painted one of the 20th century’s preeminent visions of hell, and forever put the lie to romanticized ideas about war. Lewis Milestone’s 1930 film version followed in short order, nabbing a Best Picture Oscar, but since then, Remarque’s famous tale of trauma and tragedy has only made it to the screen once more, courtesy of a 1979 TV movie. That situation is now ably rectified by Edward Berger’s big-budget German-language adaptation, which—currently in theaters, and premiering Oct.
, the chaos and madness of combat, and the lasting physical and psychological scars produced by both.is bookended by identical shots of a distant mountain range overlooking a misty forest—a visual articulation of the futility of Germany’s Western Front campaign, which from 1914 to 1918 made next to no appreciable territorial gains. In between those images, however, Berger’s film details the terrible, transformative effecthad on its participants.
As illustrated by a prologue about a doomed soldier’s jacket, those new threads may as well be funeral attire, and as soon as the boys arrive at the front, their illusions are shattered. The corridors dug into the ground are narrow, muddy, and populated by jaded recruits and brutish commanders, and after suffering an early humiliation, Paul is given the onerous task of collecting the dog tags of the dead so they can be itemized by distant officials.
Firmly ensconced in this abyss of death and despair, Paul and his mates endure one horrifying ordeal after another, beginning with Paul getting a bullet to the helmet for daring to shoot at a corpse that was being eaten by rats. Paul somehow survives this assault, just as he does a subsequent bunker collapse and a trek over the trench wall and across the battlefield, where remaining in one living, breathing piece has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with luck.
Berger immerses viewers in the grim muck of WWI, but—in keeping with his source material’s spirit—he eschews glamorizing any aspect of his tale; there’s noto be found here. The only genuine beauty on display comes via cursory glimpses of the ravaged countryside and the clear, expansive sky that looms above it.