All Quiet on the Western Front
Paul Baumer and his friends Albert and Muller, egged on by romantic dreams of heroism, voluntarily enlist in the German army. Full of excitement and patriotic fervour, the boys enthusiastically march into a war they believe in. But once on the Western Front, they discover the soul-destroying horror of World War I.
- Released: 2022-10-07
- Runtime: 147 minutes
- Genre: Action, Drama, War
- Stars: Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Aaron Hilmer, Edin Hasanović, Devid Striesow, Daniel Brühl, Moritz Klaus, Sebastian Hülk, Anton von Lucke, Michael Wittenborn, Luc Feit, Andreas Döhler, André Marcon, Tobias Langhoff, Adrian Grünewald, Thibault de Montalembert, Nico Ehrenteit, Wolf Danny Homann, Charles Morillon, Jakob Schmidt, Peter Sikorski, Sascha Nathan, Alexander Schuster, Michael Stange, Joe Weintraub, Daniel Kamen, Markus Tomczyk, Dominikus Weileder, Michael Pitthan
- Director: Edward Berger
Comments
- k_balint - 12 January 2023
The book had a great influence on me back then, so I'm quiet disappointed now
I think one of the main problem with the film that they wanted to cram into too many things, too much background information about the war. There are scenes about politics and hackneyed war characters, which I think only interrupts the main plot. (we all know the main story from school, or its 2 min. To read in wikipedia) They even changed the original (book) date of the action to the end of the war - probably to make the deaths and losses feel even more pointless - but I think it was unnecessary.
The book is a masterpiece, which I would suggest everyone should read, so then hopefully noone would ever feel that war is a nice idea.
However this film doesn't remind me of that classic except that there are some characters with the same name from the book, but they have almost no resemblance to the original personalities. Which could be ok, if it was conceptual, but unfortunately they just became more shallow, and it was very hard to sympathize with them.
Althoough the film seems historically authentic (thats why I gave 5 stars), but lacks that dramatical dephtness, which the book has. I know that its a crazy hard task to screen literatures like this, so I shouldn't be too harsh with my critics, but unfortunately I just saw 1917 some days ago, and I have to say, that 1917 is a much more authentic visualisation of the athmosphere of the book "All Quiet on the Western Front" (even though the plot is completely different) than this film with the same title. - jamesjustice-92 - 7 January 2023
Im Westen etwas Seltsames
I have watched the original 1930 movie two times and have read the book as well - and I can't figure out why is this version called also Im Westen nichts Neues when in reality it has almost nothing to do with either the source material or the movie.
I can't deny, the story is captivating and grabs you by your guts starting the first minutes, and at times it wreches your guts severely with some of its scenes of brutality, bloodshed and downright realism of war but in the end all that's remained from Erich Maria Remark's book is the message of anti-war propaganda and pacifism. It is a fine message - I'm just not fine with the idea of labeling it the same as Remark's body of work. I think should it have been named differently I would have been less critical toward it.
As long as we're on this page we might as well mention that there's only one main character in this story - Paul Bäumer, with one secondary character - Kat, whereas in the original there were many characters on the stage, each with different personality and morale. The characters themselves were written and portrayed better than what we were given in this "remake" where the two main characters have two lines of background story written about them and all the rest is filled with war battles and negotiations.
This movie is shot beautifully though and despite the presence of some modern music and instruments the narrative goes smoothly and you feel every single scene and every single emotion on Paul's face. We can almost feel the mud on our body when Paul is in the trenches. Overall it paints a pretty solid picture of what World War One was like and how well propaganda worked to call for all those young men to come and die for their country when in reality they fought for nothing. Nothing new on the Western front is the literal translation of the novel and it gives all there is to know about war: it gives nothing, it gains nothing and it leaves you with nothing inside, dead just like the people who literally died.
The changed ending doesn't serve right to the movie as well, on top of that it changes the whole concept of the book and its main character. The original was all about camaraderie and brotherhood, those people were in it to help one another, to get through war safely, or at least to try and get home although deep down they knew they wouldn't. This movie does give some feeling of friendship between Paul and Kat but it's barely enough to touch the heart strings.
This Im Westen nichts Neues is a good war drama that tells us a story of a young boy whose ideas were shattered by the war and he lost a desire to live. Here, I explained the whole movie in one sentence - too simple for the adaptation of Erich Maria Remark's monumental novel, isn't it?
