All Quiet on the Western Front
“Half a million French colonial troops including West Africans, Moroccans, Algerians, and Indochinese saw combat during World War I, many of them at the Western Front.”
Title: All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) / German: Im Westen nichts Neues
Director: Edward Berger 👨🏼🇩🇪
Writers: Screenplay by Edward Berger 👨🏼🇩🇪, Lesley Paterson 👩🏼🏴, and Ian Stokell 👨🏼🏴 based on the book by Erich Maria Remarque 👨🏼🇩🇪
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
—SPOILERS AHEAD—
Technical: 3/5
Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front is about as traditional an anti-war movie as you can get. This may not come as a surprise, given its almost century-old source material, a novel by German author Erich Maria Remarque published in 1928. The film follows a band of soldiers who get put through the gauntlet, experiencing bodily and emotional horror at the hands of far-removed government officials who sip wine and complain about stale croissants, rather than face the massive human tragedies they execute with the bark of a single command.
Nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards, All Quiet on the Western Front follows suit to previous Oscar-hopefuls set during 20th century wars, like Dunkirk (2017) or 1917 (2019). Despite different messages, ranging from nihilistic to nostalgic, each adopts an aesthetically pleasing take on gruesome events, full of atmospheric cinematography and grim sound design paired with dramatic scores.
But how many times have we seen this story? To many, this movie and its classic beats are “timeless.” But to someone else, the same material simply feels rehashed. I can’t help but fall into the latter group; between an already stellar novel and previous film adaptations released in 1930 and 1979, I’m not sure why we need to keep banging the same drum. Other wars exist. Other perspectives and interpretations exist. This particular story has already been told multiple times before, and very well, to boot.
Gender: 1/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE
No women have speaking lines in this film. They appear briefly, first as a sea of factory workers who mend soldiers’ uniforms, then as three young women seen from a distance as a German soldier flirts with them, his comrades egging him on in the foreground. For the rest of the film, women exist only as symbols—a pinup on a poster; the topic of lewd nighttime conversations between men; a still photograph of a mother and daughter found on a soldier’s corpse. As far as this narrative is concerned, women were unimportant to the events of World War I, barely constituting background scenery.
Race: 1.25/5
Viewers follow white Europeans in this movie, mostly German and French men. About 40,000 to 50,000 Black American troops did see combat under French commanders in World War I, as did nearly 500,000 colonial troops including Madagascans, Moroccans, Algerians, and Indochinese, many of them at the Western Front—particularly among the 135,000 West Africans who served overseas. Additionally, 140,000 Chinese laborers undertook various tasks such as clearing battlefields, a scene that repeats within the film.
True, their combined numbers comprise a minority of the 8 million French soldiers involved in the war between 1914-18. But congruous with history or not, the decision to hire an all-white cast for this movie is a lazy one that doesn’t serve today’s audiences or actors of color.
Deduction for Disability: -0.50
In following the media trope that shows people preferring to be dead rather than disabled, an injured soldier kills himself. Thankfully, it’s not portrayed as some twisted sense of “peace”; rather, it’s shown as heartbreaking and a damn shame to the viewer, as well as to the character’s nondisabled friends who witness the graphic suicide. Nonetheless, Better Off Dead is a cliche that gets used over and over again in movies, one that belittles the value of disabled lives with each and every reoccurrence.
Mediaversity Grade: F 1.58/5
It’s entirely up to a storyteller how much to include, or exclude, the very real contributions and experiences of various groups during wartime, such as women, soldiers of color, people with disabilities, and so on. In the case of Berger’s adaptation, the film has no interest in any of them.
Like All Quiet on the Western Front? Try these other war movies.
1917 (2019)
Dunkirk (2017)
The Woman King (2022)