Many of Paul's classmates die or are injured shortly after reaching the front, notably Franz Kemmerich. They went through basic training, which they hated, under the despicable Sergeant Himmelstoss. It includes the back story of how Paul and his classmates were persuaded to volunteer by their high school teacher, Kantorek. The novel opens with Paul already on the front lines. PlotĪll Quiet on the Western Front describes the experiences of Paul Bäumer, a soldier in the German army of World War I. To this day, the novel continues to be part of curriculums at all levels in both Germany and the United States. It is one of the most widely read and well known novels to emerge from the First World War and has elicited both strong support and strong criticism for its portrayal of the experiences of that war's common soldier. Berger’s evocation of war and its horrors ultimately connects not at an intellectual level but where it truly matters: in the gut.All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque was first published in German as Im Westen Nichts Neues in 1928. But the beauty is unrelenting and finally claustrophobic. There are moments, admittedly, when All Quiet on the Western Front makes you feel as though you’re sitting through the most profound PlayStation cut-scene ever made. Paul staggers from a tunnel wearing a funeral shroud of white ash. French soldiers in dehumanising gas-masks wield flamethrowers. Two figures face off in a forest glade, framed by icy light. As personified by General Friedrich (Devid Striesow), they believe German honour must be safeguarded by continuing to toss teenagers into the meat grinder. He is opposed not just by the warmongering French but the Berlin military establishment. The tumult in the trenches is juxtaposed with the more orthodox account of German politician Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) and his desperate efforts to bring the conflict to a close to prevent further needless deaths. These vividly-drawn characters are suddenly rendered indistinguishable: a commentary, surely, on how war reduces young men to indistinguishable killing machines or targets. A grey haze descends whenever the machine guns strike up and Paul and his friends – portrayed with cheery charm by Aaron Hilmer, Adrian Grünewald and Albrecht Schuch – become snarled in smoke and mummified in muck. Berger and cinematographer James Friend have instead stitched together a series of vignettes that by turns convey the banality and the terrifying white-heat of the killing fields. The dreaminess leaves little room for a conventional plot (another parallel with 1917). That sci-fi factor reaches its inevitable conclusion when a phalanx of monstrously boxy French tanks rumble into view, sprung free from an HG Wells nightmare. But as soon as he reaches the frontline, he has the sense of entering a dystopian otherworld. He is introduced as a naïve adolescent who lies about his age to sign up with his equally patriotic pals. The film tells the story of 17-year-old German recruit Paul Bäumer (a charismatically mopey Felix Kammerer), across the span of the war. ![]() All Quiet on the Western Front instead feels like a Teutonic soulmate of Sam Mendes’s 1917, which likewise re-cast the ghastliness of the trenches as a haunting Neverland. ![]() Such clichés are absent from Berger’s take. That’s particularly true of the First World War, long distilled in the popular imagination into a mash-up of Wilfred Owen, Blackadder Goes Forth and Paul McCartney’s Pipes of Peace video. There’s always that extra zing when a war movie takes up the German perspective. Oh, what a lovely-looking war he has conjured. Violence may be hell, but Berger bathes it in a pulsating shimmer. To this Berger adds production values that have the blood-in-ears rush of a hyper-stylised video game. As with Lewis Milestone’s 1930 Hollywood adaptation, it faithfully communicates Remarque’s message about the futility of the conflict. The First World War is reimagined as a symphony of mud, teen angst and terrible beauty in All Quiet on the Western Front, Edward Berger’s stunning German-language retelling of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel.
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