All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Rated R for being an incredibly brutal war movie.  Many war movies are meant to be uncomfortable.  All Quiet on the Western Front is known for being intentionally anti-war.  As such, it pulls no punches and shows the gore and horrors of war throughout.  It's kids dying horrible, horrible deaths throughout the film.  Nothing about it is pleasant.  It almost even goes too far at times. R.

DIRECTOR: Edward Berger

Why do war movies have to be so long?  I don't understand it.  I know that we found the one exception to the rule, but I can't remember which one it is.  Before I go into a long diatribe about All Quiet on the Western Front, I do want to state that this movie would have been way more effective if it was 30-40 minutes shorter.  At a certain point, it becomes, "I get it.  The war is terrible."

A few years ago, I had a small class that had actually gotten through all my scheduled content.  This isn't something that happens very often, especially with an English class.  I gave them practically carte blanche on what they wanted to do with their last month before graduation.  Whatever part of the literary canon they wanted to study, I'd make up a lesson for that, assuming it was appropriate.  In that class, I had a military nut.  He would daily cite specifications for different tanks while inserting these tanks into historical military strategy to discuss how outcomes would change.  It was this student who recommended All Quiet on the Western Front.  I didn't want to be the one who broke it to him that All Quiet on the Western Front was infamously an anti-war story.  If anything, the evil liberal in me was secretly relishing being the genie who gave more than he bargained for. Realistically, he probably still really enjoyed the war elements of the book and didn't change his philosophy on war based on what the book offered him.  I believe in the power of literature, but I also know what is realistic and what is (pardon the pun) a bridge too far.  But luckily for me, that made me actually quite knowledgable about All Quiet on the Western Front.  I mean, it was recent enough for me to write about the 1930 edition of the same movie.

I would have a hard time discussing which is better.  It's what I tell my students not to do when writing.  But I also know that this is a blog that is written very stream-of-consciousness style.  In terms of cinema, the new movie is almost next level.  While I would never put it on my favorite movies list, I acknowledge that it is a powerhouse of a film.  Gripped with emotion and filmed fantastically cinematically, I could show scenes from that movie on how to properly film war.  But it is also way too long.  There's probably a problem when such a harrowing story becomes boring and tedious.  I know, wars are long.  Often, a long runtime is meant to make the audience feel the impatience that the soldiers feel as well. But as Paul becomes desensitized to war, so do I feel watching All Quiet on the Western Front, which is a real problem to the mission statement to the film.  I'm supposed to prep people for the horrors and instead, I'm just just waiting for the movie to be older.  Also, and this isn't so much a criticism as it is something that one probably needs to know: the movie veers off from the original book (which it initially holds great reverence for) and produces its own third act, also weaving in elements of the greater world outside of Paul.  It's a choice and I think it is meant to create a sense of epic scale.  But for a story about The Great War, All Quiet on the Western Front is meant to be quite an intimate tale.

Paul as a protagonist, in all versions of the story, is almost lacking a sense of characterness.  It's on purpose.  I'm not criticizing any version of Western Front.  It's just an odd experience.  I hate throwing around the term "anti-war propaganda" (despite the fact that we need more anti-war propaganda!), but Paul is the ultimate avatar for the audience.  Written after what was meant to be the war-to-end-all-wars, it was a signal that war was not glorious.  One of my favorite scenes from any war movie is the pro-war propaganda that is spewed at these children. The notion that one is bred to defend one's country is something that is still wired into children today.  The new version is missing my favorite part of the story.  In All Quiet in the Western Front, Paul is indoctrinated by an older teacher, who talks about the glory of the fatherland.  That first part is in the new movie and I adore it.  All these kids are riled up and jazzed to go fight for one's country.  Cool.  There's a quick turn to realize that there's nothing sexy about being in a foxhole.  Death is just the norm in these places.  People tell the incoming recruits that they won't last the night and, in a lot of cases, their prophecies of doom are correct. 

But Paul, as our avatar, survives quite a bit of the war.  He's actually given the opportunity to go back to that teacher and shame him with the realities of war.  Now, this part doesn't happen in the new version.  I kind of hate that.  Like, it's so important to the inclusion of the brainwashing in the first scene.  I know he's not a boomer.  Heck, he's probably generation-less in the sense that he came from before we named generations.  But I love that basically, Gen Z is taking down a Boomer.  (Did you read what I just read before that inflammatory sentence?) There's something really cathartic about the entire notion of confronting those who are brainwashing others. Listen, I liked the new Western Front.  But there's something that's lost by not having the scene of confronting the teacher.  If the message of All Quiet on the Western Front is to avoid war at all costs because it will rob you of everything, that's a message of avoidance. It's telling us "not" to do something.  That's a pretty passive role for the audience.  But if Paul is the everyman avatar, having him confront the criminal teacher is something that can be done.  When Paul confronts his teacher, he's shutting down the narrative that war is glorious.  Instead, war is seen as something that is inevitable, despite the fact that Paul forges a parent's signature allowing him into war at a young age.  

But I'm already starting to see a trend with this year's Academy Awards.  Maybe it's an every year thing, but it seems like movies this year are bloated brutality.  The world is a terrible place.  I've said it for a while.  Hopeful Tim is dead.  That being said, I don't know why we have the need to keep punching our protagonists over-and-over.  It's not like there's a ton of happy things in All Quiet on the Western Front as a novel.  But the punches keep coming towards Paul.  (Trust me, All Quiet on the Western Front is not the worst offender this year.) But this movie really stresses that the notion of hope is a foolish one. One thing that the new movie does is really toy with the notion of hope as a myth.  Paul dies in the novel too.  But this is one of those movies that stresses that war will get everyone.  Because the film plays with the notion of time and a finish line, it just messes with us that Paul is the last casualty of the war.  He's war's greatest victim (again, representing the audience), because he survived so long and he saw that the end was in sight. But he watched everyone die before he did.  He had to suffer all through the war.  He could taste home and then that was denied him,  It's almost a bit too cruel. In the novel (and I only kind of remember this), it's remarkably boring that Paul dies.  The message isn't that Paul the Avatar will die nearly tasting freedom.  It's in those little moments.  Paul cannot get a spectacular death as he does in the film. Instead, the mundaneness of his death is an insult to injury

Maybe only Germany could have made this movie.  It must be really odd to be a German and to be the world's bad guy for two major films.  But the notion of making an anti-war movie from the German perspective is really telling of what the German cultural identity must entail.  I'm looking both at the perspective of Remarque and of Berger as well.  Remarque is doing something that Steinbeck is really known for: commenting on things that he lived through.  But Germany in 2022 is running into the same things most Western countries are dealing with right now and that's the notion of extremism.  I don't know if I'll be alive for when America starts telling the stories of its atrocities as cautionary tales to other countries, but that's what All Quiet on the Western Front offers.  As much as I see people wearing pro-gun shirts and I hear threats of war and violence as an American, we keep trotting forward not understanding that war is in no way sexy.  It's one of those things that should make us wrech at the notion of it.  Yet, it is glorified time and again. There are those in Germany (for all of the radicalism that is returning to all Western countries) who at least can understand what it means to be German and to be sattled with the burden of history.

It's a good movie.  It's a really good movie.  But it is long and there's a lot of bleak storytelling going on this year.  But that being said, the movie works as a whole. Yeah, it runs into the problems that many war movies run into.  But if you are into war films and are cool with the notion that war is terrible, this might really do it for you.