After almost 93 years, the best iteration of the book, All’s Quiet on the Western Front (AQ) has been created. AQ has some amazing cinematography, acting, and set creation and is a fantastic film overall.
At the beginning of the movie, a family of foxes is seen in a peaceful forest. We are shown that there is beauty and silence at this time, but this does not last for long as the viewer is then shown a battlefield of carnage and destruction. A young man is thrown into a battle and is forced to use a shovel as a weapon, but before we see what happens, the camera cuts to see a man taking the boots off the young man’s body and throwing them into a pile for repurposing. It’s seen soon after that the bundles of pants and jackets are sent back to a warehouse to be washed and sewn back together to be given to new soldiers. I feel just the first scene alone shows the overall repetition of war, and how and for every man killed, his boots and clothes go to a man that will have a similar fate as the man before him to wear his clothes just represents the meat grinder of war.
After that, we are shown another young man, Paul Baumer, a 17-year-old student that is very eager to go off to war with his friends Albert, Franz, and Ludwig. While all of them want to go to war, Ludwig is apprehensive, so his friends push him to do it, and Ludwig does. It is shown that before they go off to war, their teachers give a speech that romanticizes war for him and paints a picture explaining how they will come back to Germany as heroes, unlike the young man in the beginning who never left the carnage of the battlefield. One teacher says that they are the “iron youth of Germany” and that “In just a few weeks they will march on Paris!” Soon after the speech by their teachers, Paul and his friends are seen marching off from their town, singing with their rifles in hand. In my opinion, this shows how genuinely unprepared for war these young men were. If they had known what they were getting into they would not have been singing. After I watched these scenes I knew that the portrayal of AQ would be an anti-war war movie and the terrifying carnage of war. The filmmakers show how war is wrongly romanticized. Quoting William Tecumseh Sherman “war is hell.”
It is shown after the shelling how awful trench warfare is and how even before soldiers fight, they must use their helmets as buckets to bail water out of the trench. It is here where Paul and his friends meet a man named Kat. You can tell by his stature that he has been in the war for a while and gives the young men tips to solve their problems.
After a night of being shelled, the viewer sees the young men, Paul, and his friends marched off into battle. Without giving Paul even a second to rest he is given the job of collecting the tags off the necks of the dead. Viewers see the stature of Paul has changed after he finds Ludwig dead. Paul is in shock and looks broken, almost like he is just a husk of a person drying out slowly cracking and crumbling as time goes on.
There is a lot more to the movie, but I would hate to spoil it. I would like to talk about the making of the movie and how the director Edward Berger created one of the most WW1-accurate sets with filming constraints. During filming, the camera crew realized that there needed to be an extra foot added to the trench to fit the camera, so they had to rebuild parts of the trench while still making it look as if nothing had been changed. I also love how the more political side of the war is shown with the singing of the treaty of Versailles. I also like how impactful the final scene is to the movie but to see that you will have to watch the movie yourself.
My opinion on the movie stands as I feel AQ was expertly done there was great storytelling and the line between fighting and time between the main characters. The battle scenes were expertly done and you will be able to tell that there was a lot of time and money put into the recreation of this movie. One thing I do not recommend watching the movie in the English dub; it is much better with the original German dialect with English subtitles. To finish this review I must say that I highly recommend anyone who was a fan of the movie 1917, another expertly done WW1 movie. For now, give All”s Quiet on the Western Front a watch.
MOOSE PRINTS 
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