The new adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front opens in a really interesting way.
We begin in nature, with trees, animal life,
and though it doesn’t exactly depict a blissful harmony,
there is a certain quietness,
a balance that breaks the moment we cut to-
Here, the world of Man doesn’t just feel disproportionately violent,
but also completely distinct from what we saw moments before.
The green forest is replaced by a barren, grey landscape.
The stillness is disrupted by mechanical sounds of gunfire and artillery.
What the movie seems to be saying here,
or rather; what it seems to be asking here is that if whatever this is has nothing to do with anything natural,
then what is driving it?
Why are we doing this?
In this brief introduction, All Quiet on the Western Front captures what might be the fundamental purpose of anti-war cinema,
which in my opinion, is not just to discourage the viewer from wanting to participate in warfare
by showing the reality of combat as terrifying, brutal,
and as a force that, even if it doesn’t kill you outright, will leave you as good as dead nevertheless.
Because if that were the case, then this movie would have clearly achieved that goal,
and I could end this video right here.
But no, although depicting the true nature of warfare is obviously important,
I think the issue is much more complex than that.
I think it’s not just about the way violence is shown, but more so about the way it’s contextualized,
the way it’s, intentionally or unintentionally, either condemned or redeemed by what the overall story communicates to the audience.
This, I think, is the real purpose of anti-war cinema;
does it deconstruct violence in a meaningful way?
And more generally; does it provide us with broader insights into the nature of war?
Do we learn anything new about how human beings go from here...
to here?
When it comes to All Quiet on the Western Front,
the short answer is, yes, but with a few reservations,
which I also want to address not to discredit the movie,
because again, I definitely think it’s a good movie and a worthwhile update to the original story,
but rather because I believe that, especially with this genre,
it is so important to continuously and critically evaluate what exactly it communicates and how we relate ourselves to it.
The most important thing that All Quiet does really well in my opinion is that it clearly and critically interrogates its own hero system.
I already made an hour long video essay on war movies in which I discuss this concept.
You might want to check out that video for the full context, because it does get somewhat complicated,
but the gist of it is that hero systems are cultural constructs formed within a society to offer its members a path towards heroic elevation.
In its most dramatic form, it pretty much looks like this:
It’s basically a way for people to give their lives heroic meaning and purpose,
and when you look at this scene here in isolation, it does seem quite inspiring.
But there’s a sequence before this one that already frames this grand promise as something more insidious.
Remember that soldier from the introduction?
It’s not hard to imagine that he too was, at some point, a cheerful young man eager to fulfill his heroic destiny.
Well, he didn’t make it,
and we get to see what this really means as his body is unceremoniously stripped and discarded,
just one casket among many.
His clothes are transported back, washed, and fixed up to be repurposed for;
With very few words, the movie communicates that these young men,
though being made to believe that they were going on a grand heroic journey,
are actually more like lambs going to the slaughter,
fresh disposable bodies in a war machine designed to turn human lives into suffering and death.
Being set in the First World War,
the historical context also does a lot of the heavy lifting here when it comes to deromanticizing warfare as a stage for heroism.
The First World War was notorious for its trench warfare,
for the endless cycle of going back and forth over relatively small stretches of land,
which, after being continuously bombarded, after continuously being fed with death and decay,
turned into a devastated, poisoned landscape that just screams senselessness,
that immediately tells us that here nothing is gained, that this is a war for nothing.
Indeed, once the soldiers reach the actual front,
it doesn’t take long for the disillusionment about their heroic destiny hits them.
Now, I think that at this point, showing the reality of warfare is not really that big of a revelation anymore.
If anything, it’s an expectation.
We know that combat is bloody and brutal,
and that survival is mostly a matter of chance, not of skill.
We know that in war, death can befall any soldier randomly, and often without a real heroic significance.
In fact, I’d even say that modern war movies are more inclined to overstate rather than understate this,
as if they’re trying to say “oh you think war is hell, just wait until you’ve seen mine,”
which as a result, sometimes feels like warfare is turned into a spectacle again,
albeit a more perverted inversion of the kind that heroically glamorizes.
I wanted to address this because even though I wouldn’t say All Quiet is straight up guilty of this,
I do feel it threads closely to that line, and slightly crosses it occasionally.
But first off, a few things I do really like:
one; despite the fact that showing the reality of combat has pretty much become par for the course,
All Quiet nevertheless does this really well.
I wished it focused a little bit more on non-combat casualties,
the ones who died from disease, infection, and so on,
but overall, it depicts violence and death as chaotic, random, and as mostly pointless,
as a waste of human life, rather than a heroic elevation of it.
Two; the movie generally depicts dead bodies with dignity,
it really gives us a sense that these were once human beings, not just heaps of flesh needlessly gored up for shock value.
And three; combat scenes don’t just depict the objective reality of warfare, but also the emotional one.
Whether it’s the dread of anticipating violence,
the fear and terror that is experienced during it,
or the trauma that comes afterwards,
All Quiet really captures the harrowing emotions that the soldiers go through.
That being said,
I do want to make a more critical note regarding the cinematic language that is used during some of the combat sequences, especially the last one.
Here, we follow Paul on a final assault against his opponents.
But what do we really see here?
As in; what does the camera really emphasize?
It is, for the most part, a single take that follows Paul as he tries to make his way through the battlefield.
Basically, my issue here is that this feels too much like the language of action movies.
Just look at how often the long shot is used nowadays in these kind of movies,
and for good reason; they clearly capture the stunt work and simply look really cool.
But they also tend to focus on the hero,
as in; the camera is literally centered on the main protagonist.
And I’m just not sure how well that fits in a war movie.
There’s an argument to be made that it connects us more closely to the main character, not unlike the way 1917 did this.
But why I think this worked so well in that movie is because it didn’t actually have a lot of combat,
and instead used its continuous shot to ground us in the broader experience that soldiers went through.
And more generally, an important quality of anti-war cinema, especially when there are a lot of combat sequences,
is that it also emphasizes the humanity of the other; that it de-individualizes warfare.
To be fair, All Quiet does have an excellent scene that does exactly this;
in this classic moment from the book, and which was also part of the earlier adaptation,
Paul mortally wounds an enemy soldier when he is suddenly overcome by the implications of this act,
by the fact that he just killed another human being,
someone just like him with a family that loves him, and that is waiting for him to come back home.
It’s a classic scene for a reason,
it beautifully and heartbreakingly communicates the humanity that is at stake here,
the humanity that is so easily lost in war.
And perhaps it is because this scene was so effective,
that I felt somewhat letdown by that final sequence where I did not feel that same weight of lost humanity,
where it felt like I was just watching an action scene that follows a singular hero while the people he kills carelessly fall away off screen.
And also, it didn’t have to be this way, there’s more than one way to film violence and action.
For contrast, look at the combat scenes in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai,
and how, every time one of the Samurais kills a bandit, there is a brief cutaway shot to that character.
From a cinematography point of view, what this does is it equalizes the act of killing with the act of dying,
it adds that moment of attention, even if just briefly, to the fact that a human being just lost his life.
An even better example, at least in my opinion, can be found in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line,
where during one its climactic combat sequences,
the camera isn’t fixated on one character, but instead chaotically moves through the scene,
as if it is searching for something that makes sense,
but that unfortunately, can only find…
It's this kind of attention, this deliberateness, that I felt was missing a little bit from the cinematic language of All Quiet on the Western Front.
Again, it wasn’t a dealbreaker for me, but in the spirit of continuously and critically evaluating the art of anti-war cinema, I did want to bring it up.
Now, so far, we’ve been focusing on the perspective of the soldiers,
on those who were actually down there in the mud, those who suffered and died,
but if you really want to explore the nature of war, their story is never the full story.
And it is here, that All Quiet on the Western Front makes an interesting change to the original story.
Because aside from Paul and his friends, we also see the story of Matthias Erzberger,
the German writer and politician who tried to negotiate a peace and who eventually signed the armistice on Germany’s behalf.
Historically speaking, this wasn’t an act without controversy,
because although it ended the First World War,
it also planted what were arguably the first seeds for the second one as German nationalists would go on to use the armistice,
which they saw as unjust, even traitorous, as fuel to their rising fire.
“We included this storyline,” – as director Edward Berger explained –
“to not really tell that story, but to hint at what was going to come next.”
It’s a perspective that was excluded from the original book, because,
well, when it was written in 1928, it simply didn’t exist yet.
But knowing what we know now, knowing how the war to end all wars was only the precursor to an even greater one,
I can see how it does add extra weight to the story.
Personally, however, what I liked most about this diversion from the original is that it provided us with a gateway into the upper class,
into the world of those who are actually pulling the strings and who, in many ways,
are the ones who were truly deciding the fates of young men like Paul and his fellow soldiers.
The juxtaposition between the dreadful living in the trenches and the lavish luxury enjoyed by these men in power is a bit on the nose,
but I believe it is nevertheless important to show the distinction.
For while it is relatively easy to invoke sympathy for the soldiers suffering on the battlefield,
I think it is just as important to go beyond that, to really deconstruct the broader context that got them there in the first place.
Because it is here that war becomes more than just tragic, it becomes absurd.
By including this story, we see a glimpse of what lies beyond those who make grand promises of heroism,
we see men in power act not out of virtue, nor out of selflessness.
Instead we see stubbornness, vindictiveness, carelessness.
We see purposeless symbolical meaning take precedence over what is actually best for the soldiers,
Which leads us into the movie’s final sequence.
Here, just as in the beginning, we get another speech to rile everyone up for one last push, one last heroic effort.
But this time, we truly feel the emptiness of the words, the cruelty even.
The hero system that once got Paul and his friends to sign up with excitement has been rendered completely powerless,
and revealed for the lie that it always had been.
Nevertheless, the soldiers once more go into battle.
And it is here that the movie makes another important change to the original story,
one that I personally consider to be its only true misstep.
Because although the ending we get here,
with Paul being killed literally seconds before the armistice goes into effect, is certainly a heartbreaking one,
it is also one that, to me, gave it too much significance.
Not heroic significance, but rather a tragic inversion of it.
And the real issue with that is that the final sentiment became too much about Paul as a specific individual,
about this one particular soldier who was just a moment away from going home,
which in some ways feels like the opposite of what the original did.
Because in the novel, Paul also dies, but the details of his death are left unspecified.
What we do get, however, is an important piece of context,
one that, as a side note, is also where the title of the story gets its meaning from.
“He fell in October, 1918,” – the novel goes –
“on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front,
that the army report confined itself to the single sentence:
All quiet on the Western Front.”
What I love about this ending is that Paul’s death is specifically framed as insignificant,
and as such, it does not only make us feel sad about him as an individual,
but also about all the other soldiers like him,
all those who died in a war that was so destructive that their deaths weren’t even noticed,
all those who were made to believe they were going to write history,
but who ended up being violently erased from it.
While it does not completely stick the landing, the new adaptation, I think, does achieve this sentiment in its overall experience.
All Quiet on the Western Front is a harrowing journey into the reality of war,
an effective deconstruction of its contextual elements,
and, perhaps most importantly,
a thought-provoking continuation of the all-important discussion regarding one of humanity’s deepest struggles,
one that we should never take for granted.
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