Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front opens on a lie the audience can see and the characters cannot. Young German men march toward the front through a landscape. They cheer. They have been told they are heroes. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12, 2022, and reached Netflix on October 28. It spends the next 147 minutes taking that cheer apart, until nothing is left of it but mud and a quiet that sounds like defeat.
Trailer, via Netflix.
Paul Bäumer Volunteers in 1917
The first act belongs to Paul Bäumer, played by Felix Kammerer, and his schoolmates Albert Kropp, Franz Müller, and Ludwig Behm. They are 17. They hear a patriotic speech from a school official and volunteer for the Imperial German Army with the enthusiasm of boys who have never seen a corpse. What they do not know, and what the film shows without comment, is that their uniforms are recycled from soldiers killed in a previous battle. The clothes carry the dead forward.
Berger and his co-writers Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell do not rush the change. They let the boys believe it first. Then they deploy them to northern France near La Malmaison, where Stanislaus “Kat” Katczinsky, an older soldier played by Albrecht Schuch, takes them under his wing. Their romantic view does not survive the first night. Ludwig Behm, played by Adrian Grünewald, is killed by artillery before he has fired a shot.
That death lands harder than any later battle because the film has not yet numbed us. It is the last time a death here feels like a loss rather than an inevitability.
Kat and the Goose in Champagne
Eighteen months pass. By November 7, 1918, Paul and Kat are stealing a goose from a farm to share with Albert, Franz, and Tjaden Stackfleet. They eat behind the front in Champagne. For a few minutes the film is almost warm. Kat, who is illiterate, asks Paul to read him a letter from his wife. He worries aloud that he will not be able to reintegrate into peacetime society. It is a small scene and one of the film’s best, because it makes the armistice a threat rather than a promise.
Franz spends that night with a local French woman and brings back her scarf as a souvenir. The scarf is a token of a life these men will not get to have. The film does not underline it. It does not have to.
Matthias Erzberger at Compiègne
The parallel storyline Berger adds — not found in Remarque’s novel — follows the armistice negotiations. Daniel Brühl plays Matthias Erzberger, the German State Secretary who, weary of mounting losses, meets with the German High Command on November 7, 1918, to persuade them to open talks with the Allied powers. On November 9, General Friedrichs, played by Devid Striesow, drives Erzberger and the German delegation to a train bound for the Forest of Compiègne.
The delegation reaches Compiègne that night. Friedrichs opposes the talks and orders an attack before French reinforcements arrive. This is the film’s structural gamble: cutting between men negotiating the end of the war and men dying in a battle that no longer has a purpose. It mostly works. Brühl gives Erzberger a weariness that reads as moral rather than physical, and the train car scenes have a stillness the trenches never allow.
But the two halves do not fully fuse. The armistice plot explains why the war is ending; it does not deepen Paul’s story so much as run alongside it. The film asks us to care about both and gives the politicians less room to earn it.
A Gas Attack and 60 Missing Recruits
Paul and his friends are sent to find 60 missing recruits who were sent to reinforce their unit. They find them dead, killed by gas after taking their masks off too soon. It is a scene built on a single terrible mistake, and the film stages it without music or slow motion. The camera just moves through the bodies.
The cast around Kammerer is strong. Aaron Hilmer’s Albert Kropp carries the early scenes with a lightness that curdles. Moritz Klaus as Franz Müller, Edin Hasanović as Tjaden Stackfleet, and Sebastian Hülk as Major von Brixdorf all register. Thibault de Montalembert appears as General Ferdinand Foch. Andreas Döhler plays Lieutenant Hoppe, and Luc Feit is the Staff Surgeon.
Kammerer himself is the film’s anchor. He ages without the help of a monologue. His face does the work, and Berger trusts it.
What the Awards and Critics Disagreed About
All Quiet on the Western Front received a leading 14 nominations at the 76th British Academy Film Awards and won seven, including Best Film. It earned nine nominations at the 95th Academy Awards and won four: Best International Feature, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and Best Production Design. The craft categories are not a consolation prize. The cinematography and production design are the reason the film’s horror reads as physical rather than theatrical.
Reviews were positive for the film’s artistry and its anti-war message. But German and Anglophone critics disagreed over how faithful it is to Remarque’s 1929 novel. This is the third adaptation, after the 1930 and 1979 versions, and the argument about fidelity is not a small one. The added armistice storyline is the clearest departure, and it is the thing that makes this version feel like a 2022 film rather than a remake.
Here is where the disagreement actually matters. The book is Paul’s interiority. The film is Paul’s body. Berger cannot give us the novel’s inner voice without a voiceover he plainly did not want, so he substitutes spectacle and structure. That trade is defensible. It is also why some readers walked away cold.
A Running Order of the Film’s Three Movements
The film runs 147 minutes. Its structure breaks down roughly like this:
| Movement | Setting | Key Figures | What Happens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Volunteering and first deployment | Germany, then northern France near La Malmaison | Paul, Albert, Franz, Ludwig, Kat | The boys volunteer; Ludwig is killed on the first night |
| Behind the front | Champagne | Paul, Kat, Albert, Franz, Tjaden | The goose; Kat’s letter; Franz’s scarf |
| Armistice and the final attack | Compiègne and the front | Erzberger, Friedrichs, Foch, Paul | Talks begin; Friedrichs orders an attack |
The middle movement is the film’s heart. The first is its conscience. The third is its argument.
The Scarf, the Goose, and What Stays
Ranked by what the film does best:
- The goose scene in Champagne — the only sustained passage where these men are allowed to be people rather than casualties.
- The discovery of the 60 dead recruits — staged with restraint, and more effective for it.
- The armistice train — well acted, structurally necessary, emotionally thinner than it wants to be.
- The opening act of volunteering — effective as setup, but the film’s least surprising stretch.
- The final attack ordered by Friedrichs — loud, costly, and the point is made before the sequence ends.
The goose beats the battle. That is not a knock on the battle. It is a statement about where this film’s power actually lives.
The Verdict on All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front is a strong film with a structural seam down the middle. The war half is better than the politics half, and the film knows it, which is why the trenches keep pulling focus back from the train car. Berger’s decision to add the armistice negotiations gives the film a historical frame the novel never had, but it also splits the audience’s attention at the exact moment Paul’s story should be tightening.
What holds it together is Kammerer and Schuch. Their scenes carry a warmth the rest of the film cannot sustain. The anti-war message is not subtle, and it does not need to be. The film’s real achievement is making 147 minutes of mud and gas and paperwork feel like a single argument: that the men who believed the speech were the ones who paid for it.
The craft awards were deserved. The fidelity complaints were fair. Both things are true, and neither cancels the other.
This is not the definitive All Quiet on the Western Front. It is the most technically accomplished one, and the one most willing to admit that the home front and the front line were the same war. That is worth something. It is just not the whole thing.
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