All Quiet on the Western Front
Edward Berger follows a German teenager who enlists in WWI full of patriotic excitement and the film systematically strips every illusion from him until there is nothing left.
What it is about
A young German soldier's enthusiasm for enlistment meets the reality of the First World War.
Every illusion stripped away
Felix Kammerer carries this film on a face that starts open and ends hollow. You watch the exact moment the war gets inside him and understand it will never leave. The trench sequences are shot so close you feel the mud.
Berger keeps cutting between the front and the armistice negotiations, two men deciding in a warm train car what boys will die for in the next hours. The contrast is the film's sharpest argument and it lands without a word of commentary.
James Friend's cinematography drains the colour from every landscape until the screen looks like exposure and cold. Nothing is glorious here, not the charges, not the victories, not the uniforms. That refusal is the whole point.