All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) * * *

Directed by:  Edward Berger

Starring:  Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Aaron Hilmer, Daniel Bruhl, Sebastian Hulk

Erich Maria Remarque's 1928 novel which was made into the 1929 Oscar winner for Best Picture has now been made by a German director and cast for the first time.   The Lewis Milestone-directed original focused more on the bill of goods the young men were sold when asked to fight a war to save the Fatherland.   The boys, led by naive Paul Baumer, bought the rhetoric hook, line, and sinker.  Some lived to regret it while others died wondering what they got themselves into.

The 2022 version of the story is fixated more on the violence, blood, and warfare; a mixture of 1917 and Saving Private Ryan realism which is done well and I suppose is action the original film couldn't depict so thoroughly and accurately.   What the original film couldn't foresee, which this version can understand, is that not even a quarter of a century after the end of World War I, German men were asked to save the Fatherland again, only by an evil monster named Adolf Hitler and not Kaiser Wilhelm II.  Maybe the Nazi war machine lifted passages from the book to recite to their eager recruits.   Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, but it is telling how quickly the Germans forgot what just happened two decades earlier.   War is like that.

Aside from the older illiterate soldier Kat (Schuch), who mentors and befriends Paul as his school friends are ground up and spit out by the war, the characters are hardly memorable (even Paul, who is more acted upon than anything else).   What makes All Quiet on the Western Front effective is the universal fear experienced by the soldiers who had no idea what awaited on the battlefields and in the trenches.   Soon enough, fighting wasn't about Kaiser Wilhelm or for God or country, it was about saving your neck.   A parallel story (not written in Remarque's book but added specifically for this movie) is the German high command working out the terms of capitulation when they realize 40,000 Germans are dying daily for a lost cause.   The terms of surrender are hardly beneficial to the Germans, but what else is left to do?   As it turns out, fight another war.  History is repeated, with many innocent bystanders as part of the carnage.   

All Quiet on the Western Front's earlier power is diminished somewhat by the brutality of the battle scenes, which take on the formula of attack, bludgeon, repeat.   After a while, they all blend into each other, but it must be said the scenes are produced skillfully.  We just need so many of them to get the point, but perhaps it's being faithful to the novel in a more precise way.