Spoiler alert: This post discusses key details of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front and its film adaptations, including the ending.
For the last several months, Netflix has been trying to get me to watch All Quiet on the Western Front, a German movie from 2022 based on the famous World War I novel of the same name.
Nearly every time I open the app, a video starts playing of an impossibly naïve young man receiving a uniform which had clearly once belonged to another soldier, now deceased. I could only stop the video by scrolling away.
It’s not that I didn’t want to watch the movie. I did. Being historical and in a foreign language, it fits eminently the profile of “my kind of movie.” Of course it does. That’s why Netflix keeps pushing it at me.
But I didn’t want to watch it before I’d read the original. It had been on my radar ever since high school, where it had been offered as a possible reading for comparison with A Separate Peace. I hadn’t read it then, but it had stuck in the back of my mind.
Encountering the original
One benefit of the new movie – the only one – is that it finally got me to read Erich Maria Remarque’s classic novel, All Quiet on the Western Front.
It’s an engaging work with believable characters. The relationships and dialogue among Paul Bäumer’s group of friends at the front feel real. And that reality adds to the tragic atmosphere which flows like a wave throughout the novel, cresting periodically with Paul’s personal reflections or horrific descriptions and dipping again to an undertone with depictions of life and relationships that touch on the everyday and ordinary.
Though the characters are, of course, fictional, they represent the real men and boys thrown together on the battlefield and in the trenches. They form deep bonds of friendship while knowing they could die at any moment. In their relationships, they are like other men, but their reality is the filth and deprivation and brutality of trench warfare.
Too young to have been trained for any profession, Paul and his classmates have become experts at survival, responding instinctively to every threat. Even if they come out of the war alive, when the fighting stops, what will become of them?
What struck me most about the novel was not the writing itself but the knowledge that it was written by someone who had been there and experienced these horrors. The senselessness, waste, and brutality of the First World War are such common themes nowadays that they have become historical tropes, and it can be hard to feel the humanity behind them.
But Remarque’s dispassionate descriptions of horrific violence are startling and difficult to take in. His words have power simply because he was there. He writes about what he knows, what he himself has seen.
The first film adaptation
That firsthand experience which makes the original novel so compelling is shared also by the first film adaptation. Made in 1930, only a year after the book was published, it won the third ever Academy Award for Best Picture (though, in those days it was called the Academy Award for Outstanding Production).
There is something unsettling and almost shocking in the realization that the men who recreated the sights and sounds of a World War I battle – some of those men at least – would have been recreating impressions from their own memories.
I suppose, too, that some of the shocking nature of the film may have resulted from my own naïveté regarding what such an early film might have been capable of.
More than either of the more modern films, in my opinion, this early adaptation creates a sense of violence and brutality that shocks and overwhelms.
I think it comes from two sources. One, as I have already mentioned above, must be the intimate knowledge of those involved in creating the movie. The other, I think, is the limitations of early film.
Because there is little the filmmakers can actually show of violence, they must do their best to create an impression which inspires a visceral reaction in the viewer. It is a good reminder about film as art and film as craft and what good filmmaking can achieve.
For all its dated feel – with some of the acting especially – the 1930 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front is still a powerful movie and a worthy successor to the novel.
World War I for the silver screen
Where the 1930 version excels at portraying the violence and sense of waste which are strong themes of the original novel, the 1979 made-for-TV movie captures most strongly the loss of youth and innocence, which naturally feeds into and amplifies the tragic sense of waste.
Of the three, this is the film which I think best adapts the novel to the screen, being faithful to the tone and rhythm of the original while making it feel natural as a piece of filmmaking. In fact, it won the Golden Globe in 1980 for Best TV Movie.
The change in Paul throughout the movie is subtle but striking. Over the course of a mere few years, he transforms from a naïve, idealistic schoolboy into a tough but sympathetic soldier – far too old for his age. And his reality – the reality of war, the reality of the trenches – is out of joint with the daily lives of his family and neighbours back home. Even for the ones who survive, the war has created a lost generation who no longer fit in the society they were struggling to save.
I wonder, then, if Remarque has Paul die in the end in order to save him from what perhaps was an even greater tragedy than death. And Paul dies not in the middle of some action but towards the end of the war on a day so uneventful that the daily report contained only the words: “All quiet on the Western Front.” It is a death at once tragic and ironic.
In depicting Paul’s death, the films run into a conundrum. Remarque gives no details regarding the manner of Paul’s death except that it seems to have been quick. You can do that in a novel. It would be more difficult to achieve a similar effect in a natural way in film. And so, each of the three movies must make a decision about how to portray these final moments of the narrative.
In both this version and the earlier one (no doubt there was some conscious influence here), the moment is caused by a return of some aspect of Paul’s boyhood interests – evidence of an innocence not quite lost.
But he cannot be both Paul the boy and Paul the soldier. And Paul the soldier relies on instinct (and luck) for his survival. The moment he abandons his instinct, his luck also runs out, and so the war ends for him.
It is not a bad way, I suppose, of capturing the tragic bittersweetness with which the novel ends.
A modern moviemaking debacle
By contrast with the preceding two films, the most recent version – the 2022 German language film distributed by Netflix – is a travesty that bears so little resemblance to the book that it does not deserve to be called by the same name.
There was a moment the day after I had watched the movie, in which I was pondering some particular scene, and I was struck by the idea that it was not meant to be an adaptation at all. Rather, I thought, perhaps it was a commentary on one of the most defining historical events of German identity and its reception and transformation and absorption over the past century into a national consciousness. And of course All Quiet on the Western Front, as a required text in many German schools (so the Internet informs me), plays an outsized role in that process. Perhaps this film was in fact a very profound piece of art and social commentary to which I was missing the key because I was not German. All this I could find momentarily plausible and even acceptable.
I looked up an interview with the director and quickly burst that bubble.
Nope. It was just a truly terrible pretense at an adaptation.
The worst of it is, to so many people who will never bother to read the book, this is what their impression of it will be. But apart from the most basic nod to setting, the names of the major characters, and certain scenes taken wildly out of context, it is nothing at all like the book.
I have written in the past about what an adaptation owes to its source material. An adaptation is a translation. It is the original author who is in control first and foremost. Some licence must absolutely be given to the one translating, whether into a different language or a different medium. In fact, it is necessary in order to preserve as much as possible the intent of the original author and the integrity of the source material.
Faithfulness to an original text is not about dogged, pedantic recreation word-for-word. It is about understanding the spirit of the original and making it live a new life under a different form.
The makers of this new film have most emphatically not understood the text with which they were working. Or worse, they have deliberately ignored it. So much so that it would be useless to enumerate all the deviations from the original. It just is not the same story.
I tried somewhat to view it as a film in its own right. Not that it is entitled to such consideration: as an adaptation it should always be assessed in relation to the original.
But I did try – mostly because I wanted to understand what others saw in it to the extent that it could win so many awards. Among many others, it took home the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (which we used to call Best Foreign Language Film).
I tried, but I just could not make any sense of it. The story did not flow. The characters were flat and lifeless. They did not seem like real people – at least not like anyone I’ve ever met. There were some very beautifully filmed vignettes, but that’s not incredibly helpful.
But perhaps I only saw it that way because I could not escape the impression of the original, which was still fresh in my memory.
It’s possible, but I doubt it.
Where the original novel stuns with firsthand freshness and poignant humanity and the previous two films fairly successfully reflect that, this new so-called adaptation is a stodgy cliché. There is a certain arrogance involved in that, and I do not think we should award such arrogance and disregard toward an original work of creation and reflection on human experience with our time or consideration.