By YOSEF IBITAYO/ Staff Writer
The 2022 rendition of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” which premiered on Netflix on Oct. 28, does not open with a scene of marching soldiers or the husk of a building being torn down by artillery shells. Rather, it starts with a forest at dawn. Foxes rest in their foxhole. A kit nurses at its mother’s side. She raises her head at the sound of rumbling.
We leave the forest with its towering trees, forced into an ash-grey plain strewn with bodies. Bullets pop and whiz, shells burst upon the ground, and we move into the trenches. A man falls back into the trench, shot in the head.
A commanding officer forces a young soldier named Heinrich to his feet. Hans, Heinrich’s comrade, starts up the ladder, then falls back down, his face splattered and bloody. Heinrich is forced up and over the trenches, into no-man’s-land.
Men die all around him. Heinrich repositions, prepping his gun, and then the droning music starts, four minutes and 30 seconds into the film. He shoots three times, discards his jammed rifle, then charges with his spade and hacks at a Frenchman’s neck.
Heinrich, like 3 million others on the Western Front of World War I, does not survive past the title card of “Im Westen Nichts Neues.” Instead, it is his clothing, passed back through the industrialized human machine of the German war effort, that Felix Kammerer’s Paul Bäumer wears. These opening scenes, directed masterfully by Edward Berger, serve as a microcosm of the meaninglessness of “The Great War.”
Over the next two and a half hours, Berger explores this theme of futility through Paul’s eyes. However, where Erich Maria Remarque’s seminal novel balances life on and off the Front with the horrors of war, Berger’s adaptation does not.
Instead, he plays with a dual narrative. Paul and his classmates fight and die over the same small patch of no-man’s-land for four days in the film. Meanwhile, Daniel Bruhl’s Matthias Erzberger deliberates with France’s military command over what will become the Treaty of Versailles.
The point is immediate and harshly understood: while men in positions of power argue over politics, the common soldier dies an unnecessary death.
While Remarque’s work may echo this point in part, Berger’s decisions in reducing the last years of Paul Bäumer’s life takes weight away from the tragedy of World War I. The book ends with Paul dying a month before the Treaty is signed. In the film, he dies just after the Armistice takes place, stabbed in the back by a French bayonet.
A life is lost in the in-between, replaced by dramatic, violent highlights with no internal monologue or philosophical musings. It is all shock, and no awful thing is left behind.
Other Stories
The World of Khaos: Haunting Thrill
