The name of Edward Berger, the director of the new version of the screen version of Erich Maria Remarque‘s novel ‘Im Westen Nichts Neuen‘ (‘All Quiet on the Western Front‘) was already known to me. He directed 5 of the 8 episodes of the excellent television series ‘Deutschland ’83’. This new adaptation, to which Berger also contributed as a co-writer, is not a TV movie, even though it is produced by Netflix. I saw it in a cinema theater and nothing seems ‘low cost’ in the production. On the contrary, I believe that the intensity of the approach and technical aspects such as the screen format would ensure its success even without streaming. It is also an important landmark, as it is the third film adaptation of Remarque‘s novel, one of the masterpieces of anti-war literature, but the first made in Germany. In fact we can say that we are dealing with a rewrite inspired by the novel rather than a screen adaptation. The filmmakers kept the general lines of the story and the main character, added a lot of background information, and simplified or simply skipped whole chapters in the novel. This – let’s say – free adaptation manages to add content and emotion in many places, but it is not without certain problems, noticeable especially to those who have read the book and seen the previous versions, especially the one from 1930.
The screenwriters omitted from the film’s narrative many details related to the military training that transforms the naive high school student Paul Baumer from a young man blinded by nationalist and militaristic propaganda into a killing machine. That’s right, the start of the story is wrapped up in another rather emotional story, that of the uniform Baumer received upon enlistment. What material are survivors made of? Is it chance, or maybe the existence of a friend, or the ability to kill with a split second before being killed? A jump in time brings us to the final days of the war. Two parallel narrative threads added to the main one introduce us to the train at Compiegne where Marshal Ferdinand Foch imposes the terms of Germany’s unconditional surrender and to the castle where a German general plans a last and useless battle, to save something from the “dishonour” of surrender. It will be a last storm before the silence of peace, which will fall over Europe for two decades. Unfortunately, it is merely a silence of the dead.
The scenes in the trenches are extraordinary, some of the best in war movies I’ve seen. It’s an immersive experience that surpasses, in my opinion, the one created by Sam Mendes in ‘1917’. The terror of the bullet killing the comrade half a meter away, or the noise and the otherworldly image of the enemy tanks – monsters crushing the soldiers – are rendered with phenomenal realism and authenticity. Other solutions impressed me less. The scenes at Compiegne have a slight tendency towards revisionist history, and the German general character has a dose of caricature that seems a little out of place in context. The creations of the two actors in the lead roles – Felix Kammerer and Albrecht Schuch – are exceptional. Volker Bertelmann‘s music accompanies and enhances the visual effects. The anti-war message of the novel is partially lost due to script changes, but it is recovered by the exceptional reconstruction and representation of the nightmarish experience lived by millions of soldiers in the trenches of the First World War.