Putting Up a Good Front

"War movies" are a very hit-and-miss genre for me. I've bounced off of a lot of the most highly-praised favorites of the genre, but have been impressed just often enough to keep trying them now and then. This year, one of the 10 Oscar nominees for Best Picture is a war movie -- a new take on a classic one, in fact: All Quiet on the Western Front.

I've never seen the 1930 American film, nor have I read the original novel translated from German (as many seem to have done in school). So my first exposure to the story was this new German-made film: Im Westen nichts Neues. Set largely in the final weeks of World War I, young soldier Paul Bäumer quickly loses his illusions and idealism when faced with the reality of trench warfare. This version of the story also adds what I understand to be a new subplot, tracking the negotiations and signing of the armistice that would end the war.

Renowned filmmaker François Truffaut once said that "every film about war ends up being pro-war." I think he's right that many war movies only present noble causes and exhilarating victories, to the extent that they become glitzy recruitment videos. Even war movies with a more skeptical outlook often end up celebrating things like the camaraderie between soldiers, or the way some heroic sacrifice brings some small bit of sense to senseless chaos. But if Truffaut is wrong, and a war movie can truly be anti-war, it's this one.

You would probably expect All Quiet on the Western Front to be a "tough watch." Let me tell you that it's even tougher than you think. This movie is almost relentlessly bleak. It shows how war is hell, over and over again. And in case you somehow miss that point, Daniel Brühl (likely the one actor familiar to an American audience) is there to say it explicitly in that added armistice subplot. Director Edward Berger takes the visceral brutality of the Omaha Beach opening of Saving Private Ryan, amplifies it, and extends it for two-and-a-half hours.

His key partner in this is actor Felix Kammerer, who stars as Bäumer. Kammerer seems to have a bottomless capacity to express utter horror, and to make the audience feel it right along with him. The rest of the cast is strong, but Kammerer's thousand-yard-stare is truly haunting.

Another strong element is an unusual but brutally effective score by Volker Bertelmann. On the one hand, this music sounds nothing like what you'd expect to accompany a dramatic war movie -- it growls and grinds, sounding almost industrial and better suited to science-fiction. Yet at the same time, it's ominous, dark, and oppressive: a perfect fit for this subject matter and overall message.

Thinking about how much I was moved by this movie, I couldn't help but think about it in comparison to the last big World War I movie that was up for an Oscar, 1917. I thought highly of that movie... but for entirely different reasons that feel borderline inappropriate now that I've seen this movie. 1917 was an eye-catching high-wire act of virtuosic filmmaking. But it's All Quiet on the Western Front that is (by far) the more effective movie on an emotional level. I give it an A-, and am revising my Top 10 List of 2022 to put in in the #2 slot.