Best Pictures #92: 2022 (95th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee: All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

by A.J. 

Best Pictures #92: 2022 (95th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

“You are fortunate to be living in great times.”

The 2022 version of All Quiet on the Western Front is good enough to stand alongside the best anti-war films, but it will stand out because it is one of the still small number of movies about the First World War, and, most notably, it is German made. Published in 1929, Erich Maria Remarque’s now classic novel about an eager, patriotic German teenager experiencing the true horrors of war on the Western Front in Northern France, was first adapted by Universal Pictures the following year. That film, directed by Lewis Milestone, won Best Picture at the 3rd Academy Awards and remains one of the great anti-war films, with sights that still shock and scenes loaded with undated pathos. The novel and film ran afoul of the emerging Nazi party, who sabotaged screenings before both the novel and film were banned after they took power. Another version of All Quiet on the Western Front (there is also a surprisingly memorable made-for-TV version from 1979), seems unnecessary, but director Edward Berger uses modern cinematic styles and techniques, in addition to modern technology and visual effects, to create a harrowing and effective anti-war film.

Modernizations aside, the biggest difference between this version and the classic film and novel is the addition of scenes of the German High Command negotiating the armistice. Daniel Brühl plays real life German official Matthias Erzberger, who works to negotiate a quick armistice. He is not presented as heroic, but he is frustrated by the stubbornness of the German generals and the arrogance of the French generals, who understand that they are winning. While the politicians and generals quibble over words and protocol, teenage Paul, who joined the German army in spring of 1917 full of patriotic idealism, and his fellow soldiers are suffering and fighting and dying in mud and squalor, in conditions that before 1914 were unimaginable. The sharp and jarring juxtaposition of these scenes is intentional and highly effective. The First World War was called The Great War and The War To End All Wars because the methods of the war and conditions it created were so awful that, surely, there would be nothing after.

Berger’s film excels at something terrible, successfully conveying the horrors of modern industrial war: the grueling and terrible conditions of trench warfare; stabbing a man multiple times only to be trapped in a bomb crater with him as he dies slow enough to make you realize his humanity; the absurd and terrifying sights of soldiers in gas masks; a friend exploding into a spray of blood; WWI era tanks, lumbering steel rhombuses slouching forward and spitting explosions; soldiers with guns that throw fire instead of bullets.   

As Paul, Felix Kammerer is good at being simultaneously a generic stand-in for any young person caught up in their country’s war and a distinct person, easy to distinguish and follow. Albrecht Schuch is memorable as “Kat,” a veteran of the trenches. Paul and Kat have quiet moments together, cherished for their calmness and connection. Paul has an arc, though it is uncomplicated (patriotic idealism into jaded realism), and the rare moments of calmness do not build character so much as they maintain humanity. The amazing and moving speech Paul gives to a group of high school students at the behest of his former teacher (whose words inspired him to enlist), where he tells them that it is awful to die for your country, as well as the final image of the 1930 version, one of the most famous and poignant in film history, are replaced with a new gut wrenching ending.

I read one critic describe Sam Mendes’s WWI film 1917, a Best Picture nominee of 2019, as a movie not about the horrors of war, but a horror movie about war. I am not sure I agree with regards to that movie (I found it extremely tense and affecting, but a bit too thrilling to convey horror), but I believe this sentiment is true of Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, and, now, perhaps, Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front; time will tell. This is a rough movie to watch, and I probably would not have seen it if it had not been nominated for Best Picture by the Academy Awards. I was much more willing to watch the 20-minute vomiting and diarrhea scene from Triangle of Sadness than to watch this movie. However, this is one remake I will never begrudge because its effect and the effect of the 1930 version and the novel remain the same: war is cruel and disgusting and the ones who fight and suffer and die have no say in how it is fought or when it ends. 

Nominees: Malte Grunert, producer

Director: Edward Berger

Screenplay: Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson, Ian Stokell; based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque

Cast: Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Daniel Brühl

Production Companies: Amusement Park

Distributor: Netflix

Release Date: October 28th, 2022

Total Nominations: 9, including Best Picture

Other Nominations: International Feature Film-Germany; Adapted Screenplay-Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson, Ian Stokell; Cinematography-James Friend; Production Design-Christian M. Goldbeck, Ernestine Hipper; Makeup and Hairstyling-Heike Merker, Linda Eisenhamerova; Original Score-Volker Bertelmann; Sound- Viktor Prasil, Frank Kruse, Markus Stemler, Lars Ginzel, Stefan Korte; Visual Effects-Frank Petzold, Viktor Muller, Markus Frank, Kamil Jaffar