Split Decision: "All Quiet on the Western Front"

No two people feel the exact same way about any film. Thus, Team Experience is pairing up to debate the merits of each of the awards movies this year. Here’s Eric Blume and Cláudio Alves on Germany's Oscar contender.

ERIC:  Claudio, let's get down and dirty on Edward Berger's All Quiet on the Western Front.  I'm in camp "love" and I think you're in camp "don't love"?  The only real dissent I've heard from folks is that "it says nothing new about war" (which I look forward to addressing).  But let's start with overall impressions of the film.

CLÁUDIO:  Well, it's adapting a seminal anti-war novel – maybe THE anti-war novel pre-WWII – already made into a Best Picture Oscar winner before. So it's not like it had much hope of saying something new about its subject. Nevertheless, Edward Berger and company bring plenty of "new things" to the narrative presented in the literary work and its previous adaptations, so there's that...

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

In any case, I don't find the lack of newness detrimental to the film's success or a primary cause of my dislike. If anything, the deviation from the book's shape feels like a betrayal of basic intent or a misreading that undermines what made Erich Maria Remarque's so powerful in the first place.

I didn't want a retread of Lewis Milestone's perfect film from 1930, nor do I think a lack of plot fidelity is  an unforgivable sin. Moreover, returning this tale to its original idiom is a commendable mission. However, I can't help but feel deeply unhappy with the All Quiet On the Western Front we got and flabbergasted by the near-unanimous praise it has received. 

ERIC:  I am excited to tackle your flabbergasted state, as I'm fully onboard with the praise.  From its opening images of a light-streaked forest and a tightly-coiled sleeping family of foxes, to its overhead shot of images in snow that focus to be dead soldiers...bullets and explosions tearing apart peace, director Edward Berger made me feel like I was in masterful hands.  This guy puts together beautiful images and takes his time with the storytelling.  I was shocked by the maturity of the filmmaking from someone I hadn't known before.  Part of the mastery of the film was Berger's blend of the epic with the intimate, as he's equally adept at capturing both throughout the film.  The movie felt symphonic. He brings in a lot of tools throughout to scale up and scale down according to the moment, leading to a blissful silence at the end that's gutting. 

That's an overall thought.  Let's get into specifics?  Which of its elements (writing, directing, acting, other) did you feel was the weak spot?  Help me to understand why it didn't work for you...

CLÁUDIO:   It may be easier to say what worked first. I liked the cast well enough, and the production value is off the charts. Makeup and set design felt particularly inspired, and I'll be happy if either achievement earns an Oscar nomination.

 

Apart from that, All Quiet on the Western Front was a miss for me. Since you mentioned Berger, I'll start with him. While the man finds beauty in carnage, the visual strategies presented throughout often fall into a vacuous aestheticization with no rhyme or reason. The cinematography has been praised to high heavens, but I couldn't get over how deeply artificial it felt, often in ways that contradict the pursuit of realism elsewhere. At first, I was trying to be generous, concluding that the intense orange-teal color grading looked like that in an attempt at echoing early film techniques, either tinting, stencils, or two-tone Technicolor. But that doesn't compute with the highly modern glint of digital crispness nor the clear gestures towards visceral immediacy. By the time we cut from a 1917-esque light play to an officer's dinner in murky blue shadows offset by smudges of glowing orange over the actor's heads, I was ready to call it quits.

Trust me, I know dismissing a film for formal reasons is a no-no online right now, but my complaints don't end there. Still, reading your words, I assume you reacted more positively to Berger and DP James Friend's chromatic choices and would count it among the picture's strengths.

ERIC:  Well, let's discuss "vacuous aestheticization" which is a big phrase, but what specifically do you mean by that?  It is a director's job to "aestheticize" on some level, so what is Berger doing that makes you feel his approach is vacuous?  I think Berger's work with cinematographer James Friend is a very specific collaboration where they're blending the visceral and the poetic simultaneously.  You get the sense of being fully in the situation as a soldier, but at the same time the world around them has a stillness and an eerie beauty as contrast. 

I also feel their conception is a purposeful and concentrated balance of subjective and objective, meaning. We are following the subjective experience of Paul, but with an objective camera from Berger.  Berger doesn't give us a feeling of shaped drama in the way we saw in 1917, or a shooting style which is commenting and begging for emotion like Spielberg did in Saving Private Ryan (a movie I'd argue is actually bad).  To me, Berger's conception is: I will show you this human experience as "realistically" as I can, without influence, and you will feel what you feel.  It's extraordinarily difficult to present drama in this fashion (as you know, because you're super smart).  But the magic of the film (for me, personally) is that his "dispassionate" take provokes passion.  There's a clinical air to the film that stands in marked variance to the heartrending story unfolding.  None of the chapters or set pieces in the film feel constructed in the way usual drama is constructed;  it's just like a reality is unfolding.  

As for the "look" of the film, the achievement is exactly what you found problematic. The orange-teal grading evokes early film and is an homage on some level to the original film, but Friend is brave enough to use the current technologies and add the digital crispness to give us details in the images not at our disposal in the past.  Early on, when they are in the bunker with only that orange light, we get closeups of the soldiers' faces that show every pore, every glint of rain, the terror-water in their eyes.  This combination of "old" and "new" is the beauty of the cinematography.  Of course the officer's dinner has an different color palette, as it should since it is outside our main world. All of the "bureaucracy" scenes contain richer, more textured backgrounds shot in a more "naturalistic" style with more natural and supplied light, while still figuring into the overall visual scheme.  Also one other thing about the cinematography that I loved was that it was incredibly evocative, meaning I felt exactly how fucking freezing cold it was there at all times, how serene the settings would be during non-war times, how thick and gross that mud was.

How did you feel about the inclusion of the "outside" scenes with Daniel Bruhl, where we see the larger decisions being made by the politicians?

CLÁUDIO: "I will show you this human experience as 'realistically' as I can, without influence, and you will feel what you feel." – this is an excellent definition of what I surmise Berger's aims are and why I find his aesthetic vacuous. Because if that's the objective, the imagery actively detracts from it in its bouts of digital-age stylization. I never felt it was especially dispassionate either, finding the filmmakers were trying to force passion into the story in ways often misaligned with its dramaturgic purpose. The grisliness of a modern war picture is there, conjured with bloody pizazz but never questioned or explored, merely presented with surface-level interest and readily disposed of whenever things get a bit more abrasive than the norm.

Moreover, the vague subjectivity conveyed by the style is never that of Paul, who certainly sees no lyrical grandeur in what he's experiencing. The hyper-modern color binary isn't an objective gaze nor representative of the protagonist's mindset. So what's the point if not romanticizing the material, making it hurt less, and undercutting the aforementioned aims?

Apologies for my vitriol. I genuinely love reading your description and can't help but wish I saw the same film as you did. It's no fun hating something others adore and being unable to connect with that wonderment.

And yet, here come more complaints and revilements. Since you asked, I confess to loathing every second spent away from the soldiers. Taking All Quiet on the Western Front out of the heads of men on the battlefield is to betray the fundamental truth of the novel, its radical linchpin. Remarque's prose gains its power from trapping us with those who suffer the direct effects of war rather than the figures who command them, who spill no blood and get to live eternally in the history books. His refusal to acknowledge the experience of the powerful is startling even today, making Paul's tragedy feel immediate a century after the real world events that serve as its basis. Expanding the narrative's purview to the halls of power is another failure in my mind, a compromise that doesn't work and makes me wonder why Berger wanted to adapt this particular text in the first place.

Another way of making my point is to appeal to another literary adaptation from 2022. To me, Berger's decision to intercut Paul's story with the officers' political games felt equivalent to a hypothetical version of Women Talking, where Polley decided we needed to see the men's dealings with the police while the debate was taking place back in Molotschna. It's a disruptive contradiction that adds nothing and only muddies what good was there in the first place.

How did you feel about those scenes? I can only imagine you weren't as opposed to them as I was.

ERIC:  Wow, we really couldn't disagree more on Berger's achievement.  I feel the film has no stylization, and that it's incredibly dispassionate from a camera standpoint.  And I also think Berger's "flat" presentation of the "drama" isn't surface-level but rather intentionally straightforward.  This is further reflected in his direction of the lead, Felix Kammerer, who Berger guides to purposefully withhold, his face in various states of shock and ambiguousness throughout much of the film.  It's that perfect movie face that allows us to project our own feelings upon.

We spend about ninety percent of the film with the soldiers, with intensely feverish immediacy, that I didn't feel there was a compromise on its power, or that any fundamental truth was being lost.  Carefully watching the film a second time, I was struck by Berger's take on how war is based on both timing and randomness.  The very first action we see, of the first soldier almost comically dodging every bomb and shot as he runs forward, reaching out to another soldier who has been shot but is alive, only to watch that same soldier get shot in the head while he remains unscathed, sets us up for this world of randomness...how seconds of time can keep one man alive while another one dies.   

The inclusion of the bureaucrats further keeps us aware of this question of time:  the lazy and careless approach of the decision makers to come to their treaty, while each second other humans are dying while they meet in their rooms and coaches.  Berger sets it up as the tragic irony it was, hence the lack of any "feverish" quality to those scenes, or to those men's lives.  Part of the gorgeous poetry of AQOTWF is that our hero is the final person to die before the war ends. Had the timing been just a few minutes different, he perhaps might have lived, and knowing that, having witnessed the outside forces who prohibited it, added great power to it for me.

This film contained to me one of the single most breathtaking sequences in any movie this year, when Paul is trapped in the waterhole with the French man he believes he has killed, but whom in fact has not died.  The sequence has the darkest black comedy in it, since he cannot escape from watching the person die in front of him, but with a heart-stopping sadness as Paul then tries to keep him alive.  Berger sustains this sequence with hair-raising purity.  Yep, I said heart-stopping and hair-raising in the same damn paragraph!  This movie did all kinds of things to my body.

Claudio, I love arguing with you on all of this.  Do you have any other thoughts before we sign off and leave it to our readers?

CLÁUDIO: I have a couple of statements and a question. First, my complaints about deviating from the book aren't an indication that faithfulness was the key to success in my eyes. Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front is substantially different from the novel, changing, among other things, the piece's iconic ending. And yet, the 1930 picture constitutes a reading of the text that adds its perspective without contradicting the structural and thematic linchpins of Remarque's work. Berger's version fails to do that in script and direction, structure, and overall tonalities. One film feels like a personal reading, the other like a misunderstanding.

And yet, it's interesting to note how both works sometimes fall into the same choice, like making Paul more likable than he is in the novel. You mention the waterhole sequence, a standout moment in both pictures and a place where the two movies reach a final note that dulls the mercilessness of the literary origin. Book Paul may be full of good intentions when taking those photos, but he quickly forgets about them, the horrors of that forced deathbed communion lost amidst a sea of other traumas. He's cold in more ways than one. On-screen, the two Pauls resist apathy a little while longer, holding on to the souvenirs as a last shred of humanity. Indeed, Berger's version dies still carrying those token remembrances of another man's lost life. The camera lingers there, underlining its totemic importance. Dispassionate? I think not.

As we close our discussion, I must say I loved reading your thoughts. I can see why you feel so strongly about this film, even if I can't share the same adoratio. At least I'll always have the earlier classic.  So, let me ask you one final thing. At the very end of this All Quiet on the Western Front convo, how does the new take compare to the old one, in your opinion?

ERIC:  To me, they exist on two different planes one hundred years apart.  It feels right for a reinterpretation of the text, and again I feel Berger uses all the contemporary technologies (including an anachronistic Reznor-like score) to make something that vibrates with a contemporary energy.  I truly didn’t see Paul as “likable”. As mentioned, he was very tabula rasa to me, in a way that made neutrality powerful, no easy feat to achieve on camera. 

Both filmmakers choosing to give Paul possession of the dead soldier’s souvenirs feels cinematically right to me, not because it makes Paul more likable, but because it’s a visual medium, not a book.  Reading about kept souvenirs and seeing them are of course two different things, and it’s a gorgeous poetic grace note there.  Remarque wanted to show how merciless the war was, not how merciless we are to each other.  I suppose we disagree on Remarque as well! 

Thanks for a lively and spirited debate.  I know we both love a good argument, and you’ve been such a fun sparring partner.  Eager to hear others’ thoughts on the film in the comments!

other "split decisions"

• Babylon - thrilling or interminable?
• Everything Everywhere All At Once - essential or exhausting?
• The Fabelmans - joyous or phony?
• TÁR - utterly engrossing or underwhelming?
• Triangle of Sadness - facile or multi-faceted?
• The Whale - moving or just plain bad?

Comments

[Antônio]

If I had to nominate this for at least 1 Oscar, it would be Albrecht Schuch. The rest of the movie is so terribly derivative… I can’t even register the shortlisted original score (was it made of drums and noises?). It’s not as bad as Private Ryan though.

[Raul]

"All Quiet.." is a meh for me. There are so many war movies at this point that this would rank above average, but I don't think it says or does anything new. I agree with Claudio that the scenes with Daniel Bruhl, while a fine actor, were distracting and detracts from the film. Albrecht Schuch is terrific, though. I can see the film being the traditional Oscar film old school voters would go for even though it's in a foreign language.

[NATHANIEL R]

UGH. i just typed a really long comment and accidentally erased it.

very very short version: i fall inbetween you're two very different opinions but loved this discussion.

I do want to defend the film's expansion to include the "corporate" side of war. So few movies ever ask us to think about war beyond "Spectacled!" and/or "Message!"... and I think the element of who is making the decisions needs to be explored more.It's not quite the same thing as that but one thing I love about SCHINDLER'S LIST is that it is almost a business thriller as Schindler navigates through the war. It's an unusual vantage point but it shouldn't be because war as spectacle or message delivery system is extremely common and if we're going to keep having war movies, let's look at the tragedy of it from all angles.