The sequence, and the rest of the film, is accompanied by a score from composer Volker Bertelmann (who often goes by Hauschka) that can scarely be called music, and is all the better for it: The sound is an aural attack, with sharp, staccato drumbeats punctuating some scenes and a trio of huge, foreboding chords (think of it as an industrial-rock version of the “Dies Irae”) hanging over others. ![]() ‘Holy Spider’ Review: Iranian Serial-Killer Thriller Misses the Mark ![]() “Yeah, it was too small for him,” lies the officer who’s inducting Paul. The film follows the clothes, not the men, as they’re taken to a factory to be scrubbed, washed, mended and ultimately given to new recruits – one of whom, 17-year-old Paul Bauymer (newcomer Felix Kammerer), gets his new uniform, looks at the name tag and points out, “This already belongs to somebody.” In a chilling sequence, soldiers strip the clothes off their dead comrades, leaving a pile of muddy, torn garments alongside the rows of black coffins. It’s a technique Berger and his cinematographer James Friend return to again and again, deliberately placing their story in a world that would look like paradise if not for the blood squabbles of humans.Īnd “All Quiet” doesn’t give us time to bask in that beauty before long, we’re in a short, brutal battle, and then the ground is littered with dead bodies. “All Quiet on the Western Front” starts with the bucolic landscape of Western Europe in 1917 we know we’re in for carnage, but first we see hills and trees, clouds sitting in a pink-tinged sky, fog slipping through the woods. ![]() ( Endlessness might be the right word for viewers in 2022, given the conflicts that still wrack the globe more than 100 years after the events in this film.) It strips the glamor and heroism out of the genre to show the brutality of using young men as cannon fodder, while shocking the viewers with its brutality and tiring them with the seeming endlessness of the war. The Netflix film, which is Germany’s entry in this year’s Best International Feature Film Oscar race, follows in a long tradition of the depiction of war that goes back to Milestone’s version, but disappeared for a long while when World War II prompted Hollywood to embrace gung-ho war movies. The book was about humanity and inhumanity, and so was the 1930 Hollywood version directed by Lewis Milestone, that depicted the soldiers as Germans but had them speak English that language choice both made it more palatable to English-speaking audiences and easier to take as the Everyman story that in some ways it was.īerger’s “All Quiet” is different it’s in German, with a largely German cast and no way to avoid the realization that the hell in which these young soldiers are being immersed - and the way in which they lost the war - will directly lead to the rise of the Nazis and to World War II. There was nothing militaristic or partisan about Remarque’s novel, which is one of the reasons it was banned and burned by the Nazis when they came to power, thanks in part to stoking racist resentment of what was seen as a humiliating defeat in the First World War. ‘Armageddon Time’ Review: James Gray Looks at His Childhood Without Nostalgia ![]() Given the power of its images and the terror we see in these young faces on the battlefield, it’s hard to imagine that the film won’t elicit that empathy. The film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, dives into those horrors, adds political context that resonates in 2022 and asks viewers to empathize with soldiers who were fighting on the losing (and the “wrong”) side of that war. It’s overly simplistic to say that Edward Berger’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” reclaims that classic anti-war work for Germany, but it’s not entirely inaccurate.īerger’s unflinching adaptation comes more than 90 years after Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel shocked a battered and increasingly nationalistic Germany by depicting the brutality of sending young men off to be butchered in World War I foxholes. This review originally ran September 13, 2022, for the film’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
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