All Quiet on the Western Front

François Truffaut is credited with originating the idea that one cannot make an anti-war movie. In a biography on his life, it is explained that he abandoned a project about the war in Algiers due to a realization that, loosely translated, to “show something (war) is to ennoble it.” He ultimately didn’t limit this belief to just his own films and filmmaking, or to the Algiers conflict in particular, as he stated in a newspaper interview: “I find that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be anti-war, but I don’t think I’ve really seen an anti-war film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war.” Amusingly, I think this idea that any portrayal of military action inherently, and often unintentionally, glorifies and revels in it can be disproven easily with just one movie: All Quiet on the Western Front.

Made more than thirty years before Truffaut dropped that quote about war movies, All Quiet on the Western Front presents an image of war, through the lens of World War I, so devoid of glory, action, adventure, meaning, or greater purpose or honor that I cannot fathom how anyone could see it as anything other than a treatise on the empty brutality of war fought for the whims of the ruling elite with the blood of the misled. While many other ostensibly anti-war movies have one or two elements that may inadvertently make war seem cool, All Quiet has none of these. It has none of the bombast and spectacle of films like Platoon. It has very little of the badass fearlessness or laughing in the face of death of films like The Deer Hunter. It has no noble heroics or enviable martial mastery found in films like Saving Private Ryan. There is some dark humor, like that of Full Metal Jacket, but with less of the sarcastic detachment and flippant jokes. The black humor of All Quiet is more obviously soldiers coping with their bleak reality than being seemingly unaffected by it.

The film also does an excellent job of systematically stripping back any aspect of fighting or war that could be seen as glamorous or full of glory. World War I was the conflict that ended the French military’s belief in the virtue of élan and fittingly, despite being about Germany, this movie shows how World War I brought about that destruction in exquisite detail. The beginning of the movie focuses on the naivete of the recruitment process. How young boys are fed jingoistic rhetoric by authority figures (in this case, a teacher) about the grand adventure and patriotic duty inherent in war. The boys then go to boot camp where they learn to sing songs while they march as a demonstration of fighting spirit. Before deploying, people talk openly and without irony about how short the war ought to be. This whole illusion comes crashing down as soon as they are deployed. The very first scene in the field is not about fighting for glory but about scavenging for food. The first mission they go on isn’t taking the fight to the enemy, it is laying barbed wire in no man’s land under cover of night, where some of the battalion still dies to shell fire despite the seemingly low stakes of the mission. All Quiet only ramps up this theme as the movie goes on.

Another way the movie takes away any potential for ennobling war is by not letting the audience see very many deaths. There is no chance to accidentally make a soldier’s death look brave in the way it’s framed in camera if the death happens off screen. When a death does happen on screen, it is always done in a way to emphasize the arbitrary, senseless, and tragic nature of the death. Random shrapnel, mortar shots from off screen, or carpet bombs dropped indiscriminately over seemingly empty fields are just a few of the insignificant ways that people die. There is an incredible visual motif in the middle of the film where a pair of boots, prized for their high quality and craftsmanship, passes from soldier to soldier as each previous bearer dies. The death is never shown, only the boots changing hands: a grim reminder of the fleeting mortality of our characters.

The futility of the fighting, and the pointlessness of the war itself, is also expressed visually and narratively. Not only are the deaths robbed of glory, but also denied a sense of meaning in their contribution to a greater cause. There is no laudable self-sacrifice here. Soldiers jump from the trenches and sweep across no man’s land to seize territory, but the land they seize is all bombed out, barbed wire infested, empty land eerily similar to the land that sat behind them in their previous trench. These charges surge forward, meet resistance, and if lucky even take a new line of trenches… only for the losses incurred during the charge to be too great to hold the new territory seized, forcing a speedy retreat where many are shot in the back. No material gains are ever made and all the back and forth swings are paid for in mountains of blood. Once, we see them fight for a church, albeit one so shredded by shells and machine gun bullets that it barely resembles a building anymore. This all accumulates to paint a bleak picture of the effectiveness of the fighting, on both sides. Everything is locked in this stasis but every day units are decimated in the fighting regardless.

There is also some really great, and sometimes subtle, dialogue that helps add to this sense of wanton destruction and loss of life. Various characters will make reference to the size of a unit before, or after, a major engagement to add some grounded specifics to just how many are being fed into the meat grinder of trench warfare. There is an excellent scene where the main characters’ unit returns from fighting and there are so few of them left that there is actually enough food for them all to eat well. This is played off in a lighthearted way, which just makes the reality of the situation land that much harder.

The ending, too, is an absolute treat, loaded with juicy symbolic meaning. It touches on the lost humanity of the soldiers and adds fresh perspective to the contrast between the imagined “good fight” and the reality of war by having a character spend time on leave back in his hometown. Men too old to fight discuss battle stratagems in the pub, like backseat quarterbacks, explaining to a battle hardened officer how they should be able to push to Paris by the end of the year. Male authority figures still selling the good fight of patriots to ever younger crops of boys. People in town on rations still thinking that the soldiers eat well and are looked after at the front. Most tragically is the returning character’s combination of institutionalization and PTSD. The war is hell and suffering, but after four years its all he knows and all he can do. Rather than take his mothers advice to look for something further from the front for the remainder of his service, he goes right back to his unit to be with what is left of his compatriots because, in a cruel irony, that is all that is left that ties him to his sense of shared humanity. Like a prisoner after too many years in jail, he doesn’t know or understand life outside, only feels kinship with those who have been through the same experiences, and has a weird and self destructive need to get back to the version of life that makes sense. In a bit of dramatic irony, we know that the armistice is not far away, but must also face the apparent reality that even if he survives until the end of the war he will be so changed by his experiences that he probably won’t survive in a peacetime society.

The final moments of the film reinforce every piece of this, from the destruction of élan and old-world ideas of war, to the pointlessness of each battle and each lost life, to the stripping away of a soldier’s humanity and sense of home, culminating in a poignant, though a tad on the nose, visual metaphor for the symbolic cost of war on an individual level.

This movie is a classic for a reason. It delivers a real emotional kick in the gut and almost never puts a foot wrong. The only negative mark would be in some small moments of over-acting, but they in no way mar an otherwise spotless product. In essence, it is one of the most effective and affecting pieces of anti-war media I have ever had the pleasure of consuming.

Would Recommend: If you want to watch one of the all-time great war films.

Would Not Recommend: If you are not in the mood to confront the horrifying realities of one of the world’s most pointless and costly wars.