All Quiet on the Western Front

There is a unique industrial music drone the soundtrack does frequently in the 2022 version of All Quiet on the Western Front.

The filmmakers maybe rely on it a bit too much and every time I heard it I thought of oranges in the Godfather films.

Soundtrack: Chu chnng

My brain: Welp, this next bit won’t be good.

I kept thinking of a man being ground down by a machine. Which meant that it was the perfect selection for music in this now Oscar-nominated German film about World War 1.

I haven’t read the book. And you haven’t either so shut up. But 20 years ago in film studies class, I watched the 1930s version of All Quiet on the Western Front and was struck when watching this that I kept thinking of that final, beautiful shot of Paul reaching for a butterfly.

Today’s version has scenes of similar power and beauty and horror. If this is your first war film then I am hopeful that the message about the cost of war will move you.

If this is not your first war film then you, like I, will likely appreciate a strong story, well told with a message you have seen many, many times before.

Still, the movie finds inventive ways to make its point. This is a movie that shows you the cost of the war (and wars) in all sorts of ways. Even going so far as to follow the laundry.

Its battle scenes are appropriately graphic and gory. It examines the trenches, it examines what it’s like to watch your friends die. It examines what it is like and how terrible it is, and how hard it can be to kill a man. Even a man who is presumably your enemy.

This version adds scenes of generals and other leaders, safe in their towers, making foolish decisions that will cost the lives of hundreds, thousands, and millions of men. Those scenes make the point as effectively as the horror on the battlefield. Perhaps more so.

Nothing makes the case quite so well as the emaciated look that actor Felix Kammerer delivers at Paul. He is as competent as a man can be in these extraordinary situations but he is also starving, damaged, and suffering from mental scars that will never heal.

Those of you who served may connect with this. Those of you with family who served may know, in some small way, what war does to the men and women who see it close and try to go on.

Some of you don’t have those connections. Some of you only know war through video games or through the yammering of politicians, preachers, and others who have never set their boots on foreign soil.

I hope you will see this.

Look close.