

In fact, Al Quiet on the Western Front was one of the books burned by the Nazis during their early 1930s drive to eliminate books, movies, and other cultural artefacts they deemed dangerous for society. Why were the Nazis so afraid of this book? Well, for one, this was an anti-war novel that not only put the German leadership in the dock, it treated soldiers from both sides of the conflict with a humane eye—Remarque’s rhetoric and his crystalline prose exposed the hypocrisies of old, cynical generals who had no compunctions about ordering thousands of young men into certain death. Sample this passage, where Remarque’s protagonist is addressing the soldier in front of him, an enemy combatant whose life is at Bäumer’s mercy.

“Comrade, I did not want to kill you. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony–Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”

Remarque is every bit as astute when it comes to deconstructing the psychology of recovery and trauma. Back in those days, there was no known concept of ‘PTSD’—the term was ‘shell-shock’ and the underlying phenomenon was not very well-understood. Young men missing limbs, having escaped certain death many times over, having buried friends and comrades sans ceremony—all of this often left them with bruised and battered psyches, their eyes perpetually wide open in horror and disgust and a nagging disorientation. In a famous passage from the novel, Remarque shows us how a hospital is actually the best place to fully understand the horrors of war.

“A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, a single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.”

Updating a classic

There are a few elements in the new All Quiet on the Western Front movie that were not present in either the 1930 film or indeed, in Remarque’s novel. Perhaps the most impressive of these all-new elements is Daniel Brühl (Baron Zemo in the Marvel Cinematic Universe), who plays the real-life German politician Matthias Erzberger, a devout Catholic man who urged his political bosses to call for a ceasefire with the French. At the time, the Germans were losing tens of thousands of men every week, and Erzberger thought that pride should not come before the lives of their fellow countrymen.

Brühl’s performance is, in a word, magnificent. Erzberger is a politician at the end of the day, so anything he says is carefully measured, designed not to step on any toes while still getting his point in. But as the film progresses, we see how Erzberger gets more and more impatient with the military top brass, unable to fathom how a man could sit by and let tens of thousands of his own countrymen die horrible, lonely deaths in a ditch somewhere.

During a recent interview with the Guardian, Brühl mentioned the unique and precarious relationship German actors and audiences have with war movies, adding that like “a positive heroic story” is far from German minds in this context.

“I grew up watching war films. In most cases they are American or British and include a positive heroic story. But the genre of war films from the German perspective is practically non-existent: because of our perpetrator role, our view is marked by grief and shame. But to capture the essence of this tale, an absolute anti-war novel, which shows that there are no winners in war – as we Germans know better than anyone – felt very important. Remarque said his intention was to write as much a postwar tale as an anti-war tale, dedicated to those who had survived the war as he had survived it, but whose lives were damaged for ever.”

That bit about there being ‘no winners in war is also the overarching feeling the audience has while watching the end credits roll for All Quiet on the Western Front. This is one of the most gut-wrenching, viscerally effective war movies you’ll ever see and its pacifism is never shoved down your throat; like the best stories, it has a way of bringing the audience around to its point of view.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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