movie reviews for all quiet on the western front

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, all quiet on the western front.

Now streaming on:

This film, directed by Edward Berger from a script he wrote with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell , is the first German-made version of Erich Maria Remarque ’s famed novel about World War I, written in German and published in 1928. The first film adaptation of the book, released in 1930, was American, directed by Lewis Milestone, and kind of a landmark of early American sound filmmaking. It was well received and considered so powerful that it was thought a potential deterrent to future war. That turned out to be erroneous. (And Remarque himself contended that he had not intended to write a pacifist testament so much as to plainly depict the agony of the young recruit at war.)

A second version, in 1979, directed by Delbert Mann (a “dreary” director, per Andrew Sarris) and starring Richard Thomas , then famous for his portrayal of saintly earnest John Boy Walton on “The Waltons,” didn’t have close to the same impact. Nor, I suspect, will this rendering (and I do mean “rendering” in more than one sense) of the story, which nonetheless is Germany's official film submission to the Academy Awards this year.

At two and a half hours, it’s as long as the 1930 version, but packed with quite a bit more plot. It jettisons the early scenes in the novel and film in which young German students are goaded by an ardent super-patriot professor into joining the military and saving the fatherland. Instead, this film sets its sights on the head-spinning carnage of warfare by showing how young enlistee Paul Bäumer ( Felix Kammerer ) gets his wrong-sized uniform: the clothing has been recycled off of a corpse.

Like “1917” before it, and like the better films that continue to inspire a concentratedly grisly mode of war picture (the epochal Russian film “ Come and See ” is explicitly referenced at least once, as is the more recent, and more problematic, “ The Painted Bird ”), “All Quiet on the Western Front" is state-of-the-art in shoving your nose in realistic-seeming carnage and possibly inducing hearing damage in laying on the ear-splitting aural experience of a fire-fight. The in-the-trenches tracking shots that Stanley Kubrick crafted for “ Paths of Glory ” (a movie that culminated in a point that actually made sense, unlike this muddle) are now steady hand-held digital panoramas of exposed viscera and agonized writhing. Filmmakers have arguably lost the plot, turning “War is hell” into a “Can you top this?” competition.

Within all the action, the narrative of young Bäumer making his way, learning what it is to kill, and trying to forge fellowship in his untenable situation plods along. Berger adds some material too. There’s a parallel storyline in which real-life German vice-chancellor Matthias Erzberger tries to broker a peace with the French and others. This is not present in Remarque’s book. So why’s it here? I reckon several reasons: first, to demonstrate that in the Great War, there really WERE some “good Germans,” which when you think about it is neither here nor there in this scheme, as the reader/viewer is meant to at least have some empathy for Paul, who is after all a German soldier. And the intransigence of some of the French delegates in these scenes will bring to mind the years-long humiliation Germany was subjected to by the Armistice agreement, which helped bring about the rise of Hitler. The Erzberger narrative is also intended, one supposes, to build suspense: will the Armistice go into effect before the worst can happen to the characters we’ve come to care about? (Presuming one has indeed come to care about them, which was not my own experience here.)

But this is not the only special pleading the director puts forth. Late in the film there’s a sequence when Paul and his older army friend Katczinsky ( Albrecht Schuch ) go to steal a goose (to eat, not to adopt as a pet or anything) from a French farm and run afoul of a dead-eyed French boy. I won’t “spoil” the sequence. But I will say that, apart from committing the cinematic sacrilege of using the same Bach choral prelude that Tarkovsky put in his “Solaris,” it is very invested in villainizing French farm boys. To which I can only ask, well, what were the Germans even doing in France at that time anyway?

Ultimately, I found this kind of whataboutism more amusing than disquieting. Maybe I’m just whistling in the dark. 

In select theaters today, on Netflix October 28th.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

Now playing

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Tomris laffly.

Kaiya Shunyata

Matt Zoller Seitz

Film credits.

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Rated R for strong bloody war violence and grisly images.

147 minutes

Felix Kammerer as Paul Bäumer

Albrecht Schuch as Stanislaus "Kat" Katczinsky

Aaron Hilmer as Albert Kropp

Edin Hasanović as Tjaden Stackfleet

Devid Striesow as General Friedrich

Daniel Brühl as Matthias Erzberger

Moritz Klaus as Frantz Müller

Sebastian Hülk as Major von Brixdorf

• Edward Berger

Writer (novel)

• Erich Maria Remarque
• Lesley Paterson
• Ian Stokell

Cinematographer

• James Friend
• Sven Budelmann
• Volker Bertelmann

Latest blog posts

Chi Film Fest's 60th Anniversary Cinema Soirée

The Acolyte Sends Star Wars Into a Galaxy Far, Far In the Past

Short Films in Focus: The Year of Staring at Noses

Animation Is Slow Motion: Pablo Berger on Robot Dreams

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Movie Reviews

Movie review: 'all quiet on the western front'.

Rob Schmitz

The Netflix adaptation of "All Quiet on the Western Front," the classic novel about the horrors of World War I, was directed by a German man and is in the German language.

Copyright © 2022 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Advertisement

Supported by

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Review: The Spectacle of War

Edward Berger’s German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel aims to rattle you with its relentless brutality.

• Share full article

By Ben Kenigsberg

In his auteurist film history “The American Cinema” (1968), the critic Andrew Sarris compared similar scenes in two World War I films, King Vidor’s “The Big Parade” (1925) and Lewis Milestone’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930), the first screen adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel. Vidor, Sarris felt, had a more satisfying approach to showing two soldiers from opposite sides in a shell hole, one dying. Vidor emphasized the faces of his characters, Sarris wrote, rather than pictorialism and spectacle.

The first sequence of Edward Berger’s new German-language adaptation of Remarque’s novel announces about as loudly as possible that it’s on the side of pictorialism and spectacle. It opens with a landscape: a quiet wood and mountains, seemingly at sunrise. A fox sucks from its mother’s teat. A Terrence Malick-like shot looks upward at impossibly high and peaceful treetops.

Berger then cuts to an aerial view of drifting smoke, which clears to reveal an array of corpses. A barrage of bullets suddenly pierces the near-still composition, and the camera turns to show the full extent of the carnage and the muck. This is war as a violation of nature. And that’s even before Berger trails a scared soldier named Heinrich (Jakob Schmidt), who charges ahead in a pair of unbroken shots — take that, “1917” — only to die offscreen. In a device that owes something to the red coat in “Schindler’s List,” Heinrich’s uniform will be stripped from his body, cleansed, stitched up, shipped to Northern Germany and eventually reused by Remarque’s protagonist, Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), who notices someone else’s name on the label.

Does this version of a literary classic go hard or what? In truth, opting for pure bombast — a pounding, repeated three-note riff by Volker Bertelmann, who did the score, never fails to quicken the pulse — isn’t necessarily an ineffective way of translating Remarque’s plain-spoken prose. Berger has more tools at his disposal than Milestone did with the challenges of the early sound era, yet those advantages somehow make this update less impressive: The magnification in scale and dexterity lends itself to showing off. Still, the movie aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.

This “Western Front” places its faith in big set pieces and powerful images. Even the scope has been widened. Berger cuts between Paul’s experiences in the trenches and cease-fire talks between Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), who chaired Germany’s armistice commission, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France (Thibault De Montalembert). The 72-hour deadline that Foch gives Erzberger to sign adds an element of ticking-clock suspense to the overall narrative, albeit by departing from Remarque’s first-person point of view.

The fates of the author’s soldiers are also tweaked. But there are moments here that resonate. When Paul trudges through the trench and collects dog tags from his fallen comrades, he finds a friend’s distinctive eyeglasses in the mud. Rats scurry to avoid the earthquake of approaching tanks. Paul, his face caked in dirt, tries to silence the dying gulps of the French soldier he has stabbed, in this movie’s counterpart to the Vidor-Milestone scene. Tjaden (Edin Hasanovic) jabs at his neck after realizing he’ll have to live as an amputee.

The closest thing the movie has to affecting character work comes in the relationship between Paul and Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch), who enjoy one last mission to steal food from a farm during the final hours of the war — when neither the violence nor Berger plans to relent.

All Quiet on the Western Front Rated R. Extreme war violence. In German and French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 27 minutes. Watch on Netflix.

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

Leslye Headland’s new “Star Wars” show, The Acolyte,” is a dream come true, but she knows it carries enormous expectations .

Once relegated to supporting roles, the comedian Michelle Buteau  is a star of the film “Babes” and is moving to a bigger stage, Radio City Music Hall, for her new special.

American audiences used to balk at subtitles. But recent hits like “Shogun” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” show how much that has changed .

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter  to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

‘all quiet on the western front’ review: a visceral take on the german anti-war classic.

Close to a century after Lewis Milestone's Oscar-winning film, Edward Berger offers a German adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's World War I novel.

By John DeFore

John DeFore

• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Send an Email
• Show additional share options
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Pinterest
• Share on Reddit
• Share on Tumblr
• Share on Whats App
• Print the Article
• Post a Comment

Patriotic young men are as disposable as potato peels in All Quiet on the Western Front , Edward Berger’s new adaptation of the novel that gave us the 1930 Lewis Milestone movie of the same name. For some, seeing this German book rendered by a German will be reason enough for a remake; for many others, especially those reliant on history-ignoring Netflix (where this Front will debut next month), the original might as well not exist.

Related Stories

Toronto festival to launch film market, box office: nickelback 'hate to love' doc lands special two-night theatrical release, all quiet on the western front.

A prologue encapsulates the story’s message pretty succinctly. Caught in a battle his side is losing, a young soldier named Heinrich musters his courage, tosses his spent rifle aside, and charges heroically at the enemy with a shovel. A scene later, the hero lies in a truck full of corpses, whose uniforms are salvaged, washed and mended. The bullet hole repaired, Henrich’s jacket is passed on to a fresh new recruit who has no idea it was ever worn.

That recruit is Paul (Felix Kammerer), who is so eager to enlist in the Great War with a handful of friends that he forges a permission slip he’s supposed to get a parent to sign. (It’s worth pausing to let that sink in, right?) The boys are welcomed with puffery — commanding officers who call them the “greatest generation” and urge them to fight for “the Kaiser, God, and the Fatherland,” in that peculiar order. Soon they’re thrown out into a wasteland where, for months, opponents have killed each other to gain and lose a few yards of dirt.

A different kind of end comes. We’ve been getting breathers once in a while, shifting focus to the luxurious trains and commandeered mansions where French and German authorities make decisions. While German army commanders are prepared to toss as many young bodies on the fire as are needed, politicians understand they’ve already lost, and a faction led by Daniel Brühl’s Matthias Erzberger finally secures a ceasefire. But General Friedrich (Devid Striesow) decides to launch a doomed offensive in the war’s final minutes, ignoring the human cost.

Full credits

Thr newsletters.

Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day

More from The Hollywood Reporter

‘diane von furstenberg: woman in charge’ review: designer and fashion icon reflects on her life and loves in vivid tribeca opener, how ‘bad boys: ride or die’ may remind viewers of will smith’s oscars slap, sheryl lee ralph reacts to ‘sister act 2’ meme, james gunn’s ‘superman’ adds ‘saturday night live’ actor beck bennett, when you give a ball a camera: how ‘challengers’ vfx team created tennis pov scene, jeannette charles, famed queen elizabeth ii look-alike, dies at 96.

Review: War is hell (again) in Netflix’s new adaptation of ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

“All Quiet on the Western Front,” directed by Edward Berger, is hardly the first movie to argue — quite persuasively — that war is hell. It is, however, the first filmed adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s seminal World War I novel in which the Germans actually speak German. The book’s prior screen incarnations — Lewis Milestone’s Oscar-winning 1930 film , Delbert Mann’s 1979 telefilm — featured platoons of English-speaking actors cast as men with names like Kropp, Müller and Tjaden, a choice that made for some cognitive dissonance but scarcely mitigated their dramatic power or purpose. And that purpose — to de-glorify the horrors of trench warfare, mock the foolish vanity of nationalism and condemn the futility and cruelty of mass death — is one that should transcend barriers of language and culture anyway.

Even so, this solid, stirring new adaptation, which will represent Germany in the Oscar race for international feature, sets a noteworthy precedent. There’s an undeniable power in seeing Remarque’s once-serialized novel — an antiwar statement so definitive that it was duly banned by the Nazis a few years after its 1929 publication — brought to the screen in its original tongue. The sight of actual German actors in these roles can only lend authority to Remarque’s lament for a generation of men — his generation — who were “destroyed by the war,” even as it serves to bolster the movie’s horrifyingly visceral realism.

For your safety

The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials .

The technical virtuosity of this “All Quiet on the Western Front” is apparent from its nightmarish opening vision of a charred battlefield strewn with barricades and bodies, a graveyard of broken flesh and twisted metal. It’s 1917, and thousands of German and French soldiers have already died here, casualties of a years-long struggle on each side to gain just a few hundred meters of ground. In a bold early flourish, Berger (who wrote the script with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell) tracks the progress of a dead man’s uniform as it’s stripped from its wearer’s body, transported, laundered and pressed back into commission — one tiny, reusable cog in the grinding machinery of war.

That uniform will soon drape the body of Paul Bäumer (a very good Felix Kammerer), a fresh-faced young man who, along with his eager schoolmates, has heeded the call to fight for “the Kaiser, God and the Fatherland.” But despite the near-certain victory they’ve been promised, something other than glory awaits them as they march across miles of scorched earth and into the trenches of Northern France. There is a stunning baptism by fire as enemy bombardments send Bäumer and his comrades scurrying for shelter. And then there is the ritual of tag collection so as to identify the newly dead, a process that will become — like a heavy, synth-enhanced three-note progression from Volker Bertelmann’s score — one of the movie’s grimmer motifs.

For a while there is the tedium of waiting, but also the consolations of camaraderie. The fine actors playing Bäumer’s comrades (they include Aaron Hilmer, Moritz Klaus, Adrian Grünewald and Edin Hasanovic) bring just enough spark and shading to enliven the classical war-film convention of one distinguishing trait per soldier, the one exception being the excellent Albrecht Schuch as Bäumer’s most trusted ally, Stanislaus Katczinsky. He’s a good man to have around, whether you’re killing time in an outdoor latrine — Berger honors Remarque’s ode to the joys of public defecation — or stealing a farmer’s goose for supper in one of the movie’s more suspenseful passages.

Hunger and thirst are constants; so are other appetites, to be sated only by a suggestive poster image or, for the lucky ones, a romp with a passing farm girl. In these moments, Berger captures the sometimes surreal idleness of war — the uneasy tension of being both a hostile, occupying force and a starving, lusting man in a foreign land. The idleness, of course, is only a respite in a movie that, as it descends back into the trenches and piles on the carnage, sometimes feels like its two-and-a-half-hour running time and sometimes feels like an eternity.

I tend to reject the widely held notion that the best, most persuasive war films are those most adept at turning violence into spectacle, as if state-of-the-art verisimilitude were the genre’s highest aspiration. Whatever its flaws or merits, this “All Quiet on the Western Front” will not settle the long-standing debate over whether there can even be such a thing as an antiwar film, especially since even the most nightmarish re-creation of armed combat threatens to become — with the enhancements of digital pyrotechnics, blood-gushing prosthetics and ear-splitting, seat-rattling sound design — an inadvertently thrilling experience. For the most part, though, Berger keeps horror rightly at the fore, never more so than when Bäumer, trapped in close quarters with a French soldier, is confronted by the undeniable humanity of his enemy.

That agonizing scene, like many others, comes straight from the novel. There’s one hefty subplot that doesn’t; it follows the real-life German negotiator Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) as he travels to sign an armistice with France, determined to end the war quickly and spare his badly beaten nation as much humiliation as possible. Brühl, the most internationally recognizable member of the cast, makes an engaging enough guide, but the decision to include this principled voice of pacifism bespeaks a lack of confidence in the movie’s point and the audience’s ability to grasp it. And while it’s instructive to witness the luxuries enjoyed by the lofty and powerful — the tea, the wine, the pastries — in contrast with the soldier’s miserable starvation diet, it’s ultimately a mistake to cut away from Bäumer and his comrades, removing us from the physical and psychological hellscape to which they’ve been abandoned.

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’

In German and French with English subtitles Rated: R, for strong bloody war violence and grisly images Running time: 2 hours, 28 minutes Playing: Bay Theatre, Pacific Palisades; available Oct. 28 on Netflix

Watch L.A. Times Today at 7 p.m. on Spectrum News 1 on Channel 1 or live stream on the Spectrum News App. Palos Verdes Peninsula and Orange County viewers can watch on Cox Systems on channel 99.

More to Read

Several new World War II-set TV series aim to portray life beyond conflict and survival

May 8, 2024

How accurate is a new movie about the real-life spies who inspired Bond? We checked

April 19, 2024

Review: Long before Bond, ‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ kicked off British covert ops

April 18, 2024

Review: In Denmark’s ‘The Promised Land,’ the virtues of an old-school western still blaze

Feb. 2, 2024

Review: ‘Masters of the Air’ is a visually spectacular re-creation of war centered on real-life stories

Jan. 25, 2024

This western from Chile confronts the erased genocide of Indigenous people 

Jan. 12, 2024

Entertainment & Arts

The trauma and slaughter of World War I is examined in a new LACMA show

Dec. 7, 2023

Why there’s no such thing as an antiwar film

Nov. 10, 2023

Appreciation: Terence Davies, a master filmmaker, brought quiet passion and lyrical beauty to the screen

Oct. 8, 2023

Only good movies

Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Kevin Costner reveals his promise to Whitney Houston — and his refusal to trim her eulogy

June 5, 2024

Marvel star Evangeline Lilly takes an ‘indefinite hiatus’ from acting

Martin Lawrence is ‘healthy as hell’: ‘Bad Boys’ star quells fans’ press tour concerns

Company Town

Move over, Barbie: Universal developing ‘Monster High’ film based on Mattel dolls

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Review: A World War I Drama That’s Dutifully Competent and Dull

Edward Berger's German remake is done in the standard existential bombs-bursting-in-earth mode, but it's been made with no special flair and says nothing new.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

• ‘Bad Boys: Ride or Die’ Review: Will Smith and Martin Lawrence Make the Franchise’s Fourth Entry Tastier Than It Has Any Right to Be 1 day ago
• Would ‘Hit Man’ Be a Hit in Theaters? Netflix Doesn’t Want You to Know 3 days ago
• ‘The Great Lillian Hall’ Review: Jessica Lange Is Grand as a Legendary Stage Actress Confronting Dementia 5 days ago

Related Stories

With queen catalog deal, sony would rule cooled music publishing market, drake and nicki minaj lead 2024 bet nominations list, popular on variety.

Over the course of the war, the land “capture” on the Western Front was meager; the location of the front line never moved by more than half a mile. So why did all those soldiers die? For no reason. Because of a tragic — one could say obscene — historical accident: that in WWI, the means of fighting was caught between an older, “classical” mode of stationary combat and the new reality of long-distance slaughter made possible by technology. By the end of the war, 17 million men had fallen between those cracks.

Yet the pale, gentle-hearted Paul, whose newly issued uniform has come off the corpse of a fallen soldier (a point meant to illustrate the endless cycle of death in WWI), somehow fights on and survives. He strikes us as a mild young man, yet there’s a ruthless killer inside him. Whirling to shoot one soldier, then knife another, he becomes, in essence, a desperate action hero, and I put it that way only because I didn’t find his acumen on the battlefield especially convincing. Berger, as a filmmaker, wants to bring us “close” to war, but the horror in “All Quiet on the Western Front” is in your face and also rather tidy in its presentation. Maybe that’s why it feels numbing.

The great war films aren’t reticent about mixing personal drama into the combat. They feature characters as edgy and defined as their theater of violence. But the new “All Quiet on the Western Front” is two and a half hours of dramatic minimalism, as if this were somehow a measure of the film’s integrity. The soldiers, including Paul, are barely sketched in, and you’re frankly relieved when the movie cuts to conventional scenes of the German vice-chancellor, Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), as he tries to broker a peace with the French generals who have trounced the German army. The negotiations are one-sided; the French, who hold all the cards, want surrender on their terms. But we register, behind Erzberger, the implacable never-say-die resentment of the German officers, which will of course be carried forward into the next war.

Stanley Kubrick, with “Paths of Glory,” made what is still the greatest movie about trench warfare, and he wasn’t shy about involving us in actual drama. “All Quiet on the Western Front” lumbers along, so that even once the armistice is struck there’s still another combat episode, all to demonstrate, with overly highlighted tragic irony, that the body count in World War I kept escalating for no reason. Anyone sane would agree with that. Yet “All Quiet on the Western Front” is the war movie as thesis statement. It keeps making its point, leaving you less shattered than empty.

Reviewed at IFC Center, Oct. 27, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 152 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release of an Amusement Park Films production. Producers: Malte Grunert, Daniel Dreifuss, Edward Berger. Executive producers: Daniel Brühl, Lesley Pateron, Ian Stokell.
• Crew: Director: Edward Berger. Screenplay: Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson, Ian Stokell. Camera: James Friend. Editor: Sven Budelmann. Music: Volker Bertelmann.
• With: Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Aaron Hilmer, Moritz Klaus, Edin Hasanovic, Adrian Grünewald, Thibault De Montalembert, Devid Striesow, Daniel Brühl.

More from Variety

Intramovies sells venice horizons winner ‘paradise is burning’ in key territories ahead of cannes (exclusive), following a bidding war, blackstone gets the whole hipgnosis songs pie, netflix, roku accelerate streaming momentum in sports rights deals, more from our brands, shane smith returns to vice after company bankruptcy, sets podcast with bill maher, home of the week: a $16 million contemporary jungle compound near one of costa rica’s preeminent surf communities, ai video firm spiideo lands $20m venture capital investment, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, road house sequel will be ‘bigger’ and ‘expansive,’ says jake gyllenhaal, verify it's you, please log in.

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

• For Parents
• For Educators
• Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

• Get the app
• Movie Reviews
• Best Movie Lists
• Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

• Best TV Lists
• Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
• Common Sense Selections for TV
• Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

• Book Reviews
• Best Book Lists
• Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

• Game Reviews
• Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

• Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

• Podcast Reviews
• Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

• App Reviews
• Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

• YouTube Channel Reviews
• YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

• Preschoolers (2-4)
• Little Kids (5-7)
• Big Kids (8-9)
• Pre-Teens (10-12)
• Teens (13+)
• Screen Time
• Social Media
• Online Safety
• Identity and Community

Real-Life Heroes on YouTube for Tweens and Teens

• Family Tech Planners
• Digital Skills
• All Articles
• Latino Culture
• Black Voices
• Asian Stories
• Native Narratives
• LGBTQ+ Pride
• Best of Diverse Representation List

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

Podcasts with Diverse Characters and Stories

All quiet on the western front (2022), common sense media reviewers.

Intense, lengthy adaptation has gruesome war scenes.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

There's nothing glamorous or cool about war. Soldi

Soldiers stick together and watch out for each oth

The film is set in Europe, stars a German cast, an

In battlefield scenes, men are killed individually

Soldiers mention "dirty girls," the "Holy Virgin's

In the English subtitles: "s--t," "hell," "damn,"

Some people smoke cigarettes and drink wine or oth

Parents need to know that this German-language adaptation of the class novel All Quiet on the Western Front is a gruesome, two-and-a-half-hour depiction of the horrific realities of war. In battlefield scenes, men are killed individually and in mass in grisly ways, from stabbings to amputations, from getting…

Positive Messages

There's nothing glamorous or cool about war. Soldiers on all sides are just young people with lives and dreams. War takes this from them seemingly at random. Those who survive are forever changed by what they've witnessed and done.

Positive Role Models

Soldiers stick together and watch out for each other. They form a brotherhood that some hope to carry on after the war is over. They also obey commands and fight their hardest. Paul feels guilty after watching an "enemy" soldier die a slow death. Some soldiers lose their will to live after all the horrors they've seen. One government official who lost his son in war works for peace; another purposefully sends men to die in battle mere minutes before peace is declared.

Diverse Representations

The film is set in Europe, stars a German cast, and is shot in German with some French.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

In battlefield scenes, men are killed individually and in mass in horrific ways, from stabbings to amputations, from getting run over by a tank to being shot, exploded, set on fire, drowned in mud, gassed to death, and more. The film shows death in close-up detail. There's a lot of blood.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Soldiers mention "dirty girls," the "Holy Virgin's thighs," "the clap," a woman's breasts, and kissing a wife upon return from war.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

In the English subtitles: "s--t," "hell," "damn," "bastard," "arse," "for Christ's sake," "My God."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Some people smoke cigarettes and drink wine or other liquor.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this German-language adaptation of the class novel All Quiet on the Western Front is a gruesome, two-and-a-half-hour depiction of the horrific realities of war. In battlefield scenes, men are killed individually and in mass in grisly ways, from stabbings to amputations, from getting run over by a tank to being shot, exploded, set on fire, drowned in mud, gassed to death, and more. The film shows death, mutilation, and psychological torture in close-up detail. There's a lot of blood. We witness it all through the eyes of a young recruit who transitions from enthusiasm to horror to guilt, sorrow, and resignation. Men smoke cigarettes and drink wine or other liquor. There's less salty banter between soldiers than in some other all-male films, though there's mention of "dirty girls," the "Holy Virgin's thighs," "the clap," a woman's breasts, and kissing a wife upon return from war. In the English subtitles, language includes "s--t," "hell," "damn," "bastard," "arse," "for Christ's sake," and "My God." To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (7)
• Kids say (32)

Based on 7 parent reviews

Actually a good WWI movie

What's the story.

Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer) is a young man who doesn't want to be left behind when all his friends head off to fight in World War I at the start of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. He forges his parents' signature and enlists. All the new young recruits are pumped with energy and enthusiasm about fighting for their country. Within mere hours after setting off with their troops, these men realize just how terrible the conditions are for soldiers, and how devastating war is on the psyche. Men die by the thousands, including all of Paul's friends. An older soldier, Kat (Albrecht Schuch), takes him under his wing, but nobody can truly be protected in the trenches and on the battlefields on the disputed western front. Meanwhile, the liberal politician Matthias Erzberger ( Daniel Bruhl ) works to sign a peace deal with France in time to save some lives.

Is It Any Good?

Not every viewer will be willing or able to sit through two and a half hours of epic, bloody, graphically violent war reenactments. But those who do make it through this third film version (and the first in German) of the classic German novel, All Quiet on the Western Front , will be rewarded with a subtly humane tale of friendship, endurance, and the value of human life. The violence serves the story and its message. Director Edward Berger and team have done a jaw-dropping job of choreographing battlefield scenes, shooting them often at eye level and embedded in the trenches, giving the viewer the impression of being in the mix. A disquieting score relies heavily on single, melancholic beats that come and go with the action. Newcomer Kammerer is excellent as the wide-eyed recruit who barely withstands each passing day of tragedy.

Quiet is shot in grey, blue, and brown tones, and painstakingly conveys the soldiers' horrific, near-starvation, mud-caked, boot-soaked conditions. These are compared in overlapping scenes with the exquisite luxuries military leaders are afforded. Soldiers are killed, dismembered, exploded, set on fire, and sent into a last deadly battle just minutes before the armistice. The film has a clear theme of how little the lives of the young men seem to matter to some of the higher-ups, or to the enemy. "Soon Germany will be empty," one character says. End credits tell us almost 17 million people died in World War I, three million battling uselessly over the western front. Scenes capture how single trenches get passed back and forth on the same fought-over land between opposing sides for years, and how the uniforms of the dead are practically yet cynically washed, sewn back up, and handed out to new recruits, with perished soldiers' names on labels ripped out and tossed to the floor.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about why the young men are so eager to go to war in All Quiet on the Western Front . What did you think of the scene at the beginning where they are cheering about their turn to go to the frontlines?

The film depicts the realities of war quite graphically, with grisly scenes of death for nearly the full 2.5-hour running time. What do you think was the filmmakers' intention with this? Could the film have given the same horrific portrayal of war without so much graphic violence? Why or why not?

Who was fighting in World War I and why? Where was the western front being fought over in the film? Where could you go for more information?

If you've seen either of the earlier film adaptations or read the original novel, how does this film compare? Is this film a remake or a new adaptation?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : October 28, 2022
• Cast : Felix Kammerer , Albrecht Schuch , Daniel Bruhl
• Director : Edward Berger
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Book Characters , Friendship , History
• Run time : 148 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong bloody war violence and grisly images
• Awards : Academy Award , BAFTA
• Last updated : March 15, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

Our editors recommend.

All Quiet on the Western Front

Saving Private Ryan

World War I Books for Kids

World war ii books for kids, related topics.

• Book Characters

Want suggestions based on your streaming services? Get personalized recommendations

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

All Quiet On The Western Front vividly and poignantly reminds moviegoers that World War I was hell

Director edward berger injects visceral intensity and visual poetry into his powerful adaptation of erich maria remarque's 1929 novel.

World War I ended a little more than a century ago at this point, and it’s never felt like more of a historical blank slate on which to project our fears, our hopes, and our own cultural darkness. World War II still stands as a righteous crusade against evil in the eyes of Western popular culture, but our connection to the original Great War is something much more tenuous, more open to interpretation, and perhaps even intimacy in its storytelling. Perhaps that’s why Sam Mendes’ sweeping epic 1917 and its story of survival against all odds caught on so well with audiences and awards organizations. It was easy to superimpose ourselves onto the battlefield in front of Mendes’ camera, and imagine our own daring rescue missions.

Related Content

Edward Berger’s All Quiet On The Western Front , the third major cinematic adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s legendary novel, is playing with many of the same raw materials as Mendes’ more recent, Britain-focused hit. You’ll find more long takes of futile charges over trenches, more moments of quiet before the inevitable storm of war, and more young actors thrown into the crucible that makes boys into warriors. But in a world that has since been ravaged by a pandemic and a new European war, Berger’s film sidesteps the inevitable comparisons to Mendes (much less Lewis Milestone’s 1930 Best Picture winner) to instead give us something bleaker, more brutal, and perhaps more honest. This is a film about the boys who don’t come home, and its story proves both deeply affecting—and surprisingly timeless.

The fighting in Berger’s film, as in Remarque’s novel, centers on Paul (Felix Kammerer), a young German student who’s swept up in the nationalism of the war movement and enlists for a one-way ticket to the front lines in the fight against France. Paul begins the film bright-eyed, smiling, eager for the mantle of “veteran” and “hero” that will drape his shoulders when he finally comes home. What he doesn’t know is that his uniform was just recently stripped off a corpse and laundered for re-use, that his path to so-called glory lies through miles of mud, and that his band of idealistic friends will not be intact by the end of the war.

After capping off the film’s opening act with a terrifying depiction of Paul’s first brush with combat, Berger leaps forward to the fall of 1919, the final days of the war. Now a hardened soldier with the end of his time on the front in sight, Paul has settled into the mundane, bleary-eyed life of the Great War, while the real battle is fought elsewhere. As a German diplomat (Daniel Bruhl) races against time to forge an armistice, the country’s generals try to keep fighting, because it’s the only thing they know how to do.

This tension between peace and the constant urge to keep pushing at the front forms the emotional and structural backbone of Berger’s narrative, and what’s most striking is how readily he’s able to bring the diplomatic struggles far away from the trenches to bear on Paul and his friends as they grapple with ceaseless artillery barrages and gallons of muddy water. The totality of the consequences springing forth from the decisions of the powerful is never lost on the day-to-day work of the soldiers, and on Paul’s journey as he trudges through grief, blood, and a distant memory of what he once called peace. To underscore those consequences, Berger plays up the indecision of the German leadership, as diplomats argue for the sake of each human life and generals argue for the sake of national pride and bloody legacy. It’s an argument you could see playing out on the front page of a major newspaper any day right now, and it heightens Berger’s timeless points about the futility and false pride of war.

Though he’s certainly not the only bright light in the film’s large ensemble cast, Kammerer must carry much of this narrative tension in his face at all times, and he does a remarkable job of looking both distant and cold in the face of ceaseless tragedy and simultaneously imbuing Paul with a raw sense of humanity. There’s a sense of watching an open wound move through space as he powers through this film, from the fluid one-take battle sequences to the shell-shocked stares he delivers when the explosions die down and the counting of the dead begins. It’s a remarkable, reactive, and very rewarding performance, and it’s backed up by the compositional confidence of his director.

Berger’s All Quiet On The Western Front is a powerful, human odyssey about the cost of endless war and the whims of the powerful, but what lingers afterward is the way its director frames that narrative across the (literal) European landscape. Berger’s battle sequences are memorable, but just as memorable are his moments of quiet punctuation by framing up the silent trees of the Western European forests, the babbling brooks that will flow on no matter how much blood seeps into the waters, the wildlife that will keep fighting its own battles, heedless of the human ones. A shot of a tank emerging from smoke like a monster in a horror film might be followed by a still tableau of a forest canopy, as though God himself is watching from just above those trees, maybe judging the combatants, maybe ignoring them. If the outcome is the same, does it matter?

These are the questions invited, and not always answered, by All Quiet ’s elegiac and haunting look at a war almost no one is still alive to remember. Yet what it has left to teach us, and what we carry of it into our own wars, is very much up to us—and it’s the film’s keen awareness of that sense of projection that makes it resonate.

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

• User Reviews

Awards | FAQ | User Ratings | External Reviews | Metacritic Reviews

• User Ratings
• External Reviews
• Metacritic Reviews
• Full Cast and Crew
• Release Dates
• Official Sites
• Company Credits
• Filming & Production
• Technical Specs
• Plot Summary
• Plot Keywords
• Parents Guide

Did You Know?

• Crazy Credits
• Alternate Versions
• Connections
• Soundtracks

Photo & Video

• Photo Gallery
• Trailers and Videos

Related Items

• External Sites

Related lists from IMDb users

Recently Viewed

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Review: German Anti-War Classic Gets Stunning Adaptation

Your changes have been saved

Email Is sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

'AM I OK?' Review: Dakota Johnson’s Max Movie Is a Terrific Comedy

'hit man' review: richard linklater’s netflix noir is a hilarious, sexy gem, 'lumberjack the monster' review: takashi miike’s horror film deserved better than netflix.

Nearly one hundred years after Lewis Milestone adapted Erich Maria Remarque ’s groundbreaking novel, German filmmaker Edward Berger has brought All Quiet on the Western Front to life with a fresh perspective—and the first German adaptation of a story deeply ingrained into the very DNA of the country. Set in the midst of World War I, the film’s focus narrows on Paul Bäumer ( Felix Kammerer ) and his small group of friends that get lured into war by the promise of heroism and patriotism. But there are no heroes in this war, a fact that Berger makes evident throughout the film. Paul might be the film’s protagonist—the heart and soul of the story that the audience sees the world through—but this is not a hero’s journey. All Quiet on the Western Front is a welcome departure from a long line of profound World War I films such as Sam Mendes ’ 1917 or, more recently, Operation Mincemeat because there is no one to root for and there is no positive outcome on the horizon. It’s an interesting choice, but one that delivers a more honest and devastating story.

Berger and fellow screenwriters Ian Stokell and Lesley Paterson faithfully adapt Remarque’s somber approach and biting critique of war, by painting a brutal picture of its horrors, yet it is designed to allow the audience to arrive at its own emotional conclusion as the credits roll. War is hell and for a little over two and a half hours, All Quiet on the Western Front displays its ghastly horrors without ever venturing into voyeuristic consumption, opting instead to unsettle its audience with bleak realities and sobering truths. Throughout the film, Berger cuts away from waterlogged trenches and the mangled corpses of bright young men lured into early graves, to showcase the serenity of nature. The dichotomy between life and death stands in stark contrast with the horrors on display, even as a generation dies, creeks continue to flow, seasons change, and fox kits are born. Cinematographer James Friend brings about the perfect visuals, marrying the stunning, sweeping scope of their locations with the bristling intimacy of death and mortality.

In his first performance on-screen, Kammerer proves himself as a promising newcomer on the global stage. Paul Bäumer is not an easy role to take on; the physicality of the role alone might crush a performer, and that’s without considering the great emotional toll undertaken to portray the shame, depravity, and agony of war. Paul is the heart of the film, and Kammerer effortlessly bares his soul to the audience as the war takes and takes and takes from his character. His performance is made even better by those around him, who revel in quiet moments of humanity with him and mourn with him for the ghosts of men who have quietly been dying as they lived.

RELATED: 'All Quiet on the Western Front' Director Ed Berger on Remaking the Material From the German Perspective | TIFF

A long time ago, American anthropologist James Deetz posited that the past can be seen most fully by studying the small things so often forgotten, and this seems to be the unexpected thesis of Berger’s adaptation. His cast of characters finds favor with the audiences through small, tangible personal effects that carry through the film. For Franz ( Moritz Klaus ), it's a handkerchief from a passing paramour named Eloise—a trinket that brings a moment of reprieve to his fellow soldiers as they relish in the femininity her existence brings to the testosterone-laden bunks; for Kat ( Albrecht Schuch ) it’s a matchbox that he keeps a beetle within—a beetle that escapes war with its life when the men are left for the beetles to consume; for Albert ( Aaron Hilmer ) it's a poster that he finds that allows him to escape the horrors and dream about the women he’ll never know; and for Ludwig ( Adrian Grunewald ) it's the glasses he is given by the military to replace his own spectacles. But more profound is the fact that Paul has no touchstone, no trinket in his pocket that helps to carry him onward, because he carries those around him— Franz, Kat, Albert, Ludwig, and Tjaden ( Edin Hasanovic )—to the front lines with him.

Unlike previous adaptations of Remarque’s novel, Berger instills All Quiet on the Western Front with historical elements that further underscore the shame of war. This element takes shape in the form of real-life historical figure Matthias Erzeberger ( Daniel Brühl ), who helped Germany forge a path towards an armistice with France, and was later assassinated for those efforts. There is also the fictionalized career general, who balks at the idea of peace treaties and is so enraptured with the idea of patriotism that he is driven to lead an army of beleaguered soldiers to their deaths, rather than embrace the cease-fire that waits for them on the horizon. Both figures symbolize the costs of peace: warmongers will always march their soldiers into the maw of death, while they watch from lofty seclusion, while the peacekeepers risk their safety for the promise of a better future.

All Quiet on the Western Front has a stunning sound design; one that sets teeth on edge and rattles within the chests of its audience. As the war machine wages on, Berger utilizes the jarring and ominous music of a harmonium to break through moments of reprieve like a hammer striking an anvil, signaling the ever-waging war that is larger than its cast. It cuts through quiet moments, shattering serenity and echoing like a reminder of how war destroys beauty.

Over one hundred years ago World War I devastated a generation, ten years ago there was a war that never truly ended, and presently a war wages on with flames of devastation that no one wants to stoke. Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front offers the same reminder that Remarque’s novel presented: nationalism kills only for the glory of ego and offers shallow graves in foreign lands instead of heroic homecomings. It is impossible to watch the film without being affected by the horrors of pitting man against man to placate the egos of tyrants with chips on their shoulders. The first adaptation came at the onset of even worse horrors than World War I, and it’s hard not to wonder if this adaptation might be able to sway the masses to lower their angry fists before it's too late once again.

All Quiet on the Western Front is currently playing in select theaters and comes to be on Netflix on October 28.

Our Rating:

• Movie Reviews
• All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

• Work & Careers
• Life & Arts

Become an FT subscriber

Try unlimited access only $1 for 4 weeks.

Then $75 per month. Complete digital access to quality FT journalism on any device. Cancel anytime during your trial.

• Global news & analysis
• Expert opinion
• Special features
• FirstFT newsletter
• Videos & Podcasts
• Android & iOS app
• FT Edit app
• 10 gift articles per month

Explore more offers.

Standard digital.

• FT Digital Edition

Premium Digital

Print + premium digital, ft professional, weekend print + standard digital, weekend print + premium digital.

Essential digital access to quality FT journalism on any device. Pay a year upfront and save 20%.

• Global news & analysis
• Exclusive FT analysis
• FT App on Android & iOS
• FirstFT: the day's biggest stories
• 20+ curated newsletters
• Follow topics & set alerts with myFT
• FT Videos & Podcasts
• 20 monthly gift articles to share
• Lex: FT's flagship investment column
• 15+ Premium newsletters by leading experts
• FT Digital Edition: our digitised print edition
• Weekday Print Edition
• Videos & Podcasts
• Premium newsletters
• 10 additional gift articles per month
• FT Weekend Print delivery
• Everything in Standard Digital
• Everything in Premium Digital

Complete digital access to quality FT journalism with expert analysis from industry leaders. Pay a year upfront and save 20%.

• 10 monthly gift articles to share
• Everything in Print
• Make and share highlights
• FT Workspace
• Markets data widget
• Subscription Manager
• Workflow integrations
• Occasional readers go free
• Volume discount

Terms & Conditions apply

Explore our full range of subscriptions.

Why the ft.

See why over a million readers pay to read the Financial Times.

International Edition

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Link to Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
• Young Woman and the Sea Link to Young Woman and the Sea
• Jim Henson Idea Man Link to Jim Henson Idea Man

New TV Tonight

• Star Wars: The Acolyte: Season 1
• Ren Faire: Season 1
• Clipped: Season 1
• Queenie: Season 1
• Sweet Tooth: Season 3
• Mayor of Kingstown: Season 3
• Criminal Minds: Season 17
• Becoming Karl Lagerfeld: Season 1
• Power Book II: Ghost: Season 4
• Erased: WW2's Heroes of Color: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• Eric: Season 1
• Dark Matter: Season 1
• Evil: Season 4
• Tires: Season 1
• Outer Range: Season 2
• Star Wars: Ahsoka: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• Star Wars: The Acolyte: Season 1 Link to Star Wars: The Acolyte: Season 1
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

Star Wars TV Shows Ranked by Tomatometer

30 Most Popular Movies Right Now: What to Watch In Theaters and Streaming

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

6 TV and Streaming Shows You Should Binge-Watch in June 2024

The Acolyte First Reviews: A Familiar but New Vision of Star Wars , Packed with Stunning Action

• Trending on RT
• The Acolyte First Reviews
• Vote: 1999 Movie Showdown
• Bad Boys: Ride or Die

All Quiet on the Western Front Reviews

If two writers and a director of the caliber responsible for [the film] had been allowed money and opportunity an original work the result would have to produce been far more exciting. What they have done has power, but it is spread all over the place.

Full Review | Oct 30, 2023

No film detailed the horrors of World War I better than Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front. A technically groundbreaking film that doubles as an extremely powerful anti-war message. Just as compelling in its time as it is today.

Full Review | Jun 8, 2023

All Quiet on the Western Front remains profoundly moving.

Full Review | Apr 25, 2023

The film also deserves high praise for its dynamic camera work, editing, production design, and other technical aspects that contribute to its authenticity and relatability almost one hundred years later.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Oct 27, 2022

This is one of the best films Universal had produced. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Sep 1, 2022

Mr. Lewis Milestone, the Russian who directed it, has made the most remarkable film I have ever seen. His battles scenes alone are astonishing.

Full Review | Aug 2, 2022

Here is a photoplay which carries a wallop in every scene. Without doubt, it is as mighty a weapon against war as any infernal machine might be for conflict. After seeing it, there can be few to argue in favor of shedding the blood of any nation's youth.

It enormously earns its reverence and celebrated place among war films and epics. Make no mistake. This film's resonance has not diminished with time or changing movie tastes.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 26, 2022

I went to see the film with the idea at the back of my mind that Hollywood would "murder" Remarque's powerful indictment of war. My fears were groundless, for Lewis Milestone's treatment of the story could not be improved upon.

Full Review | Feb 19, 2022

If ever there was a play aimed to bring about permanent peace, this Universal picture, directed by Lewis Milestone and produced by Junior Laemmle, is it.

Full Review | Jun 10, 2021

Its presentation of bombardments and actual fighting is without doubt the finest and most convincing thing of its kind that the screen has yet offered to the public. Another feature is the magnificent acting of all those who are concerned in the picture.

Full Review | Apr 8, 2021

In a perfect world... this would be the war movie to end all war movies, so definite and forceful is it in its anti-war stance, while also exhibiting such grace as to place it among the best cinema has to offer in any genre.

A thoroughly effective cast enacts the events. There are many war scenes in All Quiet and tragedy presented directly and without sentimentality, but there Is levity and romance.

All Quiet on the Western Front will grip you and leave an indelible mark upon your soul.

[All Quiet on the Western Front] strips war of all its glory and bares its sickening brutality with a tragic grimness that spares nothing and leaves the spectator shaken and speechless.

How it was passible to attain such remarkable accuracy in the battle episodes is a story in itself. But the delicate and intimate touches in the production are exceptionally fine, and though the story is somber there is the relieving humor here and there.

Easily the greatest of the talkies.

There is not much characterization in the picture. This is another reason why it is not a masterpiece. Many times it seems like a news reel actually taken at the front during 1917. It is this photographic detail which limits it as a work of art.

The picture is splendidly acted. Louis Wolheim, veteran of a hundred stage battles, is a most remarkable Katcynski, and Mr. Ayres is equally effective as Paul.

All Quiet is, of all the productions derived from the war theme, the one which I would choose to have the final word.

Notice: All forms on this website are temporarily down for maintenance. You will not be able to complete a form to request information or a resource. We apologize for any inconvenience and will reactivate the forms as soon as possible.

• DVD & Streaming

All Quiet on the Western Front

• Biography/History , Drama , War

Content Caution

In Theaters

• Felix Kammerer as Paul Bäumer; Daniel Brühl as Matthias Erzberger; Albrecht Schuch as Stanislaus "Kat" Katczinsky; Moritz Klaus as Frantz Müller; Aaron Hilmer as Albert Kropp; Edin Hasanovic as Tjaden Stackfleet

Home Release Date

• October 28, 2022
• Edward Berger

Distributor

Movie review.

Green. Warm. Barely worn.

Paul Bäumer sees the name stitched on the uniform label— Heinrich —the name of someone else. Standing in line, in his underwear, he shows the name to the official who gave it to him. The uniform, Paul says, must belong to someone else.

“Probably too small for the fella,” the soldier says. “Happens all the time.” He rips the nametag off the uniform and lets it drop to the floor—joining dozens of others that lay scattered at his feet.

The uniform wasn’t too small for Heinrich. But it doesn’t belong to him. Not anymore.

While Heinrich never came back, the uniform did. The bullet holes were stitched shut. The blood was bleached away. Here, in World War I, the uniforms last longer than those that wear them.

They must. Wool is scarce. Men are not.

But that is changing. As the Great War grinds on in 1917, it grinds up the youth of Europe. Paul is part of a dwindling generation, sent into battle carrying little more than patriotic fervor.

“You have a chance to earn the right to wear the uniforms you’ve been given!” Paul’s teacher exhorted his class just days earlier. “The future of Deutschland lies in the hands of its greatest generation!”

And so inspired, Paul and his friends signed up. No matter that Paul was 17—too young to volunteer without his parents’ permission. No matter that his parents never, ever, would’ve given that permission. But the German army isn’t rigorously double-checking parental signatures these days—not with the war in its fourth year. One forged signature later, and Paul’s a soldier, marching proudly to the front.

The uniform has seen more of battle than young Paul has. In its fabric, perhaps, memories stay stitched. The mud, the blood, particles of mustard gas, the ever-so-faint stench of burned flesh.

Paul sees not: He only sees the road ahead this bright sunny day, as he and his closest friends march to the front. He hears only the songs of his fellow soldiers, ready to kill some Frenchmen. He smells only glory.

Soon enough he’ll smell what war truly stinks of.

Positive Elements

All Quiet on the Western Front is as scathing an indictment of war as you’ll ever see. And perhaps that observation in and of itself is a back-handed positive. To be reminded of war’s horrors is also a reminder not to jump lightly into conflict.

But in the midst of war, people (all men, given the movie’s 1917-18 timeframe) bond together in ways that, perhaps, would be impossible in peacetime. When soldiers suffer through so much together—when they’re asked to save one another’s lives potentially with every sunrise—they become, very much, like brothers.

We see that here. Paul is “lucky” enough to spend much of his time in the war still with his best friends from school. But he also makes a new friend, too—perhaps his best friend. Stanislaus Katczinsky—“Kat” for short—has been on the front a little while longer than Paul and his schoolmates. He makes a special effort to help Paul, especially, acclimate to the front. Over time, the two become almost inseparable, and they do their own part to help each other and their mates survive each day as it comes.

It’s only much later in the movie that we learn how different Paul and Kat are from each other—so different that in peacetime, they’d likely never speak. When the educated Paul suggests they should hang out occasionally after the war, Kat reminds him he’s an illiterate cobbler. “What are we going to do?” Kat asks. “Sole shoes together?”

As the war winds down, we see some historical figures try to cobble out an armistice. Central in that drive is Matthias Erzberger (a real historical character), who does his best to end the war in order to save thousands upon thousands of lives. “Let us find mercy where we can,” he tells his fellow Germans, hoping the French will bend their Armistice demands a bit. “But for God’s sake, let’s bring peace.”

Spiritual Elements

That scene above isn’t the only time we hear Erzberger invoke God’s name. In real life, the political figure was a prominent member of Germany’s Catholic Centre Party, and the movie perhaps hints that Erzberger’s Catholic faith helps drive some of his ambitions to stop the war.

Other than that, though, faith suffers alongside the men.

Paul and his friends go to a Christian school—or at least so it would seem from a cross hanging on the window (which the audience stares at as the teacher thunders his martial pep talk).

The next time we see a cross on a wall is at a church serving as a makeshift hospital, filled with patients and limbs and blood and screams. We hear snippets of Scripture from the war-weary (and, for the moment, celebrating) soldiers, asking for God’s mercy and referencing the “Lamb of God.” It’s hard to tell whether these drunken, celebrating soldiers are being particularly devout: One rushes up to Paul and shouts, “Knock on the monastery door and you’ll find only thieves and scoundrels!”

We hear crude jokes and remarks that make allusions to both Jesus and the thighs of his mother, Mary. A German general tells his soldiers that God is on their side.

Sexual Content

During a lull, one of Paul’s friends, Albert Kropp, leaves with a trio of three girls. He returns late in the evening, carrying a handkerchief from one of the young maidens as a souvenir. He describes the quality of the woman’s skin to Paul and mentions her breasts, and Kropp’s friends pass around the handkerchief to smell and jokingly pocket.

Another friend of Paul’s, Ludwig, watches Kropp leave with the ladies, and he’s clearly wishing he was brave enough to join. (Kropp goes temporarily AWOL for the encounter.) He talks longingly of physical intimacy, telling his friends that if there was no war, he’d be quite active in that department. “I wouldn’t put on trousers for eight days,” he says. Later, Ludwig runs into a poster that depicts a young (clothed) woman. He tears the portion of the poster that features the woman and takes it with him. The poster fragment seems to become almost like a real woman to Ludwig, and when Paul eyes the “two” of them (perhaps wondering about his friend’s sanity), Ludwig asks Paul if he’s jealous.

We see men shirtless. There’s a reference to combing pubic hair. Kat describes how beautiful his wife is to Paul, and a letter from her may have a bit of a double entendre in it. Kat advises fellow soldiers to stick their hands in their underwear if they’re cold. An officer compares a dirty gun to a “dirty girl.”

Violent Content

All Quiet on the Western Front is about the horrors of war, and it depicts those horrors graphically. I won’t detail every moment of violence here; rather, let’s deal with the subject more broadly, while perhaps touching on a couple of the movie’s most difficult moments.

People—countless people—are shot and killed. More are sliced or stabbed, via axe, bayonet and dagger. The movie wants to make the carnage we see personal : The hand-to-hand battles here don’t feel so much like war as flat-out murder. (The movie contrasts these horrifically brutal scenes with moments spent with the German’s commanding general, who’s sitting by the fire and gorging himself on fine food. “It’s been 50 years of no war,” he tells an adjunct as he wipes grease on his pantleg. “What’s a soldier without war?”)

World War I introduced a legion of new ways to kill, though, and we see those in action. Soldiers get run over by tanks, and we see their bodies reduced to meat and squirting blood. Others are immolated by flamethrowers. Scores of bodies are found in a building—victims, we’re told, of a gas attack. Grenades are thrown and find their marks. Artillery rounds explode, sending people flying, both alive and dead. Buildings collapse on still-living soldiers. Some make it out, some do not.

Corpses (mainly of men, but also of horses) lie everywhere. One of Paul’s first duties is to take part of the German version of dog tags to identify the dead: He finds a friend of his, his face mauled by an explosion, a leg missing at the knee. Soldiers walk through pools of blood. Half of a human carcass hangs from a tree, 30 or 40 feet in the air. It was blown there, we’re told, by an artillery blast.

But that’s not enough carnage, apparently, to drive the point home.

In one excruciating scene, we see a French and German soldier fight in the crater left by an artillery shell. The German finally stabs the Frenchman several times, but the man won’t die. Instead, he chokes and gurgles on his blood until the German stuffs dirt into the man’s mouth. It’s still not enough: For minutes—perhaps hours—this small struggle for life goes on, The German holding his ears as the Frenchman gurgles, until the German decides to save the man instead. He looks at the bloody wounds, wipes the dirt from his face and around his mouth. Only then does the Frenchman breathe his last. The German finds his wallet, and a picture of the man’s wife and daughter.

In another scene, a wounded man (who bears some terrible injuries to his leg) receives food and a fork. He promptly stabs himself several times in the neck with the utensil, bleeding out as his friends try to save him and another soldier, cold-eyed, looks on—as if to say that such atrocities are as common as mosquitos.

Back at the Armistice discussions, Erzberger and others talk about the casualty rates of the war: About 40,000 soldiers died in the preceding weeks before discussions began. When one German looks at the Armistice and is aghast at the proposed conditions—that Germany wouldn’t be worse off if they just followed the war to its conclusion—Erzberger adds: “Except with a few hundred-thousand extra deaths.”

Crude or Profane Language

Most of the movie is in German, and there’s some discrepancy between what we hear in the English dubbing and what we read in the subtitles. With that context in mind, we’re exposed to two f-words and about 10 s-words. Also uttered: “a–,” “b–tard,” “d–n,” “h—” and the British profanity “bloody.” God’s name is misused five times, once with the word “d–n.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Officers and government officials drink wine. During one scene of revelry, soldiers seem to be pretty drunk.

Other Negative Elements

Kat, Paul and other soldiers spend quite a bit of time talking while using the latrine. (We see their bare legs, but nothing else). Several people urinate, and one accidentally urinates on his shoe when his train stops unexpectedly.

Paul and Kat raid a farm a couple of times, once successfully making off with a dead goose. “When you’re starving, you’ll do anything,” Kat says. They’re hailed as heroes when they return with their booty.

A general makes a tragic, monstrous decision.

As the war drags to a close, Paul confesses to Kat that he’s worried about returning home. War has changed him. It has changed all of them.

“All anybody wants to know about are the battles we’ve been in,” he says. And both he and Kat know that what they’ve seen and experienced, they’ll never tell anyone. It’s too horrible. Too painful.

All Quiet on the Western Front comes, then, with an inescapable irony: The horrors that Paul would always want to keep hidden are the same horrors the film does its best to portray.

The original book, by Erich Maria Remarque, was published in 1929. And it’s just as bleak, just as brutal. Some European countries—often as they prepared for war—labeled the book antimilitary propaganda. Just four years after it was published, Germany’s new Nazi regime declared it “degenerate” and made it one of the first books to be thrown in its bonfires.

Certainly, both the book and the movie drive home the idea that war is waste: senseless, needless, immoral waste.

Perhaps there’s a place for such works. Certainly, All Quiet on the Western Front is a well-made film, achingly bleak and horrifically brutal as it is. But we know, by its end, that even if Paul survives the war, part of him will have died on that Western Front. The rest of him will be haunted by what he’s seen, and heard, and lost.

“We are forlorn like children and experienced like old men,” Paul says in the book All Quiet on the Western Front ; “We are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.”

If Paul is lost—if he wishes he could unsee what he’s seen—perhaps we, too, should be wary of seeing what he’s seen. Even on the safety of a screen. Even on the comfort of the couch.  

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

Latest Reviews

Bad Boys: Ride or Die

Young Woman and the Sea

Back to Black

The Fall Guy

Weekly reviews straight to your inbox.

All Quiet On The Western Front Review

14 Oct 2022

All Quiet On The Western Front (2022)

This is the third cinematic adaptation of the famous novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a screed so powerful in its evocation of the realities of war and so determined in its pacifism that it was among the many books to be systematically burned by the Nazis. The first film adaptation arrived in 1930, just a year after publication, winning Best Picture at the third Academy Awards; it was then made into a TV film with Ernest Borgnine in the late 1970s. Now, with the book a staple among schoolchildren around the world, it gets another turn. This is a book so seminal, it seems, that every generation gets a cinematic turn.

This new version from director Edward Berger (perhaps best known in the UK for directing Patrick Melrose ) might be the loosest take yet — here, Paul Bäumer does not briefly return home, jaded and disillusioned, as he does in the novel — but the story loses none of its power or its anger for it. A furious prologue begins not from the perspective of Paul, but another impressionable young German recruit, who quickly finds himself at the wrong end of a French bullet. Then, with a remarkable macro perspective, Berger’s camera tracks the journey of his uniform, as it is cleaned of mud and blood, reupholstered and recycled, to be sent back into the line of duty. The vast machinery of total war has rarely been depicted as viscerally or as coldly as this.

It’s all stunningly shot, with production values that rival that of Sam Mendes’ 1917 .

That uniform ultimately ends up in the hands of Bäumer (Felix Kammerer, hugely impactful even when caked in mud), who is naively inspired by a disturbingly nationalistic speech to join the military effort. He and a cluster of teenage friends sign up excitedly; 18 months later, they are all either war-weary or dead. The route of this soldier’s journey will be relatively familiar to anyone who has seen a war film before (especially if it’s one of the two previous adaptations of this book), but the execution is hugely impressive.

These soldiers are sent over the top endlessly, almost repetitively, leaving us with nothing but a sense of futility. Berger’s direction remains hard-nosed throughout. Trench warfare is depicted as nothing but a failure of thoughtless, egomaniacal generals; if hunger doesn’t kill them, their orders to go over-the-top will. It’s all stunningly shot, with production values that rival that of Sam Mendes ’ 1917 ; at times, it almost wades into horror territory, helped in no small part by the booming, anachronistic synths of Volker Bertelmann’s score. The whole experience is doom-sodden and helpless. More than anything, this is a war film that gets under your skin, and into your bones.

Related Articles

Movies | 15 03 2023

Movies | 12 03 2023

Movies | 23 02 2023

Movies | 19 02 2023

Movies | 19 01 2023

Movies | 06 09 2022

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’: A German’s grim view of World War I

Filmmaker Edward Berger’s adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s antiwar classic is the first German version of the 1929 bestseller

There are times in “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Germany’s official Oscar submission, that you might be reminded, more than a little, of “ 1917 ,” Sam Mendes’s Oscar-winning 2019 film, also loosely based on real events during World War I. The new movie — the first German-language adaptation of German veteran Erich Maria Remarque’s semi-autobiographical 1929 bestseller, later banned under Nazi rule for its antiwar sentiments — includes many echoes of Mendes’s film.

It opens in 1917, features a star (Felix Kammerer) who looks uncannily like “1917’s” George MacKay, and includes all the visual trappings of the earlier film: muddy trench warfare, misery, violence and frequent scenes of a raw recruit running across a corpse-strewn battlefield, filmed in a way that somehow aestheticizes the bleak, bloody horrors of battle. (Something to think about: Can there ever truly be a purely antiwar film, when so many movies on the theme are so terribly stunning to look at?)

There are also several differences between the two films. Mostly, “All Quiet” is not so breathtakingly, heart-stoppingly cinematic. Yes, it’s handsomely shot, but there are long sequences where little happens. True to life, perhaps, but slow.

“All Quiet,” of course, is told from the perspective of a German, not an Allied soldier: Kammerer’s 17-year-old Paul Bäumer, who lies about his age on his enlistment form and is quickly disabused of his notions about marching victorious into Paris without obstruction. As in the book, Paul and his school chums (Adrian Grünewald, Aaron Hilmer and Edin Hasanovic) scramble, back and forth, over a few hundred yards of France, mentored by an older soldier, Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch), nicknamed Kat.

The book tells their story, but German director Edward Berger, working from a screenplay he co-wrote with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell (both from the British Isles, and the latter of whom is a veteran of this newspaper), opens that narrative up. What this means is that this version of Remarque’s battlefield story intercuts periodically between dismal scenes on the Western Front and more genteel conversations taking place around a very different form of conflict. That’s the debate between hawkish military officers, embodied by Devid Striesow, and more pragmatic politicians trying to negotiate an armistice, including the real-life character of Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), here portrayed as a peacenik motivated by the death of his son.

The contrast is stark: Soldiers slurp filthy, coffee-colored water out of a bucket on the front line, while diplomats and generals sip espresso from demitasses back home. It does drive home a point, but I’m not sure it’s one that isn’t articulated better elsewhere. Much more powerful is the scene in which Paul encounters and kills a French soldier at the bottom of a bombed-out crater. That ghastly, drawn-out episode — faithful to the book, in an adaptation that takes many liberties with Remarque’s source material, including details concerning the fate of Kat — is all the reminder anyone needs that war is a nasty, brutish business where nobody, not even the victor, truly wins.

R. At area theaters; available Oct. 28 on Netflix. Contains strong bloody war violence, grisly images and brief crude language. In German and some French with subtitles. 148 minutes.

Movie review: 'All Quiet on the Western Front'

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

"All Quiet On The Western Front," the classic novel about the horrors of World War I as told by a German soldier, has been retold as a movie by a German director. It's out on Netflix today. And as NPR's Rob Schmitz reports, it's a visually stunning and powerfully acted rebuke of war from a country that lost two world wars. And just to note, this story contains the sound of cinematic gunfire.

ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: The first scenes of "All Quiet On The Western Front" are, well, quiet. The sun is rising. A fox feeds her kits in their burrow. The forest above slowly wakes, and a gentle rumble signals a coming storm.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUFFLED BOOM)

SCHMITZ: But it's not thunder.

(SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE)

SCHMITZ: It's the western front of World War I in occupied France, and it's anything but quiet.

(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSION)

SCHMITZ: For the next two hours and 20 minutes, viewers of this latest adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's seminal 1929 novel accompany German soldier Paul Baumer's journey from an innocent, idealistic young man into a hardened, cold vessel whose soul has gone missing amidst the bodies, mud and trenches of what's known as the Great War.

SCHMITZ: This is the third adaptation of the novel. The most popular one came in 1930, just a year after Remarque's novel was published to wide international acclaim. And the Hollywood film with American actors playing German soldiers won the Oscar for best picture. But this adaptation is the most loyal one to the novel. The actors are German. So is the language, and so is the director.

EDWARD BERGER: You know, as a filmmaker, hopefully, you make films that somehow come from, you know, something inside.

SCHMITZ: Edward Berger, director of "All Quiet On The Western Front," says that insight is like your DNA.

BERGER: And my DNA is made up from history lessons, from being born in a country that twice in the last century succumbed to its self-destructive impulses or destructive impulses and started two world wars and brought terror into the world. And, you know, that leaves a tremendous amount of shame and guilt and horror. And - I mean, I remember my entire childhood, I was ashamed whenever someone asked where I'm from, that I had to say Germany.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SCHMITZ: Throughout Berger's film, the machine of war looms over these German soldiers like an inescapable fate. Combatants die, and armies of sewing machines recycle their uniforms for the next victims. The soundtrack, an ominous three-note blast from an instrument called the harmonium, conjures approaching death.

SCHMITZ: But what makes Berger's adaptation even more German are the scenes he adds to illuminate the sentiments behind Germany's role in not only this war but the next one, too.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT")

DANIEL BRUHL: (As Matthias Erzberger, speaking French).

SCHMITZ: Berger added the real-life character of Matthias Erzberger, a hapless German politician who was chosen to negotiate an armistice with the French after heavy German losses and who tries to get whatever tiny concession he can from a French general.

BRUHL: (As Matthias Erzberger, speaking French).

SCHMITZ: "Be fair to your enemy. Otherwise, he will hate this peace," says Erzberger, a foreshadowing of what's about to come - a country impoverished by war, leading to the rise of right-wing fascists who are hellbent on avenging the last one by starting another one.

THIBAULT DE MONTALEMBERT: (As General Foch, speaking French).

SCHMITZ: In response, the French general says, "Fair? You speak of fairness?" before ordering Erzberger to sign the armistice. And he does. Three years later in real life, Erzberger is assassinated by German nationalists.

Erzberger isn't Berger's only addition. There's also a fictionalized German general who, upon learning of the armistice, forces his troops to fight until the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

BERGER: And I wanted to put it in to say, listen; this was just the beginning. This was just the beginning of a much bigger terror and horror and the justification of many more vicious acts to follow.

SCHMITZ: In fact, the original film adaptation of this novel left its own trail of vicious acts when it was screened for the first time in Berlin in 1930. Members of the Nazi Party didn't like how the film portrayed war in its cruel and grim reality, and they didn't like that the studio that put it out, Universal, was run by a Jew. Remarque scholar Edward Smith says they bought up a block of 300 seats at the Berlin premiere.

EDWARD SMITH: This block of people let go mice. They threw stink bombs. They threw sneezing powder into the air, and they began screaming and yelling and creating loud interruptions and - to the point where the police had to be invoked.

SCHMITZ: And for days thereafter, the Nazis, led by propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, staged demonstrations and speeches that eventually got the movie and Remarque's book banned. The book is one of the first the Nazis burned in a series of public burnings.

This time around, the German reaction to the film is mostly positive. Some of the only criticism is that it's too violent, especially at a time when war has returned to Europe and is on everyone's minds. Berger says he conceived this film prior to all of this but could tell it was coming.

BERGER: It just felt like we already knew this was heading towards confrontation - you know, this confrontational discourse got bigger and bigger between people, between parties.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character, speaking German).

SCHMITZ: He says the rhetoric from populist leaders in Europe and the U.S. delivering messages of division, self-sufficiency and shunning any efforts to bring countries together - these were the very ideas that Berger says led to the Great War and to Erich Maria Remarque's breakthrough novel chronicling it and to his own film that reminds us all that if it's war we want, this is what we'll get.

SCHMITZ: Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Berlin. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

3 best Amazon Prime Video war movies you should watch on Memorial Day

T o some Americans, Memorial Day is just another three-day holiday weekend. But for anyone who has been to war, or lost loved ones to overseas conflicts, Memorial Day has special significance as an opportunity to honor the fallen and reflect on the sacrifices they made on behalf of our country.

While the vast majority of civilians will never go to war, Hollywood has been making war movies for decades. The best war movies allow the rest of us to better understand the people who lived through it, as well as what they lost and left behind. That was the criteria we used to pick the three best Amazon Prime Video war movies you should watch on Memorial Day. Prime Video doesn’t have a lot of the classics in the genre, but it does feature a handful of the greatest war movies ever made.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

Apocalypse Now nearly proved to be fatal for its leading man, Martin Sheen, who suffered a heart attack during the filming. It was a notoriously difficult shoot that resulted in an all-time classic. Director Francis Ford Coppola updated Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness with co-writer John Milius, and Michael Herr. They moved the story up in time almost a century to the Vietnam War, which was still in America’s recent past when the film came out.

Sheen plays Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a veteran warrior who is sent to assassinate Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando) because Kurtz has gone crazy and turned against his country while waging his own private war against the Viet Cong. Kurtz’s followers treat him like he’s a living god and they’re fanatical in their devotion. But getting close to Kurtz requires Willard to go on a dangerous journey that may destroy what’s left of his soul long before he comes face-to-face with his target.

Watch Apocalypse Now on Prime Video .

All Quiet On The Western Front (1979)

Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front  has been adapted multiple times, most recently by Netflix . But the 1979 adaptation has already earned its place among the all-time great war movies. The story is set during World War I as a German teenager, Paul Bäumer (Richard Thomas), and his friends are swept up by romantic and patriotic rhetoric to join the war effort against the French.

Stanislaus “Kat” Katczinsky (Ernest Borgnine) mentors the younger troops, who soon discover that the war is far more brutal than they imagined. Death is their constant companion on the battlefield, as Paul is forced to watch the men around him fall one by one with the knowledge that he could be next at any given moment.

Watch All Quiet on the Western Front on Prime Video .

Glory (1989)

At the time Glory was released, Matthew Broderick was a bigger name than his co-star Denzel Washington . However, Washington’s performance and subsequent Oscar win for Best Supporting Actor went a long way toward establishing him as a star in the making. This film is based on the true story of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Broderick), the man who led the first all-Black regiment of troops during the Civil War.

Alongside his friend Major Cabot Forbes (Cary Elwes), Shaw attempts to mold Private Silas Trip (Washington), Sergeant Major John Rawlins (Morgan Freeman), and the rest of their men  into a united force. But they face racism within the Union army that threatens to keep them from proving themselves in battle. Shaw quickly realizes that he needs to support his men in order to earn their trust. Yet, even the bonds of brotherhood and bravery that emerge may not be enough to carry them to victory and the respect that they deserve.

Watch Glory on Prime Video .