Then the praise for the movie became deafening when it received a leading 14 BAFTA nominations, tying the most ever received by a film not in English. The BAFTAs are not something I usually keep up with, but I caught this in a news brief on the radio and it obviously really registered. However, I still assumed the movie was not generally available to me, especially here in Australia, because I had not seen it anywhere or heard anyone talk about it.
Then yesterday I was listening to Flimspotting's live year-end wrap-up show, and Adam Kempenaar chose the film's opening scene as a candidate for his favorite opening of the year. In fact, I think he also selected it as his winner. And in the context of this, I learned that it was actually available on Netflix.
Sigh. One more two hour and 30 minute film to fit in before my Tuesday deadline.
I made quick work of it by actually getting to it that very afternoon, during what we call "quiet time" in my house. I set up the projector in the garage so as not to impede my younger son's quiet time, which is usually conducted in our living room. (My older son and my wife favor their own bedrooms for "quiet time.")
There's no doubt this is a really good movie. But as I was watching it, all I could think about was that I'd seen it all before.
"You've seen one, you've seen 'em all" is a dangerous sentiment specifically when it comes to the movies, where we all know that the only six main stories in existence are being told over and over again. It's rare you see something that isn't a lot like something you've seen before. (The other movie I watched yesterday, the anime film Inu-Oh, might be an exception.)
But specifically with war movies, it's starting to feel like I have, indeed, seen them all.
Maybe this sentiment feels doubly so with All Quiet on the Western Front, which now has its third prominent adaptation of the original novel by Erich Maria Remarque. The first was of course the 1930 best picture winner, which I rewatched and discussed in this post back in 2020, and the second was a 1979 TV movie. It hasn't quite been another 50 years but we're now getting our third.
The real problem with a 2022 version of All Quiet on the Western Front is that they no longer make any war movies that make war look glamorous, as a contrast with what this movie is trying to do. Hollywood history is littered with movies that function more as propaganda and war boosterism than they function as a serious consideration of the consequences of war, but none recently. It would be morally derelict to make such a movie in the 21st century.
Therefore, every war movie shows the terrible fear of the soldier. Every war movie has faces blown off and limbs flying this way and that. Every war movie tells us the thing we already know: that war is hell.
What's more, the thing that once made All Quiet on the Western Front really distinctive, its irony, is also now a dime a dozen. And now I'll issue a SPOILER WARNING before continuing, in case you haven't seen any version of this story.
The thing that makes the ending of the novel so depressing is that the final deaths of the characters we've come to know occur after the armistice has already been announced, when everyone knows that it is simply a countdown to the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. At least in the version I saw yesterday, one particularly proud German general orders a final assault across the battlefield toward the French soldiers in their trenches, determined to lose the war with a final victory.
But the irony of the soldier who dies just before the war ends -- kind of like the detective who dies on his one last case before retirement -- has also been a feature of numerous war movies. All Quiet on the Western Front might have gotten there first, but others have flooded that space since.
So I don't feel like I myself can heap significant praise on Berger's version of this sort of movie, since it comes only three years after another version that does a lot of the same things, and also won a lot of praise at the time, probably finishing as the runner up for best picture at the Oscars. That's of course Sam Mendes' 1917.
Mendes' movie did offer us something that other war movies had not. It was made to appear as though it all occurred in one take, without any edits. Of course, there's an actual loss of time during the story when a character loses consciousness, and we all know that with a few exceptions (like another German film, Victoria), a movie can't really be done all in one take. But at least Mendes tried to make it seem like he had, just as Alejandro G. Inarritu had done with an actual best picture winner in Birdman.
What Mendes did in 1917 might not have been teaching us anything we didn't know about war, which prominent World War II movies like Saving Private Ryan were also working overtime to teach us, but it did create a reason for its own existence through its audacious technique.
I'm struggling to find that reason with All Quiet on the Western Front. So that means even if it looks great and sounds great and everything like that (many of those BAFTA nominations were technical), it still is ultimately telling me things I would expect to see in every war movie that gets made from now until I die.
I'll finish on one example.
There's a scene midway through the film when the main character, Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer), gets in a close combat fight with a French soldier, stabbing him repeatedly in the chest in a sunken part of the battlefield where they are not in the line of fire. Paul is then overcome by emotion. When he sees his enemy has not yet died, and apparently unwilling to go back to his knife, he tries jamming the man's mouth with mud. This just makes him cough, though. So he goes back and clears out the mud, opens the man's uniform to release some pressure, and wets a rag with water from a nearby puddle to drip it into the man's mouth, to quench his thirst in his final moments. When the man then dies, Paul is swept with a new wave of grief and regret.
As well as this scene is played, it feels like I could have telegraphed this sequence of events from the moment I saw Paul charge this other man. Is that because it happened in the 1930 filmed version of the novel, which I saw only three years ago, and therefore it's in the back of my mind? Or is it just the most efficient way possible to demonstrate the psychic toll on a young man who was in high school two months ago?
I spent all of All Quiet on the Western Front looking for a scene or sequence of events I could not telegraph, and that's the problem with most if not all war movies made today. It's always a valuable project, it seems, to remind us of the horrors of war. Any person in the audience could be considering these things for the first time.
But for film veterans like me ... I need more, and I'm not sure the prospects of getting it any time in the future, without a radical refocus of how we make war movies.
There is one thing this version has going for it that it does not share with the previous versions, which is that this story about German soldiers is finally being told by a German filmmaker, in the German language. That is probably the best reason for its existence, especially since Berger obviously had the ability to deliver on it.
Maybe it's things like this I'm going to have to hold on to if I want to feel something new and different from a war movie. But they aren't enough for me to call this one of the best movies of the year.
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