Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) is excited to enlist in the Imperial German Army in the Spring of 1917 alongside his friends from school: Albert Kropp (Aaron Hilmer), Franz Müller (Moritz Klaus), and Ludwig Behm (Adrian Grünewald).  The three young boys gleefully suit up in their field uniforms, listen to a speech about how they will serve their country and make a difference, and depart in formation with a spring in their step to the French/German border.  Things take a quick turn as they arrive at the trenches and receive heavy enemy fire over a sleepless night.  In the morning, Paul begins to befriend an older soldier, Stanislaus Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch), who helps show the boys the ropes of life in war.  As more and more young men on both sides of the border are slain, diplomats haggle over the terms of an armistice, and while bombs and bullets ravage the countryside, it is the pen and the seceding of ego that ends the first World War. 

Edward Berger mounts an ambitious adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, for Netflix with a script he co-wrote with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell.  Submitted by Germany for consideration in the International Film category at the 95th Academy Awards, the war drama is harrowing and punishing even when watched in the comfort and security of home.  At 148 minutes, Berger does not waste time in bringing his camera to the front line to witness the horrors of war in close quarters, and once on the line, he is unrelenting in his examination.  It is brutal and heartbreaking and the sense of doom weighs heavy on the audience, but it is so finely crafted that even despite the terrible events we are witnessing, we cannot look away. 

To draw a comparison between Kammerer’s Bäumer to Aleksey Kravchenko’s Flyora Gayshun in Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) would not be a disingenuous claim. Neither of these films mince words when they condemn the war efforts by showing the effects these acts have on the people of the countries at war, and both are led by new talent who must lay themselves bare in front of the lens as they march deeper and deeper into hell. To put it plainly, Kammerer is fearless towards the camera and is willing to do whatever is required of him by the script, even if it means breaking the character of Paul down time and time again. Over and over, the wheels of the war machine keep turning, and Paul must sacrifice every ounce of innocence and bright-eyed ambition he had in those opened sequences in order to see another day; a day that will be full of gunfire, missile blasts, and the death of the men protecting him, the same men’s whom he has also sworn to protect, which gives way to a restless night as the enemy never sleeps.  

There is no heroism here, unlike many Western war films. Even ones that are critical of the industrial-military complex often frame themselves around an act of valor so that they can end on an inspiring note. Berger will have none of that here and is not afraid to capture the absolute destruction of life that war causes as the youth of a nation are torn to pieces while the diplomats and leaders of those countries sit in their posh rooms, dressed in tailored suits, and speaking in carefully constructed and flowery language. One of the most interesting things that All Quiet on the Western Front does is that while we are firmly following Paul and his German comrades, the French army is never painted as traditional antagonists, rather, it is the failing leaders of these countries that are the true villains of the narrative even as they talk vaguely of peace. That is not to say that the penultimate battle which finds Paul’s troop ravaged by an onslaught of armored tanks and men with flamethrowers is anticlimactic as we have fallen under Kammerer’s spell and want to see Paul survive, but Berger, by keeping the French soldiers both nameless and faceless, does not allow the blame to be passed onto the countrymen. Rather he ascribes that guilt to the failure at the top of the chain on both sides of the line. 

Kammerer’s work cannot be overstated as the young performer comes of age during the cacophony of gunfire, but his and the rest of the cast’s performances are perfectly accented by the work of cinematographer James Friend, score by Volker Bertelmann, and editor Sven Budelmann. Christian M. Goldbeck, as the production designer, ensured that all these elements worked in harmony with each other across the sprawling narrative. Friend’s camera is unafraid of the violence it captures and equally unafraid of capturing the terror coursing through these young men. Conversely, it captures the moments of levity and comradery between the soldiers with equal vigor. Berger does not allow these moments of friendship – a clandestine feast of stolen goose, Paul reading a letter from home to the illiterate Katz, the men conversing lightly while peeling potatoes for a stew – to make up for the life they have lost, but Friend does not want to miss out on these moments of humanity that show these soldiers are not the machines they are groomed to be, but sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands. Bertelmann, likewise, does not score these moments in the same mechanical cadence as he does when they are in combat but instead backs these scenes with much softer and poignant notes. It feels almost like a different film entirely as he plays with two separate symphonic and stylistic themes, but the fear of the war is never far removed from the frame and Budelmann’s editing helps audiences navigate between these sequences with ease. We are able to cautiously relax as the soldiers reminisce, and we feel their same elation during their hidden dinner, but as soon as the war efforts resume, the terror takes over in a flash and even in the frenzy there remains a stillness so that audiences have to sit and observe. Relief is not found in a flurry of quick cuts to portray the incoherence of all-out war, but in wide shots which fill the screen with poor Paul at the center of this madness that surrounds him so that we are there in the moment with the boy as the world burns around him.  

As mentioned, Berger’s film is not seeking to valorize the soldiers, but he is not critiquing them, either. Instead, they are all the central figures of their own personal tragedies and are treated with all of the tenderness, love, and care that comes from these traditionally ill-fated arcs. The only choice they made that set them on this path, and even that seems like a stretch to call it a pure choice, was their enlistment into this war. After that, everything else is a decision made at the moment to preserve their own lives while their leaders – the gods of the ancient Greek plays – haggle amongst themselves. There is a long sequence towards the end of the film that finds Paul stuck and alone in a crater hole in no man’s land when a French Soldier catches him and the two engage in hand-to-hand combat. Berger holds here for a very long time and while the camera is always more interested in Paul, the enemy soldier, bleeding out and choking, is never too far out of frame. Again, the film is careful not to villainize the Frenchman as we process along with Paul how his first instinct was to kill, a far cry from the bright-eyed, excited youth at the start of the film. This horrible realization gives way to an act of compassion as Paul gives the soldier some water and delivers the final blow relieving him from his misery so that he does not die alone. Audiences feel the weight of this change, the soul of the young man having been completely corrupted, and knowing that there is no way back to that innocence all the while some miles away a document is finally signed thus ending the war. Peace, at last, but at what cost? 

All Quiet on the Western Front ends, as the title implies, ends quite quietly and meditatively as it bookends many of the emotional beats from earlier in the film by returning to the farmhouse gate, or following another young German soldier whose eyes have been opened to war as he collects the tags from the dead men laying throughout the trenches so their names may be printed in the next morning’s report. Names have played such an important motif in the film from the sequence in the beginning when Paul briefly returns his uniform fearing it was intended for another only to be told that it was the wrong size and nothing to worry about, but later revealed to be the mended uniform of a deceased soldier, all the way through until this final shot. The cloth tags pile up underfoot at the recruitment office and the satchel of dog tags grows heavier and heavier in the trenches. While the war may have ended, for the families of the men who lost their lives and will never return, and for the men who survived and will return a different person, the machine keeps on grinding aimlessly throughout our history and unfortunately into the future, the gears of which are oiled by the blood of our brothers and sisters, friends and family, to keep on moving endlessly until, at last, total destruction.