Orion Elfant Rea, 15, Morro Bay High School, Morro Bay, Calif.
Felix Kammerer, center, in “All Quiet on the Western Front,” a film that “aims to immerse the viewer in war itself,” writes Orion Elfant Rea, 15.Credit...Reiner Bajo/Netflix
“We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.” — Erich Maria Remarque
“All Quiet on the Western Front” is a film that aims to immerse the viewer in war itself. It is a battle just to keep watching, to continue breathing as each horrible moment unfolds. The soundtrack from Volker Bertelmann, thumping yet somber, mirrors war’s every mood, scream and sneeze. The cinematography, production design, and makeup paint a portrait lined with dull hues and wretched substances: blood, pus, excrement, snot … and then, there is the dirt. An endless supply of every shade and every nationality that never washes away. The viewer must sit there, covered with the stuff, and watch death persevere.
But Edward Berger, a German filmmaker with a fittingly barren filmography, does not simply seek to show the horrific nature of combat, as so many directors have done before him. Instead, he aims to engross the audience with a distinct air of futility. Generals spit in the face of peace, discarding onto porcelain plates delicacies their men haven’t eaten for years. They prolong a war that has no meaning or purpose. Political evils are worse, Berger tells the audience. They control all, they endure nothing; they send a boy where his mother will never see him again.
Berger’s storytelling is not flawless. In tackling these regimes, he tries to capture the cyclical nature of it all, that war will be waged forever and peace will never come. But at some point, a fraction of the on-screen fatalities become gratuitous, and I wonder why Berger did not utilize the unseen to hammer home his message about scheming men, who promote fear yet label it as glory. A commander steals a soldier’s life who dared to question why he must battle again, after suffering for so long. The men never reach that promised glory. They die meaningless deaths, their bodies lying slumped and frozen along the Western Front.
Felix Kammerer and Albrecht Schuch play men who fight not for their country, but for their lives, for the right not to feel the bottom of a grave by day’s end. They convey sorrowful brotherhood, showing respites from these horrors: laughter, color. Their faces are as expressive as clay. Their eyes show more anguish than any words could, flattened by a lust for blood that only man can possess. How glorious would it be, if we could spill a few more drops? Buckets? Monsoons of the stuff, pouring down from the heavens as if God himself has been silenced? Because sometimes, the Western Front can silence even Him. And then, it really is true.
All is quiet.