All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

 

German director Edward Berger's All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) does tread along familiar ground, especially since Sam Mendes exceptional 1917 was released only three years before, but it handles the material of the Great War with new and terrible insights. 

Yes, the lost lives and physical devastation are in nearly every frame, in the bloody, muddy trenches and beyond, but Berger invests much of his story in the limpid eyes of Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer in his film debut), the young man who with two friends volunteers to fight for the fatherland, prodded by the speechifying of schoolmasters.

Paul's loss of innocence is immediate, but his connection to his friends (played by Aaron Hilmer and Moritz Klaus) sustains him. Berger takes what may have become a war film cliche -- the band of brothers -- and gives it new life, and a new level of anguish when the band is torn apart.

The harrowing battle at Latierre, the major set piece midway through the film, is the turning point, not for the war, but for Paul's descent into the horrors of the inevitable. As the French move forward against the German trenches with superior weapons, Paul, dizzied by the bombardment, gunfire and explosions yells, nearly weeping, "I've lost my comrades!"  To this point, the gore has torn at us viscerally. To hear Paul's plaintive wail tears at the heart. 

Paul is able to reunite with an older friend, Kat, (Albrecht Schuch) and they do what they must, not to win -- that's the business of the officers ordering young men to their deaths -- but simply to survive until the ceasefire is called.

Berger's powerful and uncompromising interpretation of the Remarque novel is exhausting and not hopeful, at least to my mind. Those who don't know or care how dreadful wars are will not be reached by the film's unmistakable message. 

But those who can still be touched will quite likely find in this grim story something affirming in a young man learning the truth about loyalty and devotion, not from propagandists but around a campfire, peeling potatoes with his comrades.