147 min | R | October 28, 2022 | Netflix
Young German recruits march into the trenches of 1917 believing in glory. What waits is mud, gas, and a uniform passed down from the last boy who died in it. The men in the warm rooms make sure the killing runs right up to the final minute.
All Quiet on the Western Front opens in 1917 on the Western Front. Paul Bäumer and his schoolmates enlist in a wave of nationalist excitement and a speech about glory. They reach the trenches and find mud, gas, and corpses. Edward Berger’s German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel is not a story about heroism. It is a story about the industrial machinery that turns boys into raw material. The film tracks how a uniform gets stripped from a dead soldier, washed, repaired, and handed to the next recruit who will die in it.
Felix Kammerer plays Paul Bäumer in his first film role and registers the transformation from eager volunteer to hollowed survivor. He starts the film with a face full of expectation. He ends it with the blank stare of a man who has stopped believing in anything. Albrecht Schuch plays Stanislaus Katczinsky, the older soldier the recruits call Kat, with weary tenderness and a thief’s practicality. The friendship between Paul and Kat gives the film its only warmth, and Schuch makes it feel earned. Daniel Brühl plays Matthias Erzberger, the German official negotiating the armistice in a railway car, with the controlled desperation of a man who knows every hour of delay costs lives.
Berger directs from a script he wrote with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell. The screenplay invents the armistice negotiation thread and a final assault that do not appear in Remarque’s novel. The score builds around a pounding three-note motif that drops into scenes like an alarm and signals the machine grinding back into motion. The sound design separates the front into layers of distant artillery, close breathing, and sudden violence. The production design renders the mud and water of the trenches as a single gray element that swallows men whole.
The battlefield craft is relentless and the imagery lands. The film also trades Remarque’s interior voice for spectacle and a structure that cuts away from the soldiers to men in warm rooms. The contrast between the negotiating table and the trench is effective and obvious. Berger wants the irony of the final hours to carry the weight, and the invented ending pushes for a tragedy the material does not need. What remains is a powerful war film that mistakes its additions for depth.