All noise and murder on the Western Front

★★ out of ★★★★

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Runtime: 148 minutes

MPAA: Rated R for strong bloody war violence and grisly images.

"War is hell."

Leaving All Quiet on the Western Front, I felt depressed. Depressed in the sense that the entire movie was so bleak and nihilistic, yet so emotionally hollow.

First, let me get something sorted out. Granted, All Quiet on the Western Front is the third remake and also happens to be a German production. Under the company Netflix, there would also exist an English dub of the movie. Here's the problem: most of the time, the characters' lip-movement is wildly inconsistent with the English dialogue the dub is outputting, and sometimes you can't convey all the emotions the actor is suggesting in another language. This was a fundamental problem in a recent TV show "Squid Game", where the dubbing has been frequently criticized and mocked.

It's perhaps better to let the original audio play out and heavily depend on subtitles for the entire film, but that doesn't save All Quiet on the Western Front from its emphasis on high body count and lack of focus.

Directed by Edward Berger with a screenplay from him and two other writers, Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell, "All Quiet" (this will refer to the title throughout the rest of the review) starts off strong. Long, drawn-out shots of nature and other scenery are a contrast to the unimaginable horrors of the battlefield. Almost immediately, the performances truly suggest the trauma and horrors imprinted onto the soldiers. We see them cry and tremble in fear, already emotionally broken, and almost completely numb to killing.

Then, in a jarring time jump, we suddenly cut to Spring 1917. A 17-year-old German Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), alongside his friends Albert Kropp (Aaron Hilmer), Franz Müller (Moritz Klaus), and Ludwig Behm (Adrian Grünewald) enlists in the Imperial German Army. After a patriotic speech from a school official, they're given uniforms and deployed to Northern France, where they befriend an older officer named Stanislaus "Kat" Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch). The first night is already scary enough, with bombs and gunshots and deaths.

Rather than explore how the death of friends mentally and emotionally impact a person, we get yet another weird time jump to several days before the end of the war, on the 7th of November 1918. Quite overtly, "All Quiet" is adamant on showing the numerous and amounting body count, with numbers being blurted here and there, and a tad too many scenes of piles of dead bodies at just about everywhere.

Hardened by the cold realities of war, Paul and his remaining team of friends discuss about their plans after the war and how it would be almost impossible to reintegrate into society. They're assigned a task to find 60 missing recruits, but we have yet again another miserable, body-count moment. In addition, instead of making us care about the characters and fully immerse us into how they're feeling from the effects of the war, "All Quiet" frustratingly alternates frequently between politics and several characters that the individual moments never add up as a whole.

The midsection is when "All Quiet" reaches a high point, though. Sure, the big-budget set pieces start to get unwieldy, but the film spares a moment of silence where Paul tearfully regrets killing a French soldier, whom he later learns has a wife and a child. It's a heartbreaking scene, and goes to show us how much they suffer, far away from their families.

There are also many compelling truths to be found, like how soldiers would be permanently scarred after the war, or how many families wouldn't get to see their children, or how they have become numb to killing and have lost compassion for life. Just when an opportunity strikes for "All Quiet" to dig deeper and explore further into these truths, the film once again cuts to a politics or totally out-of-context scene.

"All Quiet" shifts tonally to relentlessly bleak in the third act, and heavily drags unreasonably. There's also a lack of creativity in the sense that the same punctuating score is used whenever someone stands at a trench and waits for an enemy to arrive. Perhaps some other praises I have for "All Quiet" is that the production value is high, it's gruesomely violent to suggest the horrible fates of unfortunate (or rather, fortunate) soldiers with their decomposing bodies, and that there are some striking visuals scattered throughout the film.

Ultimately, the main problem boils down to the reluctance of the film-makers to answer us the intriguing idea they have raised. They say war is hell, but why exactly? The only answer I got: because EVERYONE and your FRIENDS and YOU will die. Oh, and look at those piles of few thousand dead bodies at that corner.

Update: All Quiet on the Western Front has won four Academy Awards.