All Quiet on the Western Front film review — an antiwar classic brilliantly revisited

The name of the soldier is Heinrich Gerber. No more than a boy, he appears as the hero in a searing new version of the first world war elegy All Quiet on the Western Front. In the opening seconds, we see his terror in a drowned German trench. Then the camera hurtles alongside him as he charges into French gunfire, sprinting on even as his comrades are mown down. Such is what the protagonists of war films do. Then the movie cuts. Next we see him dead as well. His uniform is returned to Germany and plunged into a boiling vat, the blood slowly lifting from the fabric.

The bait-and-switch might have felt like a gimmick. Instead, it plays like everything else in the film: as righteous anger, perfectly controlled. Almost a century has passed since director Lewis Milestone made the best known version of the story in 1930, adapting Erich Maria Remarque’s novel for Hollywood. At that point, recounting a German experience of war fell to the players of Universal Pictures, speaking English as heard in New York and Minneapolis.

Now German director and co-writer Edward Berger returns the characters to their native tongue. The sense of national anguish is never more raw than in the early scene of giddy college boys joining up in 1917, made drunk on patriotism by their teachers. Four in particular grab their uniforms like excited guests to a fancy dress party. The thrill only glitches when one, Paul, finds a name tag still in the collar: Heinrich Gerber.

The moment is another creation of the new film, building on the blueprint of Remarque. Paul is played with grave intensity by Felix Kammerer, remarkably in his first screen role. His half-stunned features recall British actor George MacKay, star of Sam Mendes’s 1917. That movie may come to mind while you watch this one, though Berger’s was in train before Mendes saw his released, and it lands as something starker, harder: the portrait of a death machine. It also mostly takes place a year later, in what would be the last weeks of the conflict. Of course, that much is unknowable for Paul, who is already stripped of all sense of place or purpose.

What a brilliantly made film this is. Berger invests us in Paul’s fate while reminding us that he is only ever one of untold millions. More expertly handled yet is the catch-22 of the antiwar film, protest imperilled by the glamour of the screen. Here, dawn quagmires lit by dots of orange flame and troops mad-eyed with animal fear register both as fine cinema and potent fury.

The high craft of 21st-century film-makers is exactly what the story needs. Backer Netflix is often mocked for a movie library in which 2010 is ancient history, but how many audiences would really seek out Milestone’s original even if it was there next to Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story?

A modern eye brings more advantages besides. Like Paul, unwitting of the ceasefire ahead, a director working in 1930 could not have known the bleak killing joke the end of the decade would bring. Now Berger spotlights disgust among German high command not at the war but at the coming armistice — already tagged as the “stab in the back” that would help deliver Germany to Nazism. The film is haunted by the ghosts of the future. Could its outrage be any more relevant than now?

★★★★★

In UK cinemas from October 14 and on Netflix globally from October 28