Anticipation.
Erich Maria Remarque’s famous war novel gets a German-language makeover.
Enjoyment.
The movie equivalent of a military step: procedural and faceless, but interesting to observe.
In Retrospect.
The latest addition to Netflix’s war film landfill.
Here we go again. All Quiet on the Western Front ’22 is the first German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic war novel, not a remake of the 1930 Hollywood film of the same name. Although the filmmakers would have you believe this is an entirely fresh update, increasingly war films of this ilk are a dime a dozen on Netflix.
We find Paul (Felix Kammerer) cycling down the sparse cobbled streets of wartime Europe on his way to join the war effort. As a baby-faced 17-year-old he must lie about his age in order to enlist with his mates. When Paul is handed his uniform, he naively thinks it’s someone else’s – it has someone else’s name on it, after all. He swiftly becomes a shell of his former self as he traipses towards the Western Front, his friends by this point either estranged or dead, his youthful joie de vivre replaced by zombified attrition.
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The film is peppered with tender, albeit heavy-handed, metaphors for the loss of innocence experienced by young men like Paul: fox cubs snuggling up to their mother; a small beetle being encased in a matchbox. But any respite from the tub-thumping ‘this is war’ violence is short-lived. The film’s Netflix-ready sheen also renders much of the action coldly anonymous. For the most part, this is war-by-numbers.
Meanwhile, Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) and General Friedrich (Devid Striesow) clash behind the scenes over how the war should be fought: the former a jaded peacemaker; the latter a wannabe soldier who never fought. Brühl and Striesow display serious pathos, their faces as heavy and worn as the soldiers’ boots – by focusing on this pairing, director Edward Berger provides much-needed nuance away from Paul and his fellow soldiers.
Much like Volker Bertelmann’s score, however, which oscillates between delicate strings and stabbing synths, Berger’s film flits between minor and major keys without finding a harmonious balance. It’s a workmanlike addition to the anti-war genre, and you’ve almost certainly heard this tune before.
