All Quiet on the Western Front Review

There is an argument that a novel about the numbing of a young man should not look this magnificent, and the film keeps proving both sides of it. James Friend's photography is genuinely extraordinary, especially a tracking shot across a field that begins as landscape and resolves into a system for processing bodies, while the opening sequence following one uniform from a corpse to a laundry to a fresh recruit is the smartest thing here. Berger's addition of the armistice negotiations gives the film a structure Remarque deliberately refused, turning a book about the absence of meaning into a movie about bad men in a railway carriage.

Felix Kammerer carries the human material well, and Albrecht Schuch gives Kat the only warmth on offer. Volker Bertelmann's three note synthesiser sting is effective and then vastly overused. The tank advance and the closing bayonet order are staged for maximum horror in a way the novel never was. It is a tremendous piece of filmmaking that mistakes intensity for despair, which is not quite the same thing.