The new ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ is a terrible film
The are really only two types of war movie. The first is one where we know who are the goodies and the baddies. For example, the film Fury has Brad Pitt as the commander of a Sherman tank in the dying days of World War II. In one scene, a surrendered SS officer is machine-gunned in the street by a GI. The set-up for what is actually a war crime is seeing a German child hanging from a lamp-post and discovering that the SS officer has impressed children into the military to make a final stand in a town centre. So this is depicted as a justified kill. In fact audiences have been conditioned (probably rightfully) over every decade since the end of the war to believe that no SS officer had a right to live. In almost every film, anyone who has those Nordic runes on their collar flash is marked for death, and the audience has no problem with this whatsoever. The finale of Fury sees Pitt’s tank crew mowing down hundreds of Waffen-SS soldiers, and in every case this is seen as a righteous kill. In fact the death of every German soldier in the film is seen this way. Given the atrocities committed by the Nazis, there really is little wrong with films depicting German soldiers being killed, but apparently only so long as the film is set between 1933 and 1945.
The second type of war film depicts the soldier as victim in the middle of all the fighting, which is shown to be pointlessly destructive. A classic example of this has to be the film Catch-22, where the bomber crews are cogs in the machinery of industrial warfare, and operational outcomes mean less than the routine of going on operations. To paraphrase Orwell, the object of war is war. The film depicts the corporatisation of combat, where the fighting is peripheral to a group of men getting rich through the diversion of military supplies, which suggests that an updated version could be made about the modern Russian Army.
Catch-22 plays down the destruction to focus on the absurdity of the whole enterprise, and as such is an outlier in the genre of anti-war films, which focus mainly on the tragedy of the fighting and the military and civilian casualties. The prime example of this is film adaptations of All Quiet on the Western Front. The first-person narrative in the novel, authored by war veteran Erich Maria Remarque, was a sensation when published in Germany and in translation was so around the world. A Hollywood version was made in 1929, soon after the advent of talkies, to great acclaim.
A new version of All Quiet on the Western Front, this time German-made, was released last year. Now showing on Netflix, it has garnered similar praise. It is already nominated for 14 BAFTAs and nine Oscars
The film, however, is terrible.
True, it depicts the loss of idealism by the new recruits as they get closer to the front, and the awful reality of war arrives with a devastating artillery barrage seemingly within minutes of the young cannon-fodder arriving at the trenches. But then everything goes wrong with the screenplay, as it departs from the source material provided by Remarque’s novel.
The action jumps to October 1918, where the surviving characters are behind the lines in a supply depot. Well, wait a minute, there. It was public knowledge in the first week of October 1918 that Imperial Germany was seeking an end to the war on the basis of Woodrow Willson’s 14 points. Also the Imperial German Army had been in retreat along most of the Western Front since the second week of August 1918. It was not a rout, but the troops were having to fight a succession of rearguard actions, so where was this apparently untouched supply depot? Here is the hazard of using dates in a film with a historical setting.
By the second week of October 1918, the Hindenburg Line, to which the Imperial German Army had originally retreated in 1917, following their mauling at the Battle of the Somme, before resuming an offensive in Spring 1918, had been breached in several places. The lateral railway line, vital to sustaining German forces on the Western Front, was under threat. None of this is depicted in the film. It could be that the sector where the film is based was in Alsace, as the line there barely moved, but this is never made clear. Later in the film the fighting is shown to be in a fictional location. The retreat of the defeated Imperial German Army is not mentioned in the film at all. We are only told in a side-plot that the Germans are losing 40,000 troops a day, but not the reason why. So the existence of a quiet supply depot away from the front lines is questionable.
It was one of the side-plots that attracted me to watch the film. Parallel to the experiences of the main characters, we follow the path of German politician Matthias Erzberger, as he sets off to the Armistice negotiations. The depiction of this is awful. The negotiations were a dramatic event, but in the film are reduced to a low-key discussion with a few throw-away lines. No explanation, other than the “40,000 troop losses per day”, is given about the state of the forces. The decline and fall of the Kaiserreich is not explained, other than with terse telegrams announcing the abdication of Wilhelm II.
The military-political German delegation, of which Erzberger formed part of the civilian component, tried, whether by accident or design, to trap Marshal Foch into asking for the armistice. Foch was wise to this and waited for the Germans to use the right form of words. This first encounter is well-documented, but is traduced here. There is also the episode where, when the Germans discovered that the Armistice terms included the internment of the High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow, they protested that since the Imperial German Navy had not been defeated in battle, it should not have to be surrendered. The British First Sea Lord, Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, retorted that the Highs Seas Fleet only had to come out and fight. While Wemyss is seen in the film, he is not heard, and the film-makers could not even be bothered to have the actor depicting him wear his distinctive monocle. Why work to depict a historical event and not try to make it accurate?
Another side-plot, also absent from Remarque’s novel, depicts the protagonist’s battalion commander in his requisitioned chateau bemoaning to a subordinate the imminent end of the war. His monologue is a pale imitation of Robert Duvall’s as Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, a film that works much better as an anti-war work than this new offering. It is a blatant and thus clumsy attempt to shoehorn in the trope of the indifference of military command to casualties. Rather than “Lions Led By Donkeys”, this is presumably Eagles Led By Pigeons.
In the middle of all of this, the German soldiers try to survive, and we are meant to be sympathetic to them for doing so during various combat scenes against their exclusively French opponents. However, to anyone versed in the truth of German conduct during the Great War (described at the time as ‘frighfulness‘), the burning of towns (including the University of Louvain and its library), the murder of civilians, the naval shelling of British coastal settlements, the aerial bombing of London, the original use of poison gas, the sinking of unarmed civilian ships by submarines, all of which were seen as new forms of atrocity at the time, this could be as difficult as being sympathetic to the Waffen-SS troops mowed down by Brad Pitt.
The finale is an attack in the dying minutes of a war scheduled to end at 11am on November 11 by remnants of the German unit that is sent against well-prepared positions, which again poses the question of the locale of this action. Entente forces that were advancing across a broad front would not have had to time to construct trenches and provide all the necessary infrastructure, such as reinforced dugouts as depicted. The protagonist is killed minutes before the fighting stops, one of the numerous departures from the novel, where the narrator is killed in October 1918.
It may be unreasonable for a drama such as this to be required to be historically accurate, but the departures from the true situation on the Western Front in November 1918 are too substantial to be ignored, and relegate this film to be a kind of military fantasy like Kelly’s Heroes and Inglorious Basterds. The Great War was not a bloody stalemate up until the final days. Moreover, despite the assertions of numerous historians, the Great Powers did not fall into war on the basis of their alliances. Since 1914, successive German governments have been trying to absolve the Kaiser and his cronies of starting the war, and denying this was actually was a war of expansion. But the punitive treaties imposed on Russia and Romania when defeated by Germany point to the reverse. In the 1920s and 1930s, American historians were paid by the German government to portray a version of events that shared the blame for the catastrophe, to counter the War Guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles. More recently, some historians have even stated that the war was a necessary step by Germany to counter a French plot to build up Russia to force a war of two fronts on Germany some time after 1917. The truth is that the German position was expansionist in a manner not dissimilar to the Nazis, right up to the point in late September 1918 when the military leadership realised they could not longer win, after which they decided to transfer the responsibility for defeat onto the civilian government.
Thus this film trades upon the general ignorance of the viewing public over the true events of the Great War. It subscribes instead to a Teutonic Blackadder version of history, taking advantage of computer-generated imagery and a more relaxed attitude about graphic violence to invoke sympathy. This is the opposite of the plot of the original novel, which devoted itself to the progressive brutalisation of the narrator, such that he is unable to relate to civilians when on leave, something that is not depicted. The subject matter permits people who would otherwise run a thousand miles from a Stallone/Schwarzenegger/Statham/Willis-style gunfest to be provide intellectual justification for watching similar kinds of gory action here, of which there is plenty. Instead, the focus seems to be on the tragedy of the French and Germans fighting each other.
The problem in any film depicting trench warfare is that war films thrive on progress and heroism, neither of which was possible on the Western Front to any great degree until 1918. Sam Mendes’ 1917 works because it focuses on a vital mission, with the trenches and devastation as a backdrop. The truth is that a proper film about the Western Front has yet to be made, and would likely have to be a mini-series on a streaming service depicting the change in tactics and equipment between 1914 and 1918. All Quiet on the Western Front is not that film. It plays much too fast and loose with the original material, as well as with actual history.
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