"All Quiet on the Western Front," directed by Edward Berger, is hardly the first movie to argue — quite persuasively — that war is hell. It is, however, the first filmed adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's seminal World War I novel in which the Germans actually speak German. The book's prior screen incarnations — Lewis Milestone's Oscar-winning 1930 film, Delbert Mann's 1979 telefilm — featured platoons of English-speaking actors cast as men with names like Kropp, Müller and Tjaden, a choice that made for some cognitive dissonance but scarcely mitigated their dramatic power or purpose. And that purpose — to de-glorify the horrors of trench warfare, mock the foolish vanity of nationalism and condemn the futility and cruelty of mass death — is one that should transcend barriers of language and culture anyway.
Even so, this solid, stirring new adaptation, which will represent Germany in the Oscar race for international feature, sets a noteworthy precedent. There's an undeniable power in seeing Remarque's once-serialized novel — an antiwar statement so definitive that it was duly banned by the Nazis a few years after its 1929 publication — brought to the screen in its original tongue. The sight of actual German actors in these roles can only lend authority to Remarque's lament for a generation of men — his generation — who were "destroyed by the war," even as it serves to bolster the movie's horrifyingly visceral realism.
The technical virtuosity of this "All Quiet on the Western Front" is apparent from its nightmarish opening vision of a charred battlefield strewn with barricades and bodies, a graveyard of broken flesh and twisted metal. It's 1917, and thousands of German and French soldiers have already died here, casualties of a years-long struggle on each side to gain just a few hundred meters of ground. In a bold early flourish, Berger (who wrote the script with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell) tracks the progress of a dead man's uniform as it's stripped from its wearer's body, transported, laundered and pressed back into commission — one tiny, reusable cog in the grinding machinery of war.
