MOVIE REVIEW: "All Quiet on the Western Front" is the Best Portrayal of Humanity at its Worst

11/12 ForReel Score | 4.5/5 Stars

I can’t quite put into words my fascination with the first World War, that window between July, 1914 and November, 1918 in which the world tilted on its axis towards bloodshed. I find every part of the conflict that raged in trenches across Europe - and its myriad repercussions around the world - utterly absorbing. It may be for the little brother syndrome that besets this “Great War'' in comparison to its 1940s’ successor, a cataclysmic war in its own right with nearly double the casualties. It may be for the fact that a single act of political violence from one young man forever changed the course of human history (a notion I find not just a little bit of appeal in). It may be, despite - or possibly because of - all its butchery and all its importance, that World War I has been dwarfed from the public conscious, the spotlight more heavily affixed to the atrocities of the Holocaust, 9/11, or any other earth-shattering historical event. Clearer bad guys exist in more recent memory. “World War I is old news.” It’s one of history’s more beguiling frameworks. But I don’t think any of this is wholly what captures my attention. They aren’t the reason this particular war drifts to the forefront of my mind whenever I find myself staring blankly forty yards ahead. I believe the reason is far more human.

All Quiet on the Western Front, a remake - or better, a readaptation - of the 1928 German anti-war novel, written by a veteran of the first World War, begins with a series of humanistic landscape portraits. They paint the skies, fields, and forests of a Europe on the unknowing verge of chaos. The camera settles on a den in the underbrush, baby foxes suckling and cuddling up to their mother. Stereotypically sly and devious animals painted as uncharacteristically (albeit, realistically) sweet and sensitive little creatures. They orient the film’s moral compass inwards, drawing on a sense of soft humanity and innately naturalistic consideration. Then the camera turns upwards, and this foxhole transforms from one of care, to one of carnage.

What follows is, as expected, two-plus hours of brutality. It’s been over two decades since war’s been rendered as realistically or relentlessly on screen as it is here. All Quiet on the Western Front is a technical tour de force, so well constructed you become convinced that filmmaker Edward Berger waged a war himself in lieu of prop-and-set reconstruction. Berger has taken notes from the great war films before him (and their filmmakers) and created a masterwork tracing backwards through the lineage of Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now, Come and See, The Ascent, and, of course, the original All Quiet on the Western Front. Their imagery is scrawled across the celluloid, and yet wholly reimagined into something incredible and unique.

At its heart is the story of Paul Baümer, a highschool student who enlists in the German military to “serve his Fatherland.” What he finds - and what is so viscerally depicted - are the horrors of the first World War, the atrocities committed by all parties that are so purposefully underrepresented in history books. Even in the film’s nicest moments, those of brotherhood, there is an underlying nihilism permeating the scenery: there is no purpose in the war they’re waging, no ground gained with their death, no life left to live if they do make it home. World War I was an entirely miserable affair. That All Quiet on the Western Front is able to capture all that misery, without itself being dragged down by it, is a testament to the power of the filmmakers and the stars, especially lead actor Felix Kammerer.

The young man in nearly every frame of the film has earned himself a place amongst the all-time great war film performances - if not all performances, period. Felix Kammerer evokes exactly what I find so hard to articulate, and yet so fascinating about the first World War. Kammerer beautifully gives a face to the worst of humanity.

And that is what I find so affecting, not just about All Quiet on the Western Front, but about World War I in general. Clear cut bad guys (i.e. Nazis and their systematic ethnic cleansing) are easy to remember, easier yet to paint. What’s far murkier are the holistic cruelties that besieged the world for four year at the beginning of the 20th century, and yet All Quiet on the Western Front portrays it with such force and control, you’d almost think it’s easy. But we know it isn’t easy. That’s why it’s so rarely done - and hardly ever done well. There’s nothing easy about the atrocities committed on the western front: a contest of high-stakes push-and-pulls, millions of lives traded for only a couple yards gained either way. Giving a face to a perpetrator and a victim is far from facile. Coloring inhumanity with humanity is a practically unachievable landmark.

And yet Berger, Kammerer, and everyone else behind All Quiet on the Western Front do so. That, to me, is astonishingly important. And just as fascinating.