DISQUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT:

The film thereby becomes an over-stylised surrealism and absurdism masquerading as unflinching “realism.” The filmmakers have abandoned all subtlety and nuance in pursuit of their message. The irony of the title, after all, might have been lost on the viewer if the main characters had died towards the end of the war, so Baümer in the film must perish in its final seconds. The conditions of the First World War were some of the most terrible in all of human history and yet the filmmakers still feel the need to exaggerate them. The film seems to suffer from an attraction to violence for its own sake, part of a contemporary movement which seems to assume that serious art must be grim, hyperviolent, and nihilistic. The relentlessly violent hellscape ultimately subverts its own message. The emotional climax of the book, for instance, occurs when Paul is trapped in a shell hole with a French soldier he has stabbed, and this first violent encounter with the enemy at close quarters forces him to come to terms with the other man’s humanity and with the terrible stupidity of war. In Berger’s film, Paul has already brutally killed hundreds of men by this stage and the scene loses its power.

Historical films generally struggle to adequately embrace the complex overdetermination of historical events. While they can powerfully represent history as an integrated process of individuals, conditions, and events, they are forced by the demands of drama to wrestle the multiplicity of the past into the present tense of a single narrative based around individuals. Historical films therefore tend to be unsuited to analysis. As Rosenstone has argued, they “cannot make general statements about revolution or progress. Instead, film must summarize, synthesize, generalize, symbolize—in images.” Yet, even given these inherent limitations, All Quiet particularly struggles to convey a realistic sense of history in motion. The film is not content with the book’s condemnation of the failures of authority, and so it makes those leaders deranged. Its most ridiculous scene involves a demented ultranationalist general, invented expressly for the film, forcing the soldiers into a deeply implausible attack on enemy lines just minutes before the armistice comes into effect. It is telling of the film’s general lack of nuance that Berger felt the need to create an entirely new plotline about high-level peace negotiations, presumably because he was worried that the mundane experiences of soldiers would not adequately convey the meaninglessness of war by themselves.

Lewis Milestone’s 1930 film starring Lew Ayers holds up surprisingly well. While, 2022’s All Quiet has its moments, like most modern remakes, it is no substitute for the original.