All Quiet on the Western Front

Felix Kammerer

Edward Berger's All Quiet on the Western Front, currently streaming on Netflix, is an adequate adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel about World War 1 that I can muster little enthusiasm for. The film's historical verisimilitude and production design are exemplary, but the humanistic tenor of the novel has been lost in this adaption by Mr. Berger and his collaborators. What we are left with is a World War 1 theme park ride somewhat akin to 1917. 

The main flaw is that Mr. Berger has divided his film into two halves that do not complement each other. Remarque's novel and the Lewis Milestone's stodgy film version center on the wartime horrors experienced by raw recruit Paul Baumer. In addition to this, Berger highlights the story of the German diplomatic team negotiating the Armistice. Berger no doubt thought that stressing rich diplomats and officers enjoying fine dining and drinks while Baumer (Felix Kammerer) and his pal are dying in the trenches would augment their plight. Instead, it vitiates the cumulative impact of the story. Remarque's work gains in strength as we get to know Paul and his cohorts. Because the story of these soldiers only takes up ninety minutes of the two and a half hour runtime, the characters in the trenches are given short shrift and the impact of their deaths is diminished. The camaraderie of the foot soldiers is one of the great consoling joys of the novel and it is largely absent from Berger's version.

Berger wants to show how the putative terms dictated to Germany at the end of World War 1 fanned the flames of nationalism in the more sinister form of Nazism. He does show, a little, the nationalistic fervor that greeted Germany's entrance into the Great War. However, the Paris Peace Conference was more responsible for the doom of the Weimar Republic than the Armistice agreed to by an exhausted Germany.

The project might have been more suited to the mini-series format. For those who have not read the novel, Berger's version might be sufficiently effective and it is certainly more loose limbed than the 1930 film. The best Remarque adaptations are relatively neglected and remain Frank Borzage's Three Comrades from 1938 and Douglas Sirk's A Time to Love and A Time to Die from 1958.