WHY REMAKE A 92-YEAR-OLD OSCAR-WINNING MOVIE? All Quiet on the Western Front director explains.

Despite their nearly 100-year gap, both movie versions of Erich Maria Remarque’s enduring 1929 novel are echoes of each other, due largely to their reliance on the book.

Young men are lured into battle by passionate speeches; the brutal reality of battle sinks in quickly as they scrounge for food and watch each other die; Paul, the protagonist played by a haunting Felix Kammerer, kills a Frenchman in hand-to hand combat and immediately regrets it; and in the end, there is only ignominious defeat.

But [Edward] Berger’s version reaches a new level of poignancy and even urgency given the tenor of the times.

It does so first by focusing on the way in which young German boys were turned into cannon fodder by adults spouting nationalist dogma, and secondly by spotlighting how Germany’s capitulation at the end of World War I – and the sense of shame in defeat stoked by politicians – gave rise years later to Nazism and ultimately World War II.

In that, says Berger, is a lesson for us all in 2022.

“I’m sensitive to nationalist movements, so with the rise of Trump and Brexit and the far right in Hungary and Italy, it’s important to remember that 100 years ago, this all led us to a catastrophe,” he says.

Which seems odd considering Trump started no new wars while in office, Brexit seems like a pretty benign decoupling from the legalistic yoke of the EU, and “Matteo Renzi, a former [Italian] prime minister who is liberal, threw cold water on the idea that `[Giorgia] Meloni is a fascist or a demagogue on CNN. ‘She’s my rival, we will continue to fight each other, but there is not a risk of fascism in Italy,’ he said. ‘It is absolutely fake news.’”