All Quiet on the Western Front

The title of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel is part of our common parlance; the phrase has come to mean that nothing is happening, nothing is changing. But everything is currently changing in terms of cinema; the audience have turned their backs on the box-office, attendance is a fraction of what it was before the pandemic. Here in Scotland, beloved international institutions like the Edinburgh Film Festival have gone bankrupt while cinemas like the Filmhouse face a new potential future as private flats; both suffered the toxic blast of taking Netflix subsidies in the hope of survival. Barely seen in UK cinemas at all, All Quiet in the Front is a product from the self-avowed disruptor currently waging a war on the notion of going to the cinema itself, somewhat ironically the winner of seven BAFTAS including Best Film at last night’s ceremony. Netflix’s influence closes our cinemas; the streamer is the direct competitor set against big-screen entertainment, and it’s a fight to the death.

Remarque’s novel used to be handed out in schools; it’s a first hand account of WWI seen from the POV of a soldier, Paul Baumer, played in this German-language version by Paul Kammerer. Baumer navigates the kind of war-scape that Gurdjieff wrote about, with piles of boots and coffins indicating the kind of resource and planning that wholesale misery requires; even Paul’s uniform still bears the nametag of his now-departed predecessor. The point is to capture the madness of war, and Edward Berger’s film has a less restrictive canvas to work on compared to the 1930 and 1979 versions that went before; this is a uber-violent film full of torn flesh, explosions and dynamic viscera, a hell-scape where the war movie’s venerable clichés, like the glasses of a dead man, get yet another outing.

Although the individual stories get lost, the 2023 All Quiet on the Western Front is generally effective when providing a picaresque view of trench horror; a floor of corpses given a casual explanation ‘They took off their masks too soon.’ ‘Tonight will be even worse…’ is a typically downbeat line, although ‘What is a soldier without war?’ conveys a similarly desolate, hopeless idea. Surgery is brutal, hacksaw to bone amputations, an addled soldier forms an attachment to a pin up of a woman, but the females otherwise play no part other than sewing the men’s uniforms together. The headlights are dimmed in sequence on a snaking convoy of trucks as they approaches a front that never moves; it’s all grim stuff. ‘Half the world is involved, and God looks down…’

Streaming tier Netflix is now the fox that our academies have given them free run of the chicken coop; they’ve safeguarded their own futures at the expense of the cinema they’re supposedly celebrating and protecting. War is breaking out, abroad and at home, but we’re not invited to comment, correct our course or even examine the damage; projects like this direct us for the thousandth time back to our history books rather than dare to look at or talk about what’s happening to us right now. The 2022 All Quiet on the Western Front does capture the zeitgeist, the hopeless, desperate feeling of modern life; we’re all powerless, fighting without choice and forever losing in a sh*tty everyday war that we won’t be allowed to win. The road back to civilisation is out of reach; for now, all that we know is disruption, chaos, the endless boot to the face and the slow death of cinema itself.