Rating: 9.5/10 | Director: Edward Berger | Runtime: 147 min | Released: October 2022 (Netflix)

Erich Maria Remarque published All Quiet on the Western Front in 1929. It has been adapted for film before, most famously in Lewis Milestone’s 1930 version, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Edward Berger’s 2022 German-language Netflix adaptation is not only the best version of this story on film, it is one of the best war films ever made. It won four Academy Awards including Best International Feature Film, and it deserved every one of them.

What Berger Does Differently

Previous adaptations told this story from an Allied or neutral perspective. Berger tells it from the German side, which shifts something fundamental. These are not enemy soldiers. They are teenagers who were told the war was adventure and glory and discovered it was mud and rats and the slow mechanical grinding of human beings into nothing. Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) enlists with his school friends in 1917, full of enthusiasm, and the film then systematically removes every illusion he brought with him.

The film intercuts Paul’s story at the front with scenes of German armistice negotiations in 1918, which adds a layer of structural cruelty that the novel does not have. You watch men in suits discussing surrender terms in a train car, the German general insisting on one final offensive before the 11am armistice deadline because he cannot tolerate the humiliation of stopping without a final attack. And you know what that means for Paul. Berger cuts between the two lines throughout the film, and it is devastating in a way that is almost unbearable by the end.

The Craft

James Friend’s cinematography should have won the Oscar over everything else nominated. The battle sequences are among the most technically accomplished war photography in cinema history: the tanks emerging from the fog, the chaos in the trenches, the silence after an artillery barrage stops. Berger and Friend shoot the French countryside in grays and browns and the specific exhausted light of a place that has been fought over for four years, and there is nothing beautiful about any of it. That is the point.

Felix Kammerer in the lead is asked to carry the film almost entirely through physical transformation. He begins the film as a boy who looks like what he is, a teenager who has not yet had enough hard experience to know what fear looks like. By the final act, he looks like a different person, and Kammerer makes that transformation convincing without resorting to obvious actors’ tricks. The eyes do it. You believe him.

What the Film Says

Remarque’s novel was banned in Germany in 1933 and publicly burned by the Nazis because it told the truth about what the war had actually cost. Berger’s film is made in that same spirit of refusal. It does not permit the viewer any distance from what it is showing. There are no speeches about sacrifice or honor. There is no explanation that gives the suffering meaning. A boy goes to war because he was told to and he dies because it wasn’t over yet and that is all there is to say about it.

The final sequence is the best and worst thing about the film. It is not a spoiler to say that the novel ends at 11am on November 11, 1918, and that Berger does not soften what that means. If you know the ending of the story, the last twenty minutes are still devastating. If you don’t, prepare yourself.

All Quiet on the Western Front is the kind of film that earns its length and its brutality. It is not easy to watch and it is not meant to be. It is one of the finest anti-war films in the history of the medium.