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Life in the Trenches: Film Review of All Quiet on the Western Front
By Geoff Carter
Since the 1998 release of the Steven Spielberg’s groundbreaking epic Saving Private Ryan, war films have undergone a number of profound stylistic transformations. Spielberg’s use of desaturated color, alternating camera speeds, flattened lenses, blood-spattered lenses, and shaky hand-held camera effects (courtesy of the Clairmont Camera Image Shaker) have provided a harrowing and realistic view of battle that have fascinated and sometimes shocked viewers and provided other filmmakers an entirely new palette with which to work.
While gore and violence are nothing new to film, Ryan placed them in an entirely different context. During the D-Day landing sequence, audiences witnessed arms and legs being blown off, eviscerations, and blood flowing in scarlet rivulets to the ocean. Arbitrary death rained down on every part of the beach. The initial sequence of the D-Day landing was so harrowing—and so realistic—that some veterans who were there that day had to leave the theater. Its influence on subsequent films like 1917, Dunkirk, Hacksaw Ridge, Letters from Iwo Jima, and others cannot be underestimated.
Since its release, war films have adopted many of Spielberg’s techniques—and sensibilities. The latest movie in this line of hyperealistic and disturbing wartime narratives is All Quiet on the Western Front, a tale of a young German soldier’s harrowing experiences of trench warfare of World War I. While the main story of Saving Private Ryan is framed by Ryan’s return to Normandy fifty years after the fact, All Quiet starts with a young soldier dying in a futile and ill-fated charge across No Mans Land. He is—not surprisingly—killed in battle. Then viewers watch as his uniform is collected, washed, repaired, folded, and then finally reissued to new recruit Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer) who finds the previous owner’s name sewn into the collar. The young man attempts to tell the quartermaster that he has been issued the wrong uniform but—after the tag is ripped out and thrown to the ground with dozens of others—he sends young Paul on his way.
Like the blood on the uniform, the memory of the first soldier is washed away and discarded. It is a grim foreshadowing of Paul’s—and many others’—fate. Having enlisted with schoolmates Ludwig (Adrian Grunewald), Albert (Aaron Hilmer), and Franz (Moritz Klaus) after being inspired an exhilarating appeal to patriotic duty by one of his professors at school, the boys march with the swaggering confidence that they will be in Paris within days. In the trenches, they meet veteran soldier who takes the new recruits under his wing. The truth hits them with brutal force as they are hit with an artillery barrage that shakes them to their very core. Ludwig dies the first night and the rest quickly realize that their dreams of glory are merely pathetic illusions.
The sudden revulsion and terror experienced by these young men is tempered by a respite from the front lines, when they are bivouacked in the bucolic French countryside where they meet Kat (Albrecht Schuch), a veteran soldier. Franz, the only boy who is not overwhelmed by the sight of a young woman, manages to hook up with one of the local girls. Later that night, he returns with a tale of conquest and a memento, a scarf the girl had given him. The boys take turns holding the scarf, remembering desires and dreams long since buried under the horrors of war. At one point, Kat and Paul sneak away and pilfer a goose from a local farmhouse.
As Paul and his comrades are dealing with the immediate mortal consequences of war, a parallel narrative of the film follows the attempts of Matthias Erzberger, (Daniel Bruhl) a German official who is attempting to negotiate a ceasefire with recalcitrant French high command. The delegations meet but are stalemated in their negotiations by the French stubbornly refusing to meet any German demands. And so the war rages on. For Paul, horrors pile upon horrors. Assigned to search for a deployment of sixty new recruits, they discover them lying dead from a gas attack because they had removed their masks too early.
Paul’s unit is ordered to attack. They manage to breach the French lines but are soon routed by a tank attack. Albert is killed and Franz is separated from the rest of the squad. In a horrific scene, Paul and Kat stumble onto French quarters in their trench loaded with food. As the tanks approach, shaking the foundations of the underground chambers, scores of rats pour out from beneath the walls and floor, a testament to the disgusting conditions all the soldiers lived under. After fleeing the tanks, Paul encounters and stabs a French soldier, whose slow demise horrifies and sickens Paul. He apologizes to his foe repeatedly for his actions before returning to his own unit.
All Quiet on the Western Front is mainly the story of one man’s—a boy’s—descent into the madness and abjection of war. Director Edward Berger—drawing on some of the stylistic and technological innovations initiated by Spielberg and enhanced by others—has created a grim and disgusting world of mud, blood, and despair. The battle scenes are horrendously realistic. Men are dismembered, run over by tanks, and drowned in pools of execrable mud. These spectacles are paralleled only by the horror, fear, and resignation of the men who are compelled to fight in it. If Berger’s intention—as was author Erich Marie Remarche’s—was to chronicle and communicate the horrors of war, he has succeeded admirably, but his inclusion of the parallel narrative of high-level negotiations to end the war, and the egoistic selfishness of those whose pride would not let them compromise, underlines the futility and meaninglessness of the soldiers’ sacrifice. This is particularly evident in the final scenes of the film.
Berger’s production design, tracking shots, and cinematography unilaterally serve to emphasize the thematics here—there is nothing noble, heroic, or glorious about these trenches. They are disgusting and filthy pits of abjection and despair.
It is particularly ironic that cautionary tales like All Quiet on The Western Front use the same tools as films extolling heroism, sacrifice, and other virtues found on the battlefield. Hacksaw Ridge and Saving Private Ryan look remarkably similar to All Quiet, and while both of the former films document the grisly and terrible effects of war, they are more about courage, sacrifice, and duty. Battle scenes emphasize these noble qualities.
All Quiet on the Western Front is not about anything noble. It is all about the meaninglessness of these young men’s—boys’—sacrifices. Paul and his cohort are used and discarded like the nametags from the uniforms of dead soldiers. They die while generals engage in chest puffing and pissing contests.
All Quiet on the Western Front is a film well worth seeing. Felix Kammerer’s depiction of Paul’s descent into a compellingly gripping numbness is so well done that it’s difficult to watch his spiraling despair. The entire ensemble offers a beautifully calibrated performance.
It is unfortunate that these anti-war messages rarely seem to successfully resonate with the politicians, generals, and youngsters who would nobly give all for their cause. From world wars to Vietnam to Afghanistan to the Ukraine, we have been unable to learn the lessons from the millions of souls lost to the hubris of war.