All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)
That artillery. Good grief, that artillery. Within the first few minutes of Edward Berger's 2022 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, the sound design alone is doing something almost physical to you. It doesn't rumble so much as detonate somewhere behind your eyes, and the effect is immediate and total: any lingering notion that the First World War was a glorious, noble affair is obliterated before you've had a chance to settle into your seat. Berger drops us straight into the freezing, mud-soaked trenches from the German perspective, and the message is blunt and unambiguous. This is hell. Not a metaphor for hell. Just hell.
Felix Kammerer plays Paul Bäumer, the idealistic young recruit at the centre of it all, and he's a genuine find. You can watch the light go out in his eyes in real time as the romanticised idea of soldiering, the stuff of recruitment posters and classroom speeches, is systematically beaten out of him by mustard gas and rats and the sheer, grinding monotony of survival. Alongside him, Albrecht Schuch is brilliant as the battle-hardened veteran Katczinsky, bringing a weary warmth to a role that could easily have been a stock figure. The two of them together give the film its emotional ballast, and without that anchor, I think the whole thing would have felt a lot colder.
The technical craft on display here is genuinely exceptional. The cinematography is bleak and monochromatic in a way that feels entirely intentional, draining the colour out of the landscape to match the moral and spiritual exhaustion of the men in it. The special effects are extraordinary, and the sound design, as I say, is something else entirely. Berger and his crew have constructed a sensory experience that makes you feel the weight and the horror of the trenches in your chest. That's not a small thing. That's most of the job, in fact.
But here's where I have to be honest with myself, because when the noise settles and I think about the actual story being told, it's a fairly standard arc. Wide-eyed youth meets grim reality. Idealism is destroyed. War is bad. We've been here before, many times, and All Quiet doesn't do a great deal to complicate or deepen that trajectory. There's a certain predictability to the shape of it that becomes harder to ignore the longer the film goes on. It occasionally feels like it's simply waiting for the next set piece, the next explosion, rather than pushing the drama forward on its own terms.
If you're after the definitive modern depiction of the First World War, I'd still point you towards 1917 first. Sam Mendes built a relentless, ticking-clock narrative engine into that film that kept me gripped from first frame to last in a way Berger's doesn't quite manage. There's a propulsion to 1917 that All Quiet lacks, and that gap in narrative momentum is real, even if everything surrounding it here is visually magnificent. For an older, rawer example of cinema wielding similar horrors with devastating effect, Come and See remains the benchmark that almost nothing can touch.
None of which is to say this isn't well worth your time, because it absolutely is. Berger has made something genuinely harrowing, something that does exactly what an anti-war film ought to do: make you feel, in your gut, the total and absolute dread of being there. It doesn't reinvent anything, and it occasionally coasts on its own technical brilliance when it should be doing more with its characters. But the brutality is impossible to ignore, the performances are strong, and the whole thing lands with a force that lingers.
Three and a half stars.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2026-07-18
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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