All Quiet on the Western Front
I was on the fence about writing this article. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front has been one of my favorite books since I read it in high school. Often that environment is a less than ideal place to absorb great literature. Being forced to analyze a book meticulously rather than absorb it on your terms is bound to make any story feel tedious, especially since at that age you’d much rather hang out with your friends than ponder the horrific realities of war. When I did sit down to read the book, it had an enormous impact on me. When we are young, the idea of war is simplified to the good guys versus the bad. It is difficult to comprehend nuance as a kid who spends much of his time playing video games involving casual violence.
That’s not to say video games can’t make statements about mass brutality; they absolutely can. I wasn’t interested in the ramifications of my actions in what I was playing. I was too busy shooting at everything and causing mayhem. In the game, I mean. I had no reason to consider what I was doing. Going from that disconnected approach to bloodshed to reading Western Front was jarring. The vivid details of death and suffering hit me harder than I was expecting. I would be lying if I said it stopped me from playing violent games entirely, but it did certainly make me think more about them.
Part of what made the book so powerful was how personal it is. You don’t see these characters as enemy combatants, they are just people fighting for survival like everyone else in the war. There is a tragic naivete to these characters as they are ground up by the unfeeling machine of modern warfare. There was no way for them to comprehend the horrors they were about the face. This was the case across the board during the war. Nobody had ever seen combat of this magnitude before. It was common for groups of friends to join the army together. To them, it was a grand adventure with their pals. This was incentivized to create a universal bond between soldiers.
The book was an incredible way to conjure empathy from the reader, to show you the fears and traumas of people you had never read about before. Because of my history with the novel, any adaptation is bound to pale in comparison. It is difficult to be objective about a book you adore. So, this will not be a typical review where I give the film a numbered rating. Instead, it will be more of a dissection of what an adaptation of a great novel owes the original story in terms of accuracy. Of course, this is all completely subjective. I understand why many love the film. Multiple aspects of it are exceptional.
I am not such a novel purist that I am completely against changes to the original material. Film and literature are different mediums and should be treated as such. There are numerous book adaptations I love that veer away from the novel. Starship Troopers, for example, is one of my favorite films and it is a brilliant satire of the Robert Heinlein novel. That worked in Verhoeven’s favor since his storytelling style is subversive and twisted. If a filmmaker chooses to make changes to the original material, it must be done to benefit the adaptation and or put that director’s creative stamp on the work.
This can be tricky territory when it feels like a film’s changes are done by people who look down on the source material and alter it for egotistical purposes. There are grey areas when it comes to how much should we change a novel if there are aspects of it that are considered outdated. Some would say that it should be put on screen without alteration because any change is an insult to the author. On the other end of the spectrum, you have those who wring their hands in a panic whenever faced with the fact that stories from the past have different moral standards than today. Somewhere in between those extreme views lies the most reasonable answer to the question of what to keep in an adaptation.
There is no objectively right way to adapt every book. It is on a case by case basis. As much as I love Verhoeven, I would not want a subversive take on All Quiet on the Western Front. Just because an adaptation is accurate, that doesn’t make it a good film by default. Look at the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, directed by Jack Clayton and written by Francis Ford Coppola. That one is accurate to a fault. It puts the text on screen without infusing it with any heart or personality. Then you have the 2013 Baz Luhrmann adaptation which focuses so much on spectacle to comment on the excess of the era that it falls victim to its grandiose nature.
Part of what makes Western Front such a remarkable novel is how well it has aged. There is nothing in it that I can think of that would be objectionable today. The 2022 adaptation gets a few major aspects of the story right, but it falls short in some important ways. Let’s start with the good. This film looks stunning. The combat sequences are some of the most brutal and grueling that I have seen in years. You feel every molecule of blood, mud, and grime that these soldiers endure. There is a tangible and tactile nature to the film that makes the world feel lived in. You feel stuck in the trenches with the characters. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, the film is a masterpiece. Where it falls short for me is the character details. The deviations from the novel end up doing a disserve to the material.
One of the first departures in the 2022 version is the year the soldiers enlist. In the original story, Paul and his friends sign up in 1914. They have wide-eyed optimism and are completely oblivious to the terrors they are about to face. Nobody had ever lived through a modern war like that before, so that naivete makes sense and it makes their fates even more harrowing. News from the front would be limited at this point, so they would have no context for what would happen. The 2022 film changes the year they enlist to 1917. This was done so the new ending can happen, but it takes away much of the emotional impact of youthful idealism.
It also doesn’t make any sense that Paul (Felix Kammerer) and his friends would enlist with no knowledge of what awaits them. By this point in the war, Germany’s morale was devasted. The public was not expecting the conflict to drag on for multiple years. Even though there was propaganda trying to spin the news from the front in a more positive light, there is no way that these boys would still be completely ignorant of what was happening. That is a change from the book that takes away from the power of the story. You can’t have a tale of lost innocence that has the same impact when you move the year of enlistment ahead to 1917.
I suppose you could argue that Paul and his friends are from a sheltered background, and they would have been kept away from the news of the battles. Here is where the film makes another error. One of the most emotional parts of the book is when Paul goes home to visit his family. He has already witnessed unimaginable horrors that his parents have no comprehension of. He tries to feel at home, but there is a chasm of a disconnect now from his family. The film takes these essential moments away, so we have no way of understanding whether Paul was sheltered from the wartime news.
What the film adds instead are multiple scenes detailing the negotiations and eventual signing of the armistice. These involve the head of the German Delegation Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) who signed the armistice. These moments are interesting from a historical perspective since they show the disconnect between the soldiers in the trenches and the commanders. While the men on the front suffer and barely survive on rations, the higher-ups are dining on fine cuisine. The problem with these scenes is they don’t add anything beyond historical context. We could have gotten more interactions between the characters and their growing bond, but instead, that is pushed aside.
The gap between the soldiers on the ground and armchair generals has been detailed numerous times in other media. Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Paths of Glory is probably the best film example, while Blackadder Goes Forth is my favorite television portrayal of WW1. They put a focus on the characters and their dynamics. This new version of Western Front does not have the same level of intimacy as the book. Paul is the only character who is well-developed. The others are on the periphery and become so overlooked that I forgot their names halfway through the film. We are put in Paul’s weathered shoes, but without that connection to his comrades in arms, the film kept me at arm’s length.
This leads me to another issue I have with the film, which is the character of Stanislaus Katczinsky, aka “Kat”, played excellently here by Albrecht Schuch. In the book, his relationship with Paul becomes the heart of the story. It develops gradually and we gain a deep connection with them through the anguish they deal with. Here, there are hints of that strong friendship, and what we get is powerful. Unfortunately, it is severely compromised by the film’s focus on the spectacle of combat and the armistice scenes over character development.
THE NEXT PARAGRAPH CONTAINS A MAJOR STORY SPOILER, SO HERE IS YOUR WARNING.
Kat’s death in the book is one of the most gut-wrenching in any story I can think of. He is severely injured in combat and gets carried by Paul to eventual safety. What Paul doesn’t realize is his close friend has been dead for a long time due to shrapnel hitting him on the way to the medics. He had no idea he was carrying a dead body. In the 2022 film, Paul and Kat steal eggs from the farmer they previously stole from after the ceasefire agreement is announced. After their escape, Kat is shot by the farmer’s son while he is peeing. He is then carried by Paul to the hospital and dies on the way. What was so irritating about this change is how it felt like an insult to the Kat character. Not only is it absurd that the farmer’s son can teleport across a wide field without being seen by Paul, but the change is so unnecessary to the character and adds nothing other than frustration.
My final main problem with the film is the ending. ONE MORE SPOILER WARNING FOR THIS NEXT PARAGRAPH. In the book, Paul’s death is uneventful and sudden. It punctuates the entire point of the novel, about how these soldiers become just a body on the battlefield. Another statistic to add to the ever-mounting atrocities. In the film, a general we see in various scenes throughout orders one more attack on the French a few minutes before the ceasefire officially starts. This leads to a final charge where Paul is killed in battle. There is no historical record I can find of the Germans issuing any kind of final attack like this. The only examples of continued fighting I could find were actually on the Allied side where there were a few isolated examples of allied soldiers carrying on the fight right up until the ceasefire officially began.
From what I have researched, The last soldier killed in World War I was American Henry Gunther. He was killed on the Western Front on November 11, 1918, at 10:59 a.m., about one minute before the Armistice was to take effect at 11:00 a.m. Gunther was a bank clerk from Baltimore, Maryland, who had been drafted into the Army in 1917. He served in the 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Division. On the day he was killed, Gunther was leading his platoon in an attack on German positions near the Belgian village of Le Cateau. He was shot in the head by a German sniper.
By the end of the war, the Germans were completely shattered and destroyed by their experiences in the trenches. Most of them did not want to prolong the war any longer. The idea that they would do one final charge of glory makes no sense to me, both from a historical perspective and a storytelling one. It doesn’t help that the General ordering the attack was a borderline cartoon figure who reminded me of Stephen Fry’s General Melchett in Blackadder Goes Forth. To me, this ending completely missed the point of the book and prioritized spectacle over story and character. I can understand why it worked for many people, but for me, it detracted from the viewing.
Despite my problems with the 2022 film, I still think it is worth seeing. Numerous impactful moments are among the most intense and hard-hitting of 2022. The scene showing a tank attack on the German line was genuinely terrifying and did a brilliant job showing how helpless they were against these horrific machines of death. One of the most intense parts of the book was when Paul was stuck in a bombed-out crater in no man’s land with a wounded French soldier. Their brief interaction and Paul’s inevitable killing of the man was disturbing and incredibly effective. Felix Kammerer’s performance here and throughout the film as Paul is exceptional.
So, after all that, what does a film adaptation owe the source material? Honestly, I still don’t have an answer to that. I don’t think anyone does. I think it’s entirely dependent on the individual filmmaker’s interpretation and vision. A film should carve out its own identity while still ideally respecting the spirit of the original story. Some films like the Will Smith versions of I Robot and I Am Legend have barely anything to do with the original stories, so it’s easy to tell the titles were only used because they sounded cool, though I will give I am Legend some credit for somewhat sticking to the novel’s message with the film’s alternative ending.
Film is a far more condensed storytelling format than literature. It usually takes streamlining and alterations to make a great adaptation. Peter Jackson changed much from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, but It’s easy to tell he loves the books and was guided by them to create a film trilogy that kept the soul of the original work, unlike the Amazon series The Rings of Power which to me comes across as bad fan fiction made by people who can’t read. That series is adapting the world of the books rather than directly putting the books on screen, so I at least give them some credit for trying something different. Unfortunately, it is an example of the worst kind of adaptation because it feels like a corporate assembly line product. Some may disagree, but that is what makes this an endless debate. There is no right answer and multiple perspectives make understandable points.
