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'All Quiet on the Western Front': Differences Between the Book and the Netflix Movie

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Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for All Quiet on the Western Front. All Quiet on the Western Front , the German anti-war literary masterpiece by Erich Maria Remarque , has received a new adaptation, which is now playing in select theaters and is coming to Netflix on October 28th. Narrated by Paul Bäumer, an ambitious young man who fights in the German army on the French front in World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front is a decidedly unromantic, brutally accurate, and unapologetically discomfiting take on the woeful meaninglessness of war. Remarque epitomizes the devastating effects of war on the soldiers fighting on the front who are subject to constant physical dangers and life-threatening attacks.

Paul is desensitized to the point that, when he goes home, he is unable to communicate his feelings to his family, and relinquishes all attempts at rejuvenating his humanity. So pragmatic do the soldiers on the front become in the course of their training that when their comrade, Kemmerich, is dying, his friends’ only concern is who will inherit his boots. Remarque, in portraying the horrors of war, presents a thought-provoking critique of the idea of nationalism, which served as the precipitating cause of World War I. While noble to some extent, nationalism is portrayed to be a hollow ideology, promoted by those in power to exploit the common men and control a country’s population. Paul and his friends enlist themselves primarily because they are spurred into action by nationalist ideas. The horrors of war, however, soon teach them about the inherent hypocrisies of all such notions.

Contrary to common assumptions, All Quiet on the Western Front is not a remake. Director and writer Edward Berger and co-writers Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell didn’t look back at the 1930 classic for inspiration. Instead, they decided to stay as faithful to the original source as possible, telling a version of the story that the previous adaptations chose not to. Still, there are many ways in which the 2022 iteration of the story deviates from the original source. Some major differences between the Book and the 2022 version of the story are listed below

Kantorek Has a Smaller Role

The sanctimonious man who, in the safety of his classroom chambers, delivers nationalist rhetoric full of propaganda about German Pride and Glory, thanks to Berger, does not hold as much significance in the 2022 movie as he does in the book. In the book, it is he who fills the boys with questionable ideas about nationalism and prompts them to fight on the front lines. In the 1930 classic, Kantorek is the driving force behind Paul and his friends’ fateful journey. In the 2022 iteration of the story, Paul’s ( Felix Kammerer ) backstory is kept to a minimum, where he is shown lying his way into the army by forging his father’s signature. Authority figures are still very much there, motivating young men to risk everything on the front lines to maintain their integrity, despite the unspeakable horrors of war, but it doesn’t start with a classroom. Viewers don’t get to see what it is that drives Paul to enlist in the war as the focus is directed more on the devastating effects of war on young people.

RELATED: ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Review: German Anti-War Classic Gets Stunning Adaptation

Kat’s Death

Stanislaus Katczinsky, or Kat as everyone calls him, retains the most wholesome influence on Paul. His friendship is the crutch that keeps him going despite the constant mental and physical torture he is subjected to on day-to-day basis. Having gone through indescribable horrors, Paul feels so disconnected from his emotions and the world in general that he is unable to maintain, let alone form, healthy relationships with anyone who hasn’t been on the front lines with him. One of the very few people Paul looks up to and finds solace in is Kat. Their connection is made all the more heart-wrenching when Kat dies at the end of the book, and not even in close combat. He sustains a minor injury to the leg – shrapnel – and Paul, forever devoted, carries him to a medic. On the way, however, Kat sustains a fatal injury – a shrapnel splinter in his brain and dies right then and there. In the movie, the circumstances of Kat’s death are slightly different, although they carry the same devastating impact. In the movie, Kat sustains a deadly gunshot wound from a local farmer’s child, and expires on the spot, pulling the last marble from beneath Paul’s feet.

Paul’s Death

Those who have read the critically acclaimed book would already know that Paul, the character at the heart of All Quiet on the Western Front dies at the end of the story. This fine detail drives home the author’s overarching argument: that Paul found more peace in death than he ever could in life. In the 2022 version of the tale, Paul is forced to engage in combat with his comrades for a final showdown. Sustaining a fatal wound, he dies after engaging in intense close combat with the enemy. In the book, Paul’s death is rather more poignant, packed with layers upon layers. He is shot to death while reaching for a butterfly – the most accurate representation of peace and beauty – something Paul has been deprived of, for life.

Paul Doesn’t Get Furlough in the Movie

While Berger’s take on the original source is as authentic as possible, he does at times shift emphasis to focus on the thematic aspects of the book. In contrast, the 1930 classic focuses more on the narrative than the points the author is trying to get at. As such, in the 2022 movie, Paul doesn’t get furlough, and the audience gets to see a different sort of battle – one between those who have it in their power to put an end to the horrors of war and the propaganda at play. Berger also utilizes this deviation from the plot line to bring out the disparity between the soldiers fighting on the front lines and the high-ranking officials who get to enjoy elaborate meals. He also unveils the significance of the likes of Paul in the eyes of high-ranking soldiers – that of mere convenience.

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‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Review: The Spectacle of War

Edward Berger’s German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel aims to rattle you with its relentless brutality.

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By Ben Kenigsberg

In his auteurist film history “The American Cinema” (1968), the critic Andrew Sarris compared similar scenes in two World War I films, King Vidor’s “The Big Parade” (1925) and Lewis Milestone’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930), the first screen adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel. Vidor, Sarris felt, had a more satisfying approach to showing two soldiers from opposite sides in a shell hole, one dying. Vidor emphasized the faces of his characters, Sarris wrote, rather than pictorialism and spectacle.

The first sequence of Edward Berger’s new German-language adaptation of Remarque’s novel announces about as loudly as possible that it’s on the side of pictorialism and spectacle. It opens with a landscape: a quiet wood and mountains, seemingly at sunrise. A fox sucks from its mother’s teat. A Terrence Malick-like shot looks upward at impossibly high and peaceful treetops.

Berger then cuts to an aerial view of drifting smoke, which clears to reveal an array of corpses. A barrage of bullets suddenly pierces the near-still composition, and the camera turns to show the full extent of the carnage and the muck. This is war as a violation of nature. And that’s even before Berger trails a scared soldier named Heinrich (Jakob Schmidt), who charges ahead in a pair of unbroken shots — take that, “1917” — only to die offscreen. In a device that owes something to the red coat in “Schindler’s List,” Heinrich’s uniform will be stripped from his body, cleansed, stitched up, shipped to Northern Germany and eventually reused by Remarque’s protagonist, Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), who notices someone else’s name on the label.

Does this version of a literary classic go hard or what? In truth, opting for pure bombast — a pounding, repeated three-note riff by Volker Bertelmann, who did the score, never fails to quicken the pulse — isn’t necessarily an ineffective way of translating Remarque’s plain-spoken prose. Berger has more tools at his disposal than Milestone did with the challenges of the early sound era, yet those advantages somehow make this update less impressive: The magnification in scale and dexterity lends itself to showing off. Still, the movie aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.

This “Western Front” places its faith in big set pieces and powerful images. Even the scope has been widened. Berger cuts between Paul’s experiences in the trenches and cease-fire talks between Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), who chaired Germany’s armistice commission, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France (Thibault De Montalembert). The 72-hour deadline that Foch gives Erzberger to sign adds an element of ticking-clock suspense to the overall narrative, albeit by departing from Remarque’s first-person point of view.

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All Quiet on the Western Front

This film, directed by Edward Berger from a script he wrote with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell , is the first German-made version of Erich Maria Remarque ’s famed novel about World War I, written in German and published in 1928. The first film adaptation of the book, released in 1930, was American, directed by Lewis Milestone, and kind of a landmark of early American sound filmmaking. It was well received and considered so powerful that it was thought a potential deterrent to future war. That turned out to be erroneous. (And Remarque himself contended that he had not intended to write a pacifist testament so much as to plainly depict the agony of the young recruit at war.)

A second version, in 1979, directed by Delbert Mann (a “dreary” director, per Andrew Sarris) and starring Richard Thomas , then famous for his portrayal of saintly earnest John Boy Walton on “The Waltons,” didn’t have close to the same impact. Nor, I suspect, will this rendering (and I do mean “rendering” in more than one sense) of the story, which nonetheless is Germany’s official film submission to the Academy Awards this year.

At two and a half hours, it’s as long as the 1930 version, but packed with quite a bit more plot. It jettisons the early scenes in the novel and film in which young German students are goaded by an ardent super-patriot professor into joining the military and saving the fatherland. Instead, this film sets its sights on the head-spinning carnage of warfare by showing how young enlistee Paul Bäumer ( Felix Kammerer ) gets his wrong-sized uniform: the clothing has been recycled off of a corpse.

Like “1917” before it, and like the better films that continue to inspire a concentratedly grisly mode of war picture (the epochal Russian film “ Come and See ” is explicitly referenced at least once, as is the more recent, and more problematic, “ The Painted Bird ”), “All Quiet on the Western Front” is state-of-the-art in shoving your nose in realistic-seeming carnage and possibly inducing hearing damage in laying on the ear-splitting aural experience of a fire-fight. The in-the-trenches tracking shots that Stanley Kubrick crafted for “ Paths of Glory ” (a movie that culminated in a point that actually made sense, unlike this muddle) are now steady hand-held digital panoramas of exposed viscera and agonized writhing. Filmmakers have arguably lost the plot, turning “War is hell” into a “Can you top this?” competition.

Within all the action, the narrative of young Bäumer making his way, learning what it is to kill, and trying to forge fellowship in his untenable situation plods along. Berger adds some material too. There’s a parallel storyline in which real-life German vice-chancellor Matthias Erzberger tries to broker a peace with the French and others. This is not present in Remarque’s book. So why’s it here? I reckon several reasons: first, to demonstrate that in the Great War, there really WERE some “good Germans,” which when you think about it is neither here nor there in this scheme, as the reader/viewer is meant to at least have some empathy for Paul, who is after all a German soldier. And the intransigence of some of the French delegates in these scenes will bring to mind the years-long humiliation Germany was subjected to by the Armistice agreement, which helped bring about the rise of Hitler. The Erzberger narrative is also intended, one supposes, to build suspense: will the Armistice go into effect before the worst can happen to the characters we’ve come to care about? (Presuming one has indeed come to care about them, which was not my own experience here.)

But this is not the only special pleading the director puts forth. Late in the film there’s a sequence when Paul and his older army friend Katczinsky ( Albrecht Schuch ) go to steal a goose (to eat, not to adopt as a pet or anything) from a French farm and run afoul of a dead-eyed French boy. I won’t “spoil” the sequence. But I will say that, apart from committing the cinematic sacrilege of using the same Bach choral prelude that Tarkovsky put in his “Solaris,” it is very invested in villainizing French farm boys. To which I can only ask, well, what were the Germans even doing in France at that time anyway?

Ultimately, I found this kind of whataboutism more amusing than disquieting. Maybe I’m just whistling in the dark. 

In select theaters today, on Netflix October 28th.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

• Felix Kammerer as Paul Bäumer
• Albrecht Schuch as Stanislaus "Kat" Katczinsky
• Aaron Hilmer as Albert Kropp
• Edin Hasanović as Tjaden Stackfleet
• Devid Striesow as General Friedrich
• Daniel Brühl as Matthias Erzberger
• Moritz Klaus as Frantz Müller
• Sebastian Hülk as Major von Brixdorf
• Edward Berger
• Ian Stokell
• Lesley Paterson

Writer (novel)

• Erich Maria Remarque

Cinematographer

• James Friend
• Sven Budelmann
• Volker Bertelmann

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• AV Undercover

All Quiet On The Western Front vividly and poignantly reminds moviegoers that World War I was hell

Director edward berger injects visceral intensity and visual poetry into his powerful adaptation of erich maria remarque's 1929 novel.

World War I ended a little more than a century ago at this point, and it’s never felt like more of a historical blank slate on which to project our fears, our hopes, and our own cultural darkness. World War II still stands as a righteous crusade against evil in the eyes of Western popular culture, but our connection to the original Great War is something much more tenuous, more open to interpretation, and perhaps even intimacy in its storytelling. Perhaps that’s why Sam Mendes’ sweeping epic 1917 and its story of survival against all odds caught on so well with audiences and awards organizations. It was easy to superimpose ourselves onto the battlefield in front of Mendes’ camera, and imagine our own daring rescue missions.

Edward Berger’s All Quiet On The Western Front , the third major cinematic adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s legendary novel, is playing with many of the same raw materials as Mendes’ more recent, Britain-focused hit. You’ll find more long takes of futile charges over trenches, more moments of quiet before the inevitable storm of war, and more young actors thrown into the crucible that makes boys into warriors. But in a world that has since been ravaged by a pandemic and a new European war, Berger’s film sidesteps the inevitable comparisons to Mendes (much less Lewis Milestone’s 1930 Best Picture winner) to instead give us something bleaker, more brutal, and perhaps more honest. This is a film about the boys who don’t come home, and its story proves both deeply affecting—and surprisingly timeless.

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The fighting in Berger’s film, as in Remarque’s novel, centers on Paul (Felix Kammerer), a young German student who’s swept up in the nationalism of the war movement and enlists for a one-way ticket to the front lines in the fight against France. Paul begins the film bright-eyed, smiling, eager for the mantle of “veteran” and “hero” that will drape his shoulders when he finally comes home. What he doesn’t know is that his uniform was just recently stripped off a corpse and laundered for re-use, that his path to so-called glory lies through miles of mud, and that his band of idealistic friends will not be intact by the end of the war.

After capping off the film’s opening act with a terrifying depiction of Paul’s first brush with combat, Berger leaps forward to the fall of 1919, the final days of the war. Now a hardened soldier with the end of his time on the front in sight, Paul has settled into the mundane, bleary-eyed life of the Great War, while the real battle is fought elsewhere. As a German diplomat (Daniel Bruhl) races against time to forge an armistice, the country’s generals try to keep fighting, because it’s the only thing they know how to do.

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This tension between peace and the constant urge to keep pushing at the front forms the emotional and structural backbone of Berger’s narrative, and what’s most striking is how readily he’s able to bring the diplomatic struggles far away from the trenches to bear on Paul and his friends as they grapple with ceaseless artillery barrages and gallons of muddy water. The totality of the consequences springing forth from the decisions of the powerful is never lost on the day-to-day work of the soldiers, and on Paul’s journey as he trudges through grief, blood, and a distant memory of what he once called peace. To underscore those consequences, Berger plays up the indecision of the German leadership, as diplomats argue for the sake of each human life and generals argue for the sake of national pride and bloody legacy. It’s an argument you could see playing out on the front page of a major newspaper any day right now, and it heightens Berger’s timeless points about the futility and false pride of war.

Though he’s certainly not the only bright light in the film’s large ensemble cast, Kammerer must carry much of this narrative tension in his face at all times, and he does a remarkable job of looking both distant and cold in the face of ceaseless tragedy and simultaneously imbuing Paul with a raw sense of humanity. There’s a sense of watching an open wound move through space as he powers through this film, from the fluid one-take battle sequences to the shell-shocked stares he delivers when the explosions die down and the counting of the dead begins. It’s a remarkable, reactive, and very rewarding performance, and it’s backed up by the compositional confidence of his director.

Berger’s All Quiet On The Western Front is a powerful, human odyssey about the cost of endless war and the whims of the powerful, but what lingers afterward is the way its director frames that narrative across the (literal) European landscape. Berger’s battle sequences are memorable, but just as memorable are his moments of quiet punctuation by framing up the silent trees of the Western European forests, the babbling brooks that will flow on no matter how much blood seeps into the waters, the wildlife that will keep fighting its own battles, heedless of the human ones. A shot of a tank emerging from smoke like a monster in a horror film might be followed by a still tableau of a forest canopy, as though God himself is watching from just above those trees, maybe judging the combatants, maybe ignoring them. If the outcome is the same, does it matter?

These are the questions invited, and not always answered, by All Quiet ’s elegiac and haunting look at a war almost no one is still alive to remember. Yet what it has left to teach us, and what we carry of it into our own wars, is very much up to us—and it’s the film’s keen awareness of that sense of projection that makes it resonate.

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All Quiet on the Western Front

Where to watch.

Watch All Quiet on the Western Front with a subscription on Netflix.

What to Know

Both timely and timeless, All Quiet on the Western Front retains the power of its classic source material by focusing on the futility of war.

An outstanding update to an all-time classic, All Quiet on the Western Front puts you right there on the battlefield -- and reminds you once again that war is truly hell.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Edward Berger

Felix Kammerer

Paul Bäumer

Albrecht Schuch

Stanislaus Katczinsky

Aaron Hilmer

Moritz Klaus

Edin Hasanovic

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• DVD & Streaming

All Quiet on the Western Front

• Biography/History , Drama , War

Content Caution

In Theaters

• Felix Kammerer as Paul Bäumer; Daniel Brühl as Matthias Erzberger; Albrecht Schuch as Stanislaus "Kat" Katczinsky; Moritz Klaus as Frantz Müller; Aaron Hilmer as Albert Kropp; Edin Hasanovic as Tjaden Stackfleet

Home Release Date

• October 28, 2022
• Edward Berger

Distributor

Positive Elements   |   Spiritual Elements   |   Sexual & Romantic Content   |   Violent Content   |   Crude or Profane Language   |   Drug & Alcohol Content   |   Other Noteworthy Elements   | Conclusion

Movie Review

Green. Warm. Barely worn.

Paul Bäumer sees the name stitched on the uniform label— Heinrich —the name of someone else. Standing in line, in his underwear, he shows the name to the official who gave it to him. The uniform, Paul says, must belong to someone else.

“Probably too small for the fella,” the soldier says. “Happens all the time.” He rips the nametag off the uniform and lets it drop to the floor—joining dozens of others that lay scattered at his feet.

The uniform wasn’t too small for Heinrich. But it doesn’t belong to him. Not anymore.

While Heinrich never came back, the uniform did. The bullet holes were stitched shut. The blood was bleached away. Here, in World War I, the uniforms last longer than those that wear them.

They must. Wool is scarce. Men are not.

But that is changing. As the Great War grinds on in 1917, it grinds up the youth of Europe. Paul is part of a dwindling generation, sent into battle carrying little more than patriotic fervor.

“You have a chance to earn the right to wear the uniforms you’ve been given!” Paul’s teacher exhorted his class just days earlier. “The future of Deutschland lies in the hands of its greatest generation!”

And so inspired, Paul and his friends signed up. No matter that Paul was 17—too young to volunteer without his parents’ permission. No matter that his parents never, ever, would’ve given that permission. But the German army isn’t rigorously double-checking parental signatures these days—not with the war in its fourth year. One forged signature later, and Paul’s a soldier, marching proudly to the front.

The uniform has seen more of battle than young Paul has. In its fabric, perhaps, memories stay stitched. The mud, the blood, particles of mustard gas, the ever-so-faint stench of burned flesh.

Paul sees not: He only sees the road ahead this bright sunny day, as he and his closest friends march to the front. He hears only the songs of his fellow soldiers, ready to kill some Frenchmen. He smells only glory.

Soon enough he’ll smell what war truly stinks of.

Positive Elements

All Quiet on the Western Front is as scathing an indictment of war as you’ll ever see. And perhaps that observation in and of itself is a back-handed positive. To be reminded of war’s horrors is also a reminder not to jump lightly into conflict.

But in the midst of war, people (all men, given the movie’s 1917-18 timeframe) bond together in ways that, perhaps, would be impossible in peacetime. When soldiers suffer through so much together—when they’re asked to save one another’s lives potentially with every sunrise—they become, very much, like brothers.

We see that here. Paul is “lucky” enough to spend much of his time in the war still with his best friends from school. But he also makes a new friend, too—perhaps his best friend. Stanislaus Katczinsky—“Kat” for short—has been on the front a little while longer than Paul and his schoolmates. He makes a special effort to help Paul, especially, acclimate to the front. Over time, the two become almost inseparable, and they do their own part to help each other and their mates survive each day as it comes.

It’s only much later in the movie that we learn how different Paul and Kat are from each other—so different that in peacetime, they’d likely never speak. When the educated Paul suggests they should hang out occasionally after the war, Kat reminds him he’s an illiterate cobbler. “What are we going to do?” Kat asks. “Sole shoes together?”

As the war winds down, we see some historical figures try to cobble out an armistice. Central in that drive is Matthias Erzberger (a real historical character), who does his best to end the war in order to save thousands upon thousands of lives. “Let us find mercy where we can,” he tells his fellow Germans, hoping the French will bend their Armistice demands a bit. “But for God’s sake, let’s bring peace.”

Spiritual Elements

That scene above isn’t the only time we hear Erzberger invoke God’s name. In real life, the political figure was a prominent member of Germany’s Catholic Centre Party, and the movie perhaps hints that Erzberger’s Catholic faith helps drive some of his ambitions to stop the war.

Other than that, though, faith suffers alongside the men.

Paul and his friends go to a Christian school—or at least so it would seem from a cross hanging on the window (which the audience stares at as the teacher thunders his martial pep talk).

The next time we see a cross on a wall is at a church serving as a makeshift hospital, filled with patients and limbs and blood and screams. We hear snippets of Scripture from the war-weary (and, for the moment, celebrating) soldiers, asking for God’s mercy and referencing the “Lamb of God.” It’s hard to tell whether these drunken, celebrating soldiers are being particularly devout: One rushes up to Paul and shouts, “Knock on the monastery door and you’ll find only thieves and scoundrels!”

We hear crude jokes and remarks that make allusions to both Jesus and the thighs of his mother, Mary. A German general tells his soldiers that God is on their side.

Sexual & Romantic Content

During a lull, one of Paul’s friends, Albert Kropp, leaves with a trio of three girls. He returns late in the evening, carrying a handkerchief from one of the young maidens as a souvenir. He describes the quality of the woman’s skin to Paul and mentions her breasts, and Kropp’s friends pass around the handkerchief to smell and jokingly pocket.

Another friend of Paul’s, Ludwig, watches Kropp leave with the ladies, and he’s clearly wishing he was brave enough to join. (Kropp goes temporarily AWOL for the encounter.) He talks longingly of physical intimacy, telling his friends that if there was no war, he’d be quite active in that department. “I wouldn’t put on trousers for eight days,” he says. Later, Ludwig runs into a poster that depicts a young (clothed) woman. He tears the portion of the poster that features the woman and takes it with him. The poster fragment seems to become almost like a real woman to Ludwig, and when Paul eyes the “two” of them (perhaps wondering about his friend’s sanity), Ludwig asks Paul if he’s jealous.

We see men shirtless. There’s a reference to combing pubic hair. Kat describes how beautiful his wife is to Paul, and a letter from her may have a bit of a double entendre in it. Kat advises fellow soldiers to stick their hands in their underwear if they’re cold. An officer compares a dirty gun to a “dirty girl.”

Violent Content

All Quiet on the Western Front is about the horrors of war, and it depicts those horrors graphically. I won’t detail every moment of violence here; rather, let’s deal with the subject more broadly, while perhaps touching on a couple of the movie’s most difficult moments.

People—countless people—are shot and killed. More are sliced or stabbed, via axe, bayonet and dagger. The movie wants to make the carnage we see personal : The hand-to-hand battles here don’t feel so much like war as flat-out murder. (The movie contrasts these horrifically brutal scenes with moments spent with the German’s commanding general, who’s sitting by the fire and gorging himself on fine food. “It’s been 50 years of no war,” he tells an adjunct as he wipes grease on his pantleg. “What’s a soldier without war?”)

World War I introduced a legion of new ways to kill, though, and we see those in action. Soldiers get run over by tanks, and we see their bodies reduced to meat and squirting blood. Others are immolated by flamethrowers. Scores of bodies are found in a building—victims, we’re told, of a gas attack. Grenades are thrown and find their marks. Artillery rounds explode, sending people flying, both alive and dead. Buildings collapse on still-living soldiers. Some make it out, some do not.

Corpses (mainly of men, but also of horses) lie everywhere. One of Paul’s first duties is to take part of the German version of dog tags to identify the dead: He finds a friend of his, his face mauled by an explosion, a leg missing at the knee. Soldiers walk through pools of blood. Half of a human carcass hangs from a tree, 30 or 40 feet in the air. It was blown there, we’re told, by an artillery blast.

But that’s not enough carnage, apparently, to drive the point home.

In one excruciating scene, we see a French and German soldier fight in the crater left by an artillery shell. The German finally stabs the Frenchman several times, but the man won’t die. Instead, he chokes and gurgles on his blood until the German stuffs dirt into the man’s mouth. It’s still not enough: For minutes—perhaps hours—this small struggle for life goes on, The German holding his ears as the Frenchman gurgles, until the German decides to save the man instead. He looks at the bloody wounds, wipes the dirt from his face and around his mouth. Only then does the Frenchman breathe his last. The German finds his wallet, and a picture of the man’s wife and daughter.

In another scene, a wounded man (who bears some terrible injuries to his leg) receives food and a fork. He promptly stabs himself several times in the neck with the utensil, bleeding out as his friends try to save him and another soldier, cold-eyed, looks on—as if to say that such atrocities are as common as mosquitos.

Back at the Armistice discussions, Erzberger and others talk about the casualty rates of the war: About 40,000 soldiers died in the preceding weeks before discussions began. When one German looks at the Armistice and is aghast at the proposed conditions—that Germany wouldn’t be worse off if they just followed the war to its conclusion—Erzberger adds: “Except with a few hundred-thousand extra deaths.”

Crude or Profane Language

Most of the movie is in German, and there’s some discrepancy between what we hear in the English dubbing and what we read in the subtitles. With that context in mind, we’re exposed to two f-words and about 10 s-words. Also uttered: “a–,” “b–tard,” “d–n,” “h—” and the British profanity “bloody.” God’s name is misused five times, once with the word “d–n.”

Drug & Alcohol Content

Officers and government officials drink wine. During one scene of revelry, soldiers seem to be pretty drunk.

Other Noteworthy Elements

Kat, Paul and other soldiers spend quite a bit of time talking while using the latrine. (We see their bare legs, but nothing else). Several people urinate, and one accidentally urinates on his shoe when his train stops unexpectedly.

Paul and Kat raid a farm a couple of times, once successfully making off with a dead goose. “When you’re starving, you’ll do anything,” Kat says. They’re hailed as heroes when they return with their booty.

A general makes a tragic, monstrous decision.

As the war drags to a close, Paul confesses to Kat that he’s worried about returning home. War has changed him. It has changed all of them.

“All anybody wants to know about are the battles we’ve been in,” he says. And both he and Kat know that what they’ve seen and experienced, they’ll never tell anyone. It’s too horrible. Too painful.

All Quiet on the Western Front comes, then, with an inescapable irony: The horrors that Paul would always want to keep hidden are the same horrors the film does its best to portray.

The original book, by Erich Maria Remarque, was published in 1929. And it’s just as bleak, just as brutal. Some European countries—often as they prepared for war—labeled the book antimilitary propaganda. Just four years after it was published, Germany’s new Nazi regime declared it “degenerate” and made it one of the first books to be thrown in its bonfires.

Certainly, both the book and the movie drive home the idea that war is waste: senseless, needless, immoral waste.

Perhaps there’s a place for such works. Certainly, All Quiet on the Western Front is a well-made film, achingly bleak and horrifically brutal as it is. But we know, by its end, that even if Paul survives the war, part of him will have died on that Western Front. The rest of him will be haunted by what he’s seen, and heard, and lost.

“We are forlorn like children and experienced like old men,” Paul says in the book All Quiet on the Western Front ; “We are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.”

If Paul is lost—if he wishes he could unsee what he’s seen—perhaps we, too, should be wary of seeing what he’s seen. Even on the safety of a screen. Even on the comfort of the couch.  

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Review: War Is Still Hell in German Remake

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. Netflix will release the film in select theaters on Friday, September 30 and streaming on Netflix on Friday, October 28.

“ All Quiet on the Western Front ” is one of those foundational texts that transcends clichés, because it invented them. Erich Maria Remarque’s 1928 novel and Lewis Milestone’s Oscar-winning 1930 film are cornerstones of the “war is hell” subgenre — which, in a post-”Apocalypse Now,” post-”Saving Private Ryan” era, has become more ubiquitous than the jingoistic war epics it was designed to counter.

There might be some fresh insight to be gained from a new adaptation of “All Quiet,” despite the ripple effects of its influence: War, sadly, has not ended because of films about how awful it is. And its futility and absurdity remain constant, even as its face evolves with the times. Sadly, Edward Berger’s handsome, but expected version of the story doesn’t add much to the canon except for some starkly beautiful imagery.

Berger’s “All Quiet” was produced in association with Netflix, and is the first German-language film version of Remarque’s novel, which was originally published in German. “All Quiet” was one of the works targeted by Nazi book-burnings, and this new film is an attempt to reclaim the novel as an essential work of German culture. It’s coming from inside the house, so to speak, and there is a certain Teutonic seriousness to the filmmaking as well as the subject matter. Just as polished but not quite as flashy as Sam Mendes’ “1917,” the film displays a similar level of commitment to historical detail, but presents its elaborately staged battlefield scenes in a relatively more plain spoken style.

Instead, Berger and cinematographer James Friend focus on color, such as it is. The palette here ranges from dried clay to blackened smoke, with little but rusty red blood and urgent orange fire to break up the muddy monochrome look of the Western front. Everything is wet — if it’s not raining, the recruits are crawling on their bellies through mud puddles, their uniforms soaked through with filthy cappuccino-colored water — and cold. The skies are overcast, the ground is barren and crunchy with frost, and the wind whispers through hushed groves of oak trees like the voices of the dead.

And there are many voices to be heard. “All Quiet on the Western Front” is a story of how naive boys become broken men, and the film opens with a young soldier being mowed down on the battlefield and thrown into a mass grave. His boots are pulled off of his stiff feet, and sent back to a factory where they’re cleaned up and given to another acne-scarred recruit who will join the boots’ previous owner in death soon enough. Throughout the film, German officers report back to their superiors with big, abstract numbers: 20,000 dead in an afternoon. 100,000 dead by the end of the week.

These abstractions are contrasted with the individualized trauma inflicted on Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer), a 17-year-old infantryman who joins up on a whim with a group of classmates who brag that they’ll be marching on Paris in six weeks. Instead, Paul and his friends — Paul’s best buddy Albert (Aaron Hilmer), their bespectacled school chum Ludwig (Adrian Grunewald), and the worldly Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch) — watch helplessly as their fellow soldiers are picked off in horrifyingly graphic ways over the course of 18 months.

Paul’s disillusionment is seen primarily in Kammerer’s eyes, which go from wide with fear to cold and dead as he begins to wonder if it might be better to join his comrades in death. Compared to Milestone’s “All Quiet,” Berger’s version spends less of its screen time hanging out with the infantrymen as they kill time between raids, chasing girls and geese across the French countryside like the teenagers that they are. This makes for both a bleaker and a less impactful film: The onslaught of death is more relentless (and numbing) here, yes. But we don’t know these young men as well when they do meet their deaths, which makes the loss hurt just a little less.

In its place, Berger inserts scenes set at German high command, where the clean linens, fine crystal, and plentiful food contrast as sharply with the soldiers’ experience on the front as the opinions of liberal politician Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) contrast with those of hawkish career soldier Gen. Friedrich (Devid Striesow). Erzberger’s goal is simply to end the war, and he rushes to accept a ceasefire despite its accompanying blow to German dignity; Friedrich, on the other hand, insists on keeping the bloodshed going until the very end as a matter of pride, which is easy for him to say from behind thick stone walls.

The showiest and most modern aspect of the filmmaking in “All Quiet” is its score, from Academy Award nominee Volker Bertelmann. Bertelmann’s music combines blasts of machine-gun snare drums with a blaring three-note sequence that recalls a famous snippet from Akiria Ifikube’s “Godzilla” theme, and creates a similarly ominous effect of something big, scary, and invincible coming to get the viewer. In this case, that thing is the literal manifestation of humanity’s more violent instincts rather than a metaphorical one.

That’s not to say that “All Quiet on the Western Front” doesn’t traffic in symbolism: Throughout the film, objects like uniforms, dog tags, and the aforementioned pair of boots stand in for the tragic and mind-boggling loss of life on the Western front during WWI. Late in the film, Paul rages at the idea that he can just set aside “two years of hand grenades like a pair of socks” once he returns home from the front. And indeed, for veterans of the First Great War, the physical and psychological damage was lifelong. And the echoes of their ordeal still resonate — and may well forever, as long as dutiful re-creations of their experience like this one keep coming out every few decades.

“All Quiet on the Western Front” premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. Netflix will release it in select theaters on Friday, September 30 and streaming on Netflix on Friday, October 28.

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The Most Loved and Hated Novel About World War I

An international bestseller, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was banned and burned in Nazi Germany

Patrick Sauer

History Correspondent

On December 5, 1930, just over 12 years after the end of World War I, German moviegoers flocked to Berlin’s Mozart Hall to see one of Hollywood’s latest films. But during the movie, a cadre of 150 Nazi Brownshirts, nearly all too young to have fought in World War I, were led into the theater by propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Spewing anti-Semitic invective at the screen, they repeatedly shouted “Judenfilm!” as they tossed stink bombs from the balcony, threw sneezing powder in the air, and released white mice into the theater. A somewhat shocking turn of events, considering the movie was the highly anticipated adaptation of countryman Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front , the blockbuster novel that had transfixed the nation months earlier.

First serialized in 1928 in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung he, the book was published on January 31, 1929, and instantly became a literary juggernaut. In Germany, the initial print run sold out on release day, and some 20,000 copies moved off the shelves in the first few weeks on its way to more than a million books sold by year’s end. Abroad, All Quiet on the Western Front was a big hit as well, selling 600,000 copies in both Britain and France, and 200,000 in America. The film rights were snatched up by Universal Pictures for a record $40,000 and the motion picture went into production immediately.

All Quiet on the Western Front is, as most American high school students know, the story of a company of volunteer German soldiers stationed behind the front lines in the last weeks of World War I. Based on Remarque’s time as an infantryman, it’s the first-person account of Paul Baumer, who joins the cause with a group of his classmates.

It’s a gritty pull-no-punches look at the horrors of war. Limbs are lost, horses are destroyed, starving soldiers root through garbage for food, the troops are ravaged by poison gas and artillery bombs, and few make it out alive. Baumer himself dies on a tranquil day shortly before the Armistice is signed. Apolitical in terms of policy and strategy, Remarque’s anti-war masterpiece tapped into the global sorrow following a conflict that led to more than 37 million casualties between 1914-18. The humanity of All Quiet on the Western Front was captured in The New York Times review as, “a document of men who—however else there lives were disrupted—could endure war simply as war.”

Ironically it was this very humanity, and relentless political agnosticism, that made Goebbels see the All Quiet on the Western Front film as a threat to the Nazi ideology. A few weeks prior to the December screening, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party surprised the nation on election day, garnering 6.4 million votes, 18 percent of the total. It was a stunning victory for Adolf Hitler that gave his party 107 seats in the Reichstag and made the Nazis the second-largest political party in Germany. His leading campaign message, to unite Germany and make it strong again, resonated with voters in the midst of the Great Depression. Hitler, believing that treasonous Jewish-Marxist revolutionaries at home were to blame for Germany’s defeat in the Great War, proposed tearing up the Treaty of Versailles and ending war reparations to the Allies. This “ stabbed in the back ” theory was historical nonsense, but allowed workaday Germans to place blame elsewhere for the conflict that took an estimated 3 million lives , military and civilian, an easy sell that undermined the Weimar Republic.

All Quiet on the Western Front may have been the first runaway international bestseller, but its utter lack of pro-German propaganda and honest, downbeat look at war made the book a Nazi target. As Hitler’s power grew, Remarque’s critically acclaimed novel (which would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931) became a proxy for Nazi rage over its portrayal of German infantrymen as dispirited and disillusioned. Hitler refused to believe Teutonic soldiers could be anything but a magnificent fighting force, a nationalistic historical rewrite that took hold amongst the battered German citizenry. 

“One of the great legacies of World War I is that as soon as the Armistice is signed, the enemy is war itself, not the Germans, Russians, or French. The book captures it and becomes the definitive anti-war statement of the Great War,” says Dr. Thomas Doherty, professor of American Studies at Brandeis and the author of Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-39 . “The movie has the same depressing tone, the hero doesn’t achieve battlefield glory. He dies in the famous scene reaching for the butterfly . It’s an extraordinary film, the first must-see of the early sound era not starring Al Jolson. Unfortunately, the premiere was an animating moment in the history of Nazism, reclaiming the World War I memory not as meaningless slaughter, as Remarque says, but as a glorious noble German enterprise.”

The $1.25-million film had actually quietly debuted in Germany on December 4 under heavy police presence. According to a Variety reporter, when then lights came up, the audience was too rattled or moved to disapprove or applaud. However, Goebbels correctly guessed that the theater would let its guard down during the December 5 showing. His surprise mob attack went far beyond the realm of boyhood fraternity pranks like mice and sneezing powder. The projectors were shut down and in the chaos, savage beatings were handed down to moviegoers believed to be Jewish. (Also in attendance: Future Nazi filmmaker—and occasional drinking buddy/confidant of Remarque—Leni Riefenstahl.)

Goebbels, a tiny man with a clubfoot, had been unfit to fight in World War I and his physical rejection consumed him. His hatred of All Quiet on the Western Front was both a personal vendetta and one of the first major public displays of Nazi thuggery. The main goal was simply to create chaos, to terrorize moviegoers, to rally support against the film. “Within ten minutes, the cinema was a madhouse,” Goebbels gloated in his diary that night. “The police are powerless. The embittered masses are violently against the Jews.”

Goebbels would lead torch-wielding hooligans for the next few days as other riots broke out. In Vienna, 1,500 police surrounded the Apollo Theater and withstood a mob of several thousand Nazis trying to disrupt the movie, but vandalism and violence still erupted in the streets. Other disturbances, like one on December 9 in Berlin’s West End district were more sanguine. The New York Times described it as “fairly polite rioting, the sort one could take one’s best girl to see.”  Only scary in that it proved others were heeding the Nazi call.

By week’s end, the Supreme Board of Censors in Germany had reversed its original decision and banned All Quiet on the Western Front, even though Universal Pictures had already revised the film, sanitizing the trench warfare scenes and removing dialogue blaming the Kaiser for the war. Universal founder Carl Laemmle, a Jewish emigre from Germany, was shocked at the movie’s controversial reception. He sent a cable to Berlin newspapers, which ran as an ad, basically saying that the film was not anti-German and that it portrayed a universal war experience. (His point was made in Poland, where All Quiet on the Western Front was banned for being pro-German.) Laemmle’s efforts were fruitless, the Nazi intimidation tactics worked. Perhaps the most insidious part of the damage done was emboldening the Brownshirts to go after people where they live. As Doherty eloquently puts it in his book :

“Whether in the cathedral-like expanse of a grand motion picture palace or a cozy seat at the neighborhood Bijou, the movie theater was a privileged zone of safety and fantasy—a place to escape, to dream, to float free from the worries of the world beyond the Art Deco lobby, a world that, in the first cold winter of the Great Depression, was harder and harder to keep at bay. All the more reason to view the Nazi-instigated violence as the desecration of a sacred space.” 

Throughout, Remarque stayed relatively quiet, a habit he would later come to regret. He’d been recruited by Laemmle to write the screenplay, and as the legend goes, to play Baumer, but neither came to fruition. In his biography The Last Romantic , author Hilton Tims says Remarque was visited by a Nazi emissary prior to the premiere, who asked him to confirm that the publishers had sold the film rights without his consent. The idea was he’d been swindled by Jews, which Goebbels could use as propaganda, in exchange for protection from the Nazis. Remarque declined.

On the night of May 10, 1933, four months after the Nazis had come to power in Germany, Nazis raided bookstores and libraries, stampeding by torchlight to ritually hurl the books of more than 150 authors on to flaming pyres of gas-soaked logs. Students screamed into the night, condemning each writer as some 25,000 books were incinerated. Goebbels would call it “the cleansing of the German spirit. ”

Remarque, neither Communist nor Jew, had been in Berlin on January 31, 1933, the day Hitler was appointed chancellor. He was tipped off that the Nazis were gunning for him and drove through the darkness to escape. On that May evening, Remarque was ensconced in his palatial Swiss home. By year's end, the Nazis would made it a crime to own All Quiet on the Western Front or its sequel-of-a-sort,  The Road Back. All private copies had to be turned over to the Gestapo.

Remarque would finish his trilogy with Three Comrades, the tale of three German soldiers who open an auto body shop and all fall for the same dying woman. Like The Road Back , it sold well and was adapted into a milquetoast film, albeit it the only movie with F. Scott Fitzgerald credited as a screenwriter. Concerned about his safety in Switzerland, Remarque sailed to America in 1939, where he would be reunited with one of his many paramours, an actress he’d met in the South of France, Marlene Dietrich. Although married, for the second time, to the dancer and actress Jutta Ilse Zambona, Remarque would have countless affairs. From barmaids and prostitutes to Hollywood royalty like Greta Garbo, Hedy Lamarr, Luise Rainer and Maureen O’Sullivan (long rumored to have aborted his only child), Remarque had an insatiable sexual appetite.

As World War II raged on, Remarque lived the high life unbeknownst of his family’s tragic suffering. His brother-in-law became a prisoner-of-war; his father’s second wife committed suicide, but it was what befell his youngest sister that haunted Remarque for the rest of his life. In September 1943, Elfriede, a fashionista dressmaker living in Dresden, was turned in by her landlady and arrested by the Gestapo for “defeatist talk” and “subversion of military strength.” She was sentenced to death in a sham trial ‘as a dishonorable subversive propagandist for our enemies’. On December 12, Elfriede was beheaded by guillotine.

Records of the judge’s summation at trial were destroyed in an air raid during Elfriede’s incarceration. According to Tims, in pronouncing the decision the judge allegedly stated: ‘We have sentenced you to death because we cannot apprehend your brother. You must suffer for your brother.’ Remarque would dedicate his 1952 novel Spark of Life to Elfriede, but in a final twist of the knife, it was omitted in the German version, a snub chalked up to those who still saw him as a traitor.

As for the book and film that started his career and ended his relationship with his native country, they went on to be stunning successes. An estimated 30 to 40-million copies of All Quiet on the Western Front have been sold since it was first published in 1929, and the film would win that year’s Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Production. It is still regarded as one of the best war movies ever made. 

All Quiet on the Western Front

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Raised in Billings, Montana,  Patrick Sauer  is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer who primarily covers sports, history and sports history. His work has appeared in the New York Times , Smithsonian , Defector , Los Angeles Times , Montana Quarterly and countless publications that no longer exist.

The 7 Best And 7 Worst Things About Netflix's All Quiet On The Western Front

Director and co-writer Edward Berger's new adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's landmark 1928 anti-war novel "All Quiet on the Western Front" is the second major cinematic adaptation of the work after the 1930 film directed by Lewis Milestone that went on to win both best picture ("outstanding production" at the time) and best director at the Academy Awards . In the nearly 100 years since that film's release, technology and filmmaking have evolved significantly, and the new adaptation reflects that.

The new adaptation doesn't just bring color (literally) to the story, but also hugely expands the battle scenes both quantitatively and qualitatively. Though this has nothing to do with new technology, 2022's "All Quiet on the Western Front" also introduces not one, but two new storylines that run parallel to the main storyline drawn from the book.

The main story follows young Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer) who enlists in the German war effort during World War I with several of his friends. The young men have been inspired to enlist by their teachers who speak of the glory and honor to be found on the battlefield fighting for their country. But when they arrive on the front lines they find nothing but death and destruction. The film then shows moments of their experiences that painfully emphasize the brutality and inhumanity of war.

It's a powerful film, but it's also not without its flaws. Here we'd like to consider what elements work best about this new adaptation — making it a must-watch for fans of the book, the original film, and war films — but also taking a look at what fails and may hold "All Quiet on the Western Front" (2022) back from becoming the same kind of timeless classic as Milestone's adaptation.

Best: The opening(s)

"All Quiet in the Western Front" begins with some credits before showing the audience a beautiful forest at what looks like the dawn. But this beauty is then interrupted by gunfire and images of corpses strewn about the forest floor that are still being struck by ongoing gunfire. The movie then thrusts the viewer into the middle of a chaotic battle wherein we follow a young German soldier until he charges at an enemy combatant, buries a shovel in their shoulder, and the film cuts to the title card.

It's a striking opening that highlights how brutal and matter-of-fact the film will be when it comes to depictions of war violence. What pushes the film's first moments beyond this is that following that jarring sequence, though, is that there is a lengthy wordless montage that shows how the uniforms of dead soldiers on the front are collected, returned to Germany, washed, restitched, and given out once more to new soldiers.

These dual opening sequences show that "All Quiet on the Western Front" isn't only interested in the horror of war from an experiential standpoint, but the conceptual horror of an uncaring war machine that simply swallows a seemingly endless parade of young men.

Worst: The armistice storyline

One of the two new storylines added to this cinematic adaptation of the novel follows real-life diplomat Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) as he seeks to bring an end to the war by signing an armistice with the Allied Powers represented by the French. The storyline itself is interesting and does some thematic work by calling attention to the major discrepancies between the lives of diplomats and soldiers as well as the abstract ways that diplomats often think about war instead of seriously considering the cost of human life.

The problem with the storyline is that it feels like it's a completely different movie from the main storyline that follows Paul and his comrades on the front. The storylines are, of course, connected as they are both about the war, and the film uses the character of General Friedrichs (Devid Striesow) to tie them together more directly, but the armistice storyline offers the audience a respite from the visceral and horrific experiences of the men on the front, ultimately dulling the impact of the film as a whole.

Best: The production design

The best aspect of the armistice storyline is how it visually highlights the differences between life for Erzberger and the soldiers at the front. Erzberger travels on a luxury train, with fresh fruit, beautiful carpets and curtains, a soft bed, and even slippers. These are likely all period accurate, but the gorgeous detail of the production design really brings these sumptuous amenities to the fore.

Of course, these images wouldn't be so striking if they weren't so harshly contrasted with life on the front where barbed wire and mud are ubiquitous. Production designers Christian M. Goldbeck and Milena Koubová make the front seem endless through the long trenches lined with wet logs and thick clay-like mud. It's a horrible vision, but one that's true to history, making the audience reckon with the conditions soldiers lived in throughout the war.

Even General Friedrichs, who isn't too far from the front, lives a completely different life than the soldiers, he has a roof over his head and well-cooked meals every night. The building where he stays during the film isn't nearly as beautiful or expensive-looking as the train on which Erzberger arrives, but it's still strikingly different from what the soldiers on the ground are living with.

Production design rarely is one of the most outstanding things about a movie, but "All Quiet on the Western Front" uses its various settings to really draw attention to the different lives of those involved with the war.

Worst: General Friedrichs' storyline

Like the added storyline that follows Erzberger, the storyline that follows Friedrichs and his conversations with his apparent right-hand man Major von Brixdorf (Sebastian Hülk) does add something thematically interesting but draws us away from the front and the soldiers there. Friedrichs is a hard man who believes in war and glory and sees the armistice talks as a sign of weakness and cowardice on the part of the government. He does not believe that Germany should surrender and wants to continue fighting until his country and he individually are victorious.

While this viewpoint, from a man who is not at the front, doubles down on the film's thematic interest in the way war is viewed from afar, it also once again draws the film's attention from Paul and the men at the titular front. That this storyline then comes into a devastating collision with Paul's story makes the case for it conceptually, but we'll discuss that more in a moment.

Best: The acting

Felix Kammerer and Albrecht Schuch (who plays Paul's friend and mentor Stanislaus "Kat" Katczinsky) don't have too many scenes between battles on the front, but in the few scenes of stillness they have, the two actors have a significant impact. Kammerer does an incredible job changing Paul's entire way of carrying his body and face from the start of the film where he is a bright-eyed young student excited to go to war for his country to the end where is an almost hollow shell of a man.

And in one of the film's most memorable scenes, when Paul reads the illiterate Kat a letter from his wife, Schuch does some of the best silent-face acting we've seen in a long time. As he listens to Paul read we see him go through nearly every emotion from joy and hope to grief and despair.

While "All Quiet on the Western Front" can't be said to be a character-focused movie, Kammerer and Schuch make sure to make the most of their time on screen and offer us the best look they can into the minds and hearts of these men.

Worst: Not enough time with soldiers

The greatest downfall of this adaptation that holds it back from the highs reached by the first cinematic adaptation is that it doesn't spend enough time with Paul and his fellow soldiers. The book is written entirely in the first person allowing the reader to spend the entirety of the story with Paul and the men around him. While the 1930 film doesn't include an ever-present voiceover from Paul, the story is still entirely focused on him, drawing the reader into his life and his world.

This new movie's added plotlines about Erzberger and Friedrichs may add something conceptually, but they take time away from the soldiers, who should be the only focus of any adaptations of the book. But it's not only these added storylines that draw time and attention away from the inner lives of the men on the front, it's the fact that the time we do spend with them is overwhelmingly spent in battle. These battle scenes certainly spotlight the horror of war, but they don't serve to paint a picture of the inner lives of the soldiers and to draw us into their emotional worlds.

Best: The cinematography

The opening shot of "All Quiet on the Western Front" is a gorgeous view of a forest in what looks like the early morning, with light just beginning to appear and cover the trees. It's a beautiful image that contrasts with the horror of the violence that follows. And that contrast between beauty and horror continues throughout the entirety of the film, sometimes within the same image, and it's all possible because of the simply stunning cinematography courtesy of director of photography James Friend.

Friend makes images of the trenches and no man's land uncomfortably beautiful by lighting them with bright yellow, orange, and red flares that cast their light across the space as they fall. Even scenes of battle are alluring in their high contrast and deep color. It's quite the feat that the movie manages to create such aesthetically pleasing images of a horrific event without ever downplaying the horror of the war that it brings to the screen.

Worst: The runtime

It makes perfect sense that a movie with three different plotlines and numerous lengthy battle scenes has a significant runtime. But the almost two-and-a-half-hour runtime of "All Quiet on the Western Front" begins to feel laborious at some point. It's not that any part of the film is boring in itself, but that the frequent jumps from one story to the other make it more difficult to get caught up in the momentum of any one story or even the characters in any single plot line.

"All Quiet on the Western Front" is a movie that is simply too full of ideas. All of those ideas are interesting, but the movie simply cannot engage all of them and maintain its narrative momentum. So it opts to cram in all its ideas and forfeit any sense of moving along, leading to a movie that feels like it refuses to end. However, that might also be one of the ideas that the movie seeks to convey: that the war simply would not end. Still, just because something works on an intellectual level doesn't mean it works for the movie.

Best: The battle scenes

The major improvement of this adaptation of the novel over the 1930 adaptation is the way that it brings the audience into the battles that the soldiers experience. From the start, the film forces the audience to be in the same physical space as the soldiers, going so far as to follow characters into battle from the safety of the trenches.

These sequences are breathtaking not because they are beautiful but because they are so incredibly tense. We can feel that at any moment any soldier may die, from a bullet, a bayonet wound, a landmine, or even something as comparatively unthreatening as barbed wire. The chaotic camera work and the overbearing sound design serve to make these scenes feel overwhelming and inescapable.

But it's not just the broad strokes of craft that make these scenes so effective. It's the use of specific new (at the time) and devastating weapons like flamethrowers and tanks. The scene that shows flamethrowers being unleashed upon Paul and his comrades emphasizes the impossibility of defending against these weapons as we see Paul left with no other option but to run away even while a friend of his is burned alive. The later sequence in which tanks are used shows the tanks making their assault on the German trenches, not only as defensive vehicles protecting the enemy combatants inside but as massive weapons themselves that are used to roll over and through trenches, crushing men underneath their treads. These scenes are horrifying and make for one of the best elements of the movie. 

Worst: The time jump

The great power of the novel and the original 1930 adaptation of it comes from spending time with the young soldiers who are convinced to enlist by their teachers and come to quickly realize, through increasingly brutal experiences, that war is not glorious but, in fact, miserable. It's a key of these narratives that we spend time with these young men as more and more misery and brutality are laid out in front of them and their ideals are snuffed out in the name of the real cruelty of war.

But this new version of the movie jumps ahead 18 months after Paul and his fellow students experience their first battle. It sort of makes the case that the first battle is the only moment of horror the young men need to learn that war is terrible, but it seems at odds with what the novel is fundamentally about. That time jump also doesn't really serve the story of the soldiers, it's only there so that the armistice storyline can begin. It's a strange and awkward choice that highlights this film's interest in the conceptual over the personal.

Best: The themes

"All Quiet on the Western Front" succeeds in bringing the broad anti-war message of the book to the screen as well as some of the more specific themes of loss of innocence and the psychological toll of war on survivors. And while the new storylines about the armistice and General Friedrichs take away from time spent with the soldiers, these stories do add some more thought-provoking ideas to the film through their contrasts with life at the front.

The film's opening also highlights the wholly impersonal and machine-like way that war demands young life, as we see the process of uniforms being recycled from corpses and given to new recruits, presumably only to be recycled once more when those new recruits die in battle. The film's ending, which we'll touch on more in a moment, also speaks to the ultimate meaninglessness of all the death and destruction that attended the First World War in particular.

This adaptation is more interested in the conceptual horrors of war than emotions, and while that is a problem for the story, the movie does manage to offer several thought-provoking and abstractly horrifying moments.

Worst: Lack of emotion

Berger's focus on themes and delivering visceral battle scenes means that we don't get to spend as much time with the soldiers as we've already noted above, and that becomes a problem because it doesn't offer us the time to become fully invested in these characters. The novel and the 1930 adaptation are character driven and focused on the inner lives of the men who live through the war.

Through the time we spend with the men who live and die on the front we develop emotional connections with them and are emotionally impacted when they fall in battle just as their comrades are. But "All Quiet on the Western Front" draws too much time away from the soldiers to focus on characters and stories higher up in the political and military hierarchy leading to a movie that doesn't allow us to become emotionally invested in any of the characters.

This adaptation of the novel is far from a failure, but it doesn't have the same lasting emotional impact that the novel and original adaptation do, and that's disappointing.

Best: The score

It's somewhat surprising the first time we hear an electronic score in "All Quiet on the Western Front." It's a period piece and a war film, both of which usually stick to more orchestral scores, but it also makes a sort of sense that this movie about the inhumanity of war and the way that it simply continues to demand more and more death would be scored with ominous electronic sounds. That electronic theme plays repeatedly throughout the movie and is striking and impactful every time, but it's not alone.

The score, by Academy Award-nominated composer Volker Bertelmann, includes quiet moments as well. Some are created by synths, while others are brought to life by strings and piano. And those orchestral instruments are also used in more energetic and overwhelming ways as well, particularly the strings and percussion sections that Bertelmann uses to claustrophobic effect during some of the film's more intense moments.

It's a score that initially calls attention to itself before becoming part of the world of the movie, which is what all the best scores do. It lifts up the film that it's a part of but doesn't go wholly unnoticed as a piece of great music itself.

Worst: The ending

This new adaptation's ending differs significantly from the ending of the book. There, Paul dies a month before the armistice is signed, as Remarque wrote,  "on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western front." This emphasizes that Paul's death is insignificant to the larger war, a young man who we have come to care for has lost his life, but it makes no difference to the uncaring war.

By contrast, in the 2022 movie, the armistice is signed and announcements are made of the ceasefire taking place at 11 a.m. on the 11th of November before the final battle scene. That battle takes place because General Friedrichs is dissatisfied with what he perceives as weakness on the part of the ruling government and decides that before the official ceasefire, while he is still legally permitted to engage in aggression, he will force the men under his command to make a final attack.

It's a devastating irony that drives home the utter meaninglessness of the massive loss of life in the war, especially in the final moments when peace has already been announced. But it overplays the responsibility of one man in a story that is meant to be about the ways that the war machine destroys individual lives. This change doesn't just change the novel's final message, but is also at odds with the way the rest of the movie portrays war, as something beyond any individual person's control.

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Books Made into Movies » Books made into Netflix series or films

All quiet on the western front, by erich maria remarque, recommendations from our site.

“This book is a pacifist book, a great anti-war book. It was very popular when it came out. Erich Maria Remarque wrote the book at the end of the 1920s. When Hitler came to power, the book was banned, and was one of the books that was burned in that infamous book-burning episode in Berlin. Later on, Remarque was forced to leave Germany. He went to America and remained in the United States. It’s a story of a young man’s tragic disenchantment with war.” Read more...

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David Lawday , Biographer

“My copy, rather histrionically, advertises itself as ‘the greatest war novel of all time.’ I remember thinking, when I picked it up in a second-hand shop: that’s big promise. But I think it might be right. It’s very distressing and actually quite life-changing. The book gave me a permanent jolt in perspective.” Read more...

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Alice Winn , Novelist

“ All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), by Erich Maria Remarque. This is a landmark novel about war in general, and the First World War in particular. Remarque was a German writer who subsequently was exiled from Nazi Germany to the United States. He had quite an extraordinary life. He fought in the First World War, and the book, which is written in the first person, is largely autobiographical. It’s a remarkable novel which I chose for mostly two reasons. The first one is that, better than any novel or indeed first-hand account I’ve read about war, it shows what’s animal and animalistic about war. The second reason I chose it is because it also claims that, even in the middle of such horrors as were experienced in the trenches, there was always a spark of hope, a spark of life, without which you can’t go on..” Read more...

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Cécile Fabre , Philosopher

“It’s evocative because it’s the First World War seen through German eyes… All Quiet on the Western Front is the story of a German private soldier on the front line and it’s a very moving account of the deprivation and the hardship he goes through, showing us that innocent people were thrown into uniform and told to serve whether they liked it or not.” Read more...

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Jeffrey Archer , Novelist

Q: In  Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989) by Modris Eksteins. there’s a chapter about  All Quiet on the Western Front , and how Adolf Hitler spent a lot more time in the trenches than the author of that book (Eric Maria Remarque). I found it very readable, but I wasn’t sure how it all held together, necessarily.   A: I’m not sure it does terribly. Inevitably, he’s cherry picking from a huge number of sources and then trying to drag them together into this broader thesis about the modern world. It doesn’t work, but I think that’s the nature of the project. If you go and look at 100 different artists, you’ll get 100 different responses to the war. They can’t be generalized about in that way. But it’s a brave attempt.

The best books on World War I recommended by Jonathan Boff

What has changed since World War I is that the writing on war by those who have experienced it is much more openly concerned with how soldiers reintegrate both during war and after it is over. How do they reintegrate after war? That was the theme of All Quiet on the Western Front too, in some ways: Erich Maria Remarque wanted to find the way back, to paraphrase the title of the book he wrote after All Quiet . The enemy is also there in World War I literature, but the civilians are much more absent, not obvious as they are in the Woodruff book.

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Other books by Erich Maria Remarque

A time to love and a time to die by erich maria remarque, our most recommended books, on liberty by john stuart mill, middlemarch by george eliot, war and peace by leo tolstoy, nineteen eighty-four by george orwell, republic by plato, frankenstein (book) by mary shelley.

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