Split Decision: "All Quiet on the Western Front"

No two people feel the exact same way about any film. Thus, Team Experience is pairing up to debate the merits of each of the awards movies this year. Here’s Eric Blume and Cláudio Alves on Germany's Oscar contender.

ERIC:  Claudio, let's get down and dirty on Edward Berger's All Quiet on the Western Front.  I'm in camp "love" and I think you're in camp "don't love"?  The only real dissent I've heard from folks is that "it says nothing new about war" (which I look forward to addressing).  But let's start with overall impressions of the film.

CLÁUDIO:  Well, it's adapting a seminal anti-war novel – maybe THE anti-war novel pre-WWII – already made into a Best Picture Oscar winner before. So it's not like it had much hope of saying something new about its subject. Nevertheless, Edward Berger and company bring plenty of "new things" to the narrative presented in the literary work and its previous adaptations, so there's that...

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Review: All Quiet on the Western Front

By Christopher James

Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) heads into World War I in "All Quiet on the Western Front," the German submission this year for Best International Feature.

It’s daunting to remake a Best Picture winner. Steven Spielberg was able to breathe new life and vitality into West Side Story, making it a companion to the timeless original. But, more often than not, filmmakers buckle under the weight of expectations and self importance (like the failures of, say, Steven Zaillian's star-studded rendition of All the King’s Men or Timur Bekmambetov's Ben-Hur).

The Lewis Milestone adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930 struck new ground for realism, brutality and anti-war sentiments. It earned Oscar wins for Best Picture and Best Director. It's been regarded as a classic ever since, later receiving citations on AFI’s list of best films and best epics and inclusion in the National Film Registry. How could a new film pack a similar punch? Director Edward Berger doesn’t reinvent the story, but his 2022 re-telling of All Quiet on the Western Front is loaded with enough technical panache to make it a worthy, additive remake and a great time at the movies...

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