Directed by Edward Berger

Screenplay by Ian Stokell, Lesley Paterson, Edward Berger

Based on All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Produced by Daniel Brühl, Daniel Marc Dreifuss, Malte Grunert, Clive Barker, Marc Toberoff, Lesley Paterson, Ian Stokell

Starring

Felix Kammerer as Paul Bäumer

Albrecht Schuch as Stanislaus “Kat” Katczinsky

Aaron Hilmer [de] as Albert Kropp

Moritz Klaus as Franz Müller

Adrian Grünewald [de] as Ludwig Behm

Edin Hasanovic [de] as Tjaden Stackfleet

Daniel Brühl as Matthias Erzberger

Thibault de Montalembert as General Ferdinand Foch

Devid Striesow as General Friedrichs

Andreas Döhler [de] as Lieutenant Hoppe

Sebastian Hülk [de][5] as Major Von Brixdorf

Cinematography James Friend

Edited by Sven Budelmann

Music by Volker Bertelmann

Production company Amusement Park

Distributed by Netflix

Country Germany

Languages German & French (Netflix has excellent English dub)

Futility

By Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?

There are many books, films, poems and stories that detail the horror and futility of war, but even after nearly a century, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front stands alone at the apex of that grim pyramid. The first movie based on the novel was made in 1930, and it, too, is regarded as a great monument to the depraved idiocy of war.

Edward Berger’s 2022 remake, uniquely German, joins the novel and the first movie as a searing, horrifying testament to the folly of The Great War. In some ways, it’s even truer to its source material, not hesitating to pull punches. In other ways, less so, in that it cuts away to the talks leading to the Armistice of Compiègne, showing that the German position was becoming rapidly more untenable, and that the French were in an unforgiving mood. Forty thousand troops a day were dying, thousands more injured and wounded, typhus, dysentery, and influenza rampant. Meanwhile, the men who could end all this smoked cigars, drank brandy, and complained that the pastries were a day old. Given the utter and unremitting brutality of the battle scenes, the thematic apposition is jarring.

Berger’s sets, setting, makeup and effects are utterly amazing. He has no interest in sparing his audience, and he is right not to do so. Anything less would be a disservice to Remarque’s masterpiece. Even the intermittent sound track, a minimalist blast of five discordant horn notes adds to the sense of dread in inexorability that is the theme of the film.

Of course, the worst comes in the six hours between when the Armistice is signed and when it took effect, at 11am on 11/11/18. One bitter German general, presaging the anger and despair that led in just four years to the emergence of the little corporal, Adolph Hitler, sends his troops—including the three surviving central characters—in to an utterly pointless attack on the French, a gesture aimed, not at the French, but at the social democrats the General believed betrayed his country. Thousands of more lives were lost even as everywhere else along the lines, troops dropped their weapons and began a weary and heartfelt celebration.

Just by coincidence, this is being written on the tenth of November, and over the twenty five years that I have written political essays, I’ve returned to the Great War a number of times, including the Christmas Truce and the poems written by the increasingly disillusioned soldiers in the trenches. This time I began the review with one such, and will end it with another.

If you love peace, see this movie. The madness may never be defeated, but we can try to keep it contained.

And There Was a Great Calm

By Thomas Hardy

(On the Signing of the Armistice, 11 Nov. 1918)

I

There had been years of Passion—scorching, cold,
And much Despair, and Anger heaving high,
Care whitely watching, Sorrows manifold,
Among the young, among the weak and old,
And the pensive Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”

II

Men had not paused to answer. Foes distraught
Pierced the thinned peoples in a brute-like blindness,
Philosophies that sages long had taught,
And Selflessness, were as an unknown thought,
And “Hell!” and “Shell!” were yapped at Lovingkindness.

III

The feeble folk at home had grown full-used
To ‘dug-outs’, ‘snipers’, ‘Huns’, from the war-adept
In the mornings heard, and at evetides perused;
To day-dreamt men in millions, when they mused—
To nightmare-men in millions when they slept.

IV

Waking to wish existence timeless, null,
Sirius they watched above where armies fell;
He seemed to check his flapping when, in the lull
Of night a boom came thencewise, like the dull
Plunge of a stone dropped into some deep well.

V

So, when old hopes that earth was bettering slowly
Were dead and damned, there sounded ‘War is done!’
One morrow. Said the bereft, and meek, and lowly,
‘Will men some day be given to grace? yea, wholly,
And in good sooth, as our dreams used to run?’

VI

Breathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance
To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped,
As they had raised it through the four years’ dance
Of Death in the now familiar flats of France;
And murmured, ‘Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?’

VII

Aye; all was hushed. The about-to-fire fired not,
The aimed-at moved away in trance-lipped song.
One checkless regiment slung a clinching shot
And turned. The Spirit of Irony smirked out, ‘What?
Spoil peradventures woven of Rage and Wrong?’

VIII

Thenceforth no flying fires inflamed the gray,
No hurtlings shook the dewdrop from the thorn,
No moan perplexed the mute bird on the spray;
Worn horses mused: ‘We are not whipped to-day;’
o weft-winged engines blurred the moon’s thin horn.

IX

Calm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency;
There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;
Some could, some could not, shake off misery:
The Sinister Spirit sneered: ‘It had to be!’
And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, ‘Why?’

Source: Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems (Palgrave, 2001)