Director: Edward Berger
6.5/10
Twenty minutes into this, the third film of the masterful Remarque novel, it was clear this one has little to do with the book. That isn’t necessarily a problem. Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line is only loosely based on the James Jones novel but it’s one of my favorite films. The cinematography and battle sequences in this version of All Quiet are excellent but the film lacks important things that Remarque was trying to tell us.
First off, Remarque noted how deeply militaristic his upbringing had been. Berger’s film devotes only a brief scene to the idealism and naïveté of the youths before entering the military. We see little of the enthusiasm for war in school, families, and community. Even Remarque’s postman was eager to be called up.
The camaraderie of the schoolboys in the classroom and training camp and their gradual coarsening in the trenches is lost. Berger instead casts the main character, Paul Bäumer, into the war where he is almost immediately buried alive by an artillery barrage, then brought back to the living as a hardened soldier.
School friends show up only intermittently. Kat, the older, experienced, working-class figure who teaches the youths how to survive, is just another soldier. Paul doesn’t return home on leave and see the changes he’s endured and the chasm that’s opened between him and his community which holds fast to romantic views of war, patriotism, and manhood.
Instead, Berger presents scene after scene of harrowing but repetitive trench warfare with only brief moments of pastoral respite and soldierly banter, crucial though they are to war. Unlike previous versions, we see negotiations to end the war and hidebound militarists who want to fight on. One of them orders an attack though he and everyone knows the armistice will go into effect in a few hours. The absurdity barely dawns on anyone, not even on Paul. Remarque’s main character has learned. Berger’s hasn’t. He just trudges on to the end. Disillusion brings introspection and alienation. Every poet from the Great War told us that.
This version lacks the breadth and appeal of the book and the films by Lewis Milestone (1930) and Delbert Mann (1979). In his rush to show the horror of war Berger doesn’t comprehend much of the experience of war. The 1979 film with Richard Thomas as Paul and Ernest Borgnine as Kat, though relatively unknown, is in my estimation the best of the three.
The book and films stand as antiwar monuments, though of varying statures of course. Historian George Mosse, however, grew up in postwar Germany and recalls his friends read All Quiet on the Western Front and enjoyed it a great deal as an action story. They looked forward to their own war. Fate did not refuse them.
©2023 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to fellow Hoya Susan Ganosellis.