“All Quiet Ahead” (“Im Westen nichts Neues”), managed to win four Oscars last Sunday in Los Angeles. The Netflix production won Best International Film, Cinematography, Production Design, and Makeup and Styling.
The feature film by the German Edward Berger is broadly speaking an anti-war document. Based on the 1929 novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque, this is the third film adaptation of the story. It is the first to be filmed in German.
The first premiered in 1930 and was directed by the American Lewis Milestone. The second was a television movie, released in 1979, directed by the also American Delbert Mann, winner of the Golden Globe and the Emmy.
Berger’s new version offers a more spectacular, brutal and bloody approach than the previous ones. Some critics point out, yes, that it lacks the depth of the Milestone film.
The film debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2022. A month later it was released on the Netflix streaming platform.
The history
The film narrates the events through the eyes of Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), a young 17-year-old German student who enlists, along with a group of friends and without family support to do so, to fight in the First World War. . They all end up there seduced by the gimmicky speeches of an important military man.
But all their enthusiasm, marked by patriotism and camaraderie, ends when they reach the trenches on the front lines in northern France. Contrary to what they were told, that they would take Paris in six weeks, Paul and his friends Albert (Aaron Hilmer), Ludwig (Adrian Grunewald) and Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch) have to face the brutal reality of war, with death looming every minute.
The first sequence of the Netflix film leaves no doubt about its intentions to immerse the viewer in all the horror, destruction and confusion experienced by the young protagonists. The first sequence, in fact, opens with a landscape: a calm forest and mountains, apparently at dawn. A fox feeds on his mother. One shot, the camera pans up to the tall, peaceful treetops. Berger then cuts to an overhead view of drifting smoke, which clears to reveal a series of dead bodies. A barrage of bullets suddenly pierces the nearly still composition, and the camera pans around to show the full extent of the carnage and manure. That’s just the beginning.
The film has a parallel plot that highlights the opposing positions of the politician Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), who seeks a rapprochement to end the war and avoid more deaths, and General Friedrich (Devid Striesow), who intends to continue the fighting on behalf of of his wounded pride.
a loop of horror
With a duration of 2 hours and 29 minutes, according to Netflix, “All Quiet on the Front” is a visceral and heartbreaking proposal about the absurdity of war, the loss of ideals and the cruelty and insensitivity of those in command. . The central idea seeks to show at its best the bloody and repetitive nature of war: adolescents are sent to the front; they die horribly, and are betrayed by their rulers.
Another of the sequences, just before the credits, shows the footage of the dead as a soldier named Heinrich steps over the top and is immediately killed. His clothes are stripped from his body in a bloody mass of corpses, bagged, washed, altered, and sent back to the next recruit to fill his boots. It’s a horror story that will restart, like a loop, anywhere else.