German director Edward Berger’s Conclave became an unexpected hit this past awards season, garnering multiple Oscar nominations and taking home the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as four BAFTAs (including for Best Film) and a Golden Globe. But Berger is no stranger to big wins, having wowed critics and audiences alike with his acclaimed World War I drama All Quiet On The Western Front in 2022. Here’s why it’s worth a watch.
‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ Tells The Story Of Trench Warfare From The German Side

Image via Netflix

All Quiet On The Western Front revolves around the wartime experiences of Paul (Felix Kammerer), an idealistic young man who joins the German army along with a group of his friends and is sent off to the front. Most of the film takes place in 1918, in the closing days of the war, when Germany was losing and the Allies were making gains across the front. Paul’s duties range from finding lost soldiers to participating in an attack on Allied lines.
The B-plot is similarly arresting. With the German government collapsing, it fell to Ambassador Matthias Erzberger to convey the German wish for peace. In the film, as in real life, the negotiations take place in a nondescript railway carriage in a forest near Compiègne, where the German delegation is dismayed to find the Allies presenting them with a take-it-or-leave-it offer of an armistice. Daniel Brühl, perhaps best known to English-speaking audiences as Zemo in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War and for his work on TNT’s The Alienist, is pitch-perfect here as the put-upon Erzberger, who finds the courage to face down the hawks in the German camp who would prefer more bloodshed to a surrender.

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“Nothing slower than crawling. Nothing in the world.”

Edward Berger Crafts A Masterful Narrative

All Quiet On The Western Front had, of course, been filmed twice before, most successfully in the 1930 adaptation which bagged director Lewis Milestone an Oscar. But Berger’s version contains an extraordinary depth of feeling that sets it apart from the original. Paul’s trials are human ones. He struggles to keep his fingers warm or to find food (by 1918, the German army were facing severe food shortages). He also struggles with his conscience: having killed a French soldier in a hand-to-hand struggle within a shell crater, he is forced to sit with the body while the battle rages elsewhere and asks his dead enemy – who, he discovers from his possessions, has a wife and child – for forgiveness. Berger ensures these allusions to the comforts and joys of peacetime life – family, women, children – are always held at one remove. We hear of such things through letters received from wives back home; from stories of nights of passion related by Paul’s comrades; and vicariously, in the form of a poster of a model placed in a trench for retrieval when the battle is concluded.
The battle scenes are lifelike and horrifying, particularly the extended scene in which Paul and his comrades take an Allied position, only to retreat in disorder as the Allies counterattack with a lethal combination of tanks, artillery, planes, and soldiers armed with flamethrowers. Berger puts the viewer in the trench as massive tanks roll overhead. But it is the quieter moments that show how uninterested Berger is in filming a simple blood-and-guts war movie. From the strangely intimate opening scene, which features a fox and her cubs in a den away from the battlefield, to the two-handers between the vengeful General Friedrichs (Devid Striesow) and his adjutant in the incongruously luxurious surroundings of a French chateau, Berger takes the time to step away from the battlefield and hint at the narratives that will issue from the punitive peace the audience knows is coming.
Berger also found a dependable cinematographer in James Friend, who won an Oscar for his efforts. Some outlets may have accused the film of whataboutery in its seeming sympathy for the German perspective. This fails to see the wood for the trees. All Quiet On The Western Front doesn’t demonize the French over the Germans: it demonizes war itself. Regardless of what you think of the moral rectitude of Paul’s choices or those of his friends, it’s hard not to feel sorry for a young man whose sense of propriety is so at odds with what is required of him on the battlefield.
All Quiet On The Western Front is available to stream on Netflix.

All Quiet on the Western Front

Release Date

September 29, 2022

Runtime

143 Minutes

Director

Edward Berger

Writers

Edward Berger

Producers

Carl Laemmle Jr.

Felix Kammerer

Paul Bäumer

Albrecht Schuch

Stanislas ‘Kat’ Katczinsky