Film / All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues, literally "Nothing New in the West") is a 2022 war film from Germany directed by Edward Berger. It is the first ever German-language film adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's iconic 1929 novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. There were two versions prior to it, a 1930 theatrical film and a 1979 TV film, both made in the USA.

The film is set in 1917-1918 during the last year and a half of World War I in Western Europe. Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) is a 17-year-old schoolboy who, along with his buddies Albert Kropp (Aaron Hilmer), Franz Müller (Moritz Klaus), and Ludwig Behm (Adrian Grünewald), volunteer for the Imperial German Army after getting a patriotic talk from their teacher. They do not know that the army uniforms they are receiving have been taken from corpses.

The boys are sent to the trenches where they come under the wing of a veteran sergeant, Stanislaus "Kat" Katczynski (Albrecht Schuch). The mud, blood, and horror of the trenches quickly strips the boys of their patriotic enthusiasm. Time passes, and the fortunes of war turn against Germany, and the German army goes into retreat. While the surviving boys try to make it to the end of the war alive, German Minister of Finance Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) is sent to the French, to beg for an armistice.

The film was released on October 28, 2022 on Netflix.

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All Quiet on the Western Front provides examples of:

• Adaptation Expansion: The part of the film that follows Matthias Erzberger as he tries to get an armistice is an addition to the story, found neither in the original novel or previous adaptations like the 1930 film.
• Adapted Out: Several characters that were featured in the original 1929 novel and the 1930 and 1979 films, such as Himmelstoss and Kemmerich, have been left out of the 2022 film.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: While retreating in panic from the battlefield, Albert and several German soldiers are cornered by French soldiers armed with flamethrowers. They immediately throw down their rifles and beg them not to shoot. Unfortunately, the French soldiers are in no mood to give mercy and promptly execute them with their flamethrowers.
  Albert: "Nicht schiessen! Nicht schiessen!" ["Don't shoot! Don't shoot!"]
• All for Nothing:
  • Paul volunteers in hopes of becoming a hero when the war is over, but in the end, Paul dies, and his dogtag is not even taken after his corpse is found, leaving his sacrifice in vain.
  • All of the misery and struggle the cast (and their enemies) endure throughout the film is over the same half-mile stretch of countryside. The closing narration points it out to further hammer in the "War Is Hell" message.
• And Starring: The cast list ends with "and Daniel Brühl".
• Anyone Can Die: By the end of the movie, the only named character who might've lived is Franz, who gets separated from Paul during a French counter-attack and is not seen again. Every other character dies terribly and pointlessly.
• Armchair Military: The German delegation is seen taken refuge in an abandoned, luxurious, spacious château, while being tended to by servants and eating fresh food expertly prepared by experienced chefs. All the while the enlisted men take shelter in whatever nook and cranny they can find in the cramped, mud clogged trenches. This is made more apparent when General Friedrichs look on the distance from a balcony, where just a few kilometers away Paul and the rest of his unit are being massacred by a ferocious French counter attack that uses tanks and flamethrowers to horrifying effect. Friedrichs himself points out that there had been no major war in nearly 50 years, but it flies completely over his own head.
• Artifact Title: In the novel, Paul dies a month before the war ends "on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front." — In the movie, however, Paul dies in different circumstances on the last day during an attack, losing the context in which the original title arose.
• Artistic License – History: In the movie, German General Friedrichs orders an attack in the last fifteen minutes of the war that succeeds only in getting hundreds more young men killed for zero gain. While there were indeed multiple pointless attacks in the last hours of World War 1, they were launched by the Entente, not Germany, as noted in a History Channel documentary.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: General Friedrichs, driven by a deranged sense of "honor", sends his men to attack the French lines fifteen minutes before the war is scheduled to end.
• Bad Vibrations: When the Germans seize the French trenches and our heroes enjoy the French food, the liquids on their table suddenly start shaking. Then they see the fleeing rats and rush out of the dugout to see the approaching enemy tanks.
• Bald of Evil: General Friedrichs, the fanatic General Ripper who sends his men on an insane last attack fifteen minutes before the Armistice, is totally bald.
• Bayonet Ya: This being a World War I movie, bayonets are standard. Notably, Paul's death comes from the point of a French bayonet with only moments to go before the armistice.
• Big Good: Matthias Erzberger, who's trying to negotiate a stop to the war that Paul and his friends are trapped in.
• Bloodier and Gorier/Darker and Edgier: Compared to its 1930 and 1979 predecessors, the 2022 film takes advantage of modern cinematography to depict a brutal and grittier portrayal of the horror and tragedy of the First World War. This includes incredibly visceral portrayals of amputated limbs, bullet wounds, bodies reduced to mist by explosions, burn victims... it goes on and on.
• Book Ends: The film begins and ends with a shot of the western front's wilderness, calm and unaffected by the grisly happenings of the war.
• Broad Strokes/Truer to the Text: The film manages to be both in the same time. Large sections of the story are made for the adaptation^note Particularly, the entire subplot involving armistice delegation and its outcome, as well as the skipping or compressing of various events and the removal of certain characters, but dozens of tiny details^note Like Kat being considered Old Soldier despite being in his late 30s or the various quirky behaviours soldiers developed as means of survival that are depicted on-screen simultaneously put it closer to the text than the previous two adaptation.
• Call-Back:
  • One of the few comic bits in this grim movie has Paul and Kat successfully stealing a goose from a French farm house. Late in the film, they try this again, and the farmer's son kills Kat.
  • One of the men, lonely for female companionship, takes a pretty poster of a French actress in costume. That same poster is seen in the trenches in the last scene.
  • The scarf that Franz got from a French woman after sex. At the end another German soldier takes the scarf from a dead Paul and puts it around his neck.
• Charge-into-Combat Cut: During the opening battle sequence, Decoy Protagonist Heinrich charges against the enemy with his folding shovel. Then the scene cuts away to the aftermath with Heinrich's corpse being loaded onto a truck.
• Close on Title: The movie title is shown at the start of the closing credits.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • Paul's friend Albert Kropps is caught at gunpoint by French soldiers while retreating and is executed by flamethrower. Albert is left screaming in pain and agony until he is finished off with a Coup de Grâce while Paul can only watch helplessly in horror.
  • One soldier who has fallen to the ground ends up crushed under the treads of a French tank.
  • The French soldier that Paul kills in the bomb crater is stabbed multiple times, and begins to choke on his own blood. In a desperate attempt to quiet the man's gurgling, Paul shoves mud into his mouth before realizing what he has done, and desperately tries to save the man's life. It does not work, and the man dies in agony as Paul scrambles and fails to help.
  • Tjaden, upon realizing that he will likely be crippled by the bullet wound in his leg, stabs himself repeatedly in the neck with a fork, sending blood flying from the wound.
• Death by Adaptation: Several characters who survive in the original novel and previous film adaptations are killed off in the 2022 film, most notably Albert and Tjaden.
• Decoy Protagonist: The opening battle scene follows a soldier named Heinrich as he goes over the top and into hand-to-hand combat with the enemy. He is killed in that attack, and his is the uniform that is stripped off his body and given to Paul, the actual protagonist.
• Demoted to Extra: Paul's schoolteacher Kantorek, who encouraged Paul and his friends to join the war effort in the original novel and previous film adaptations, is relegated to a single scene in the film's introduction.
• Desperate Plea for Home: Ludwig has already seen enough on Day 1 and admits under tears that he wants to go home.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: Several characters die differently in the 2022 film than in the original novel and previous film adaptations, most notably Kat, who is shot in the liver and dies from a combination of organ failure and blood loss, and Paul, who dies from a bayonet stab in the back mere moments before the war ends, though he lives long enough to see the immediate moments after the ceasefire is called.
• Downer Ending: Just as in the original novel and previous film adaptations, Paul loses all his friends and dies just before the end of the First World War. The film ends with a newly-arrived German recruit whom Paul earlier saved in battle finding Paul's body, a look of calm on his face.
  "His face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come." - Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
• Dramatic Irony:
  • The audience is fully aware of what sort of hell the frontlines of WW1 is by default and if they are somehow unaware, there is a combat scene before even opening credits roll. Characters in-universe, however, are not. This is most prominent with all the eagerness with which the students go willingly and enthusiastically to the recruitment office, even if the war has been at a complete stalemate for three years already.
  • During recruitment, Paul is given the refurbished uniform of the late Heinrich, the POV character from the opening. And audiences were given an entire credit sequence tracking that jacket until it reaches Paul's hands. Once Paul spots that there is a nametag already sewn to his uniform jacket, the recruitment clerk tells him it probably didn't fit the previous owner and was sent back. The clerk then rips the nametag off and throws it on the ground - and the camera pans across the entire collection of such tags under the table.
• Dramatization: At the end of Remarque's novel, Paul is killed a month before the end of the war. Here he dies within minutes of the armistice going into effect, to make his death even more tragic in its futility.
• Driven to Suicide: Unwilling to live as a cripple, Paul and Kat's maimed comrade Tjaden repeatedly stabs himself in the neck with a fork and bleeds out, much to their horror.
• Dwindling Party: Paul and all his friends, and all in the last five days of the war. Albert is burned to death by a French flamethrower. Franz disappears in the French attack, never to be seen again. Tjaden kills himself rather than face life as a cripple after suffering a terrible leg wound. Kat is killed by a civilian, and Paul dies in the last insane German charge.
• The Dying Walk: Paul has been Impaled with Extreme Prejudice by a French bayonet in literally the last minute of the war. He is able to stagger up out of the French dugout, look around, and see the peace that has broken out, before he dies.
• Externally Validated Prophecy:
  • During the negotiations with the French, Matthias Erzberger warns the French delegation that the terms imposed on Germany will lead to famine and anarchy with the general population and requests for more merciful terms that will not cause resentment amongst the populace. The French delegation does not listen and forces them to sign the peace agreement, setting the stage for the post-war conditions in Germany that led to the Nazis' rise.
  • At one point upon seeing that the end of the war is near and the conditions Germany will be left in, Paul remarks "I'm scared of what's coming".
• Eye Scream: Ludwig's left eye is swollen and has turned blood red from ruptured vessels within upon his death.
• The Film of the Book: A pretty loose adaptation that keeps only a couple of plot points from the book (the terror of huddling in a trench bunker during a bombardment, Paul trapped in a shell hole with a dying Frenchman) and the general idea of school friends signing up for the war and becoming a Dwindling Party.
• Foreboding Fleeing Flock: A Swarm of Rats acts as an alarm, as the rats are fleeing the French dugout, along with the ominous vibrations, alert Paul and his friends that something bad is happening. It's a French tank attack.
• General Ripper: After the French and German delegations sign the treaty that officiates that the ceasefire will begin at 11:00 am, on November 11, 1918, General Friedrichs is furious that Germany accepted defeat. In a last-ditch effort to recapture some land from the French and spite the "Social Democrats" that he believes will "ruin mankind", he orders his men to march towards no-man's land and achieve at least one last victory in the hours before the war officially ends, and orders any soldier who refuses to fight to be executed as a deserter and a traitor.
• The Ghost: Hindenburg. Erzberger is called in for a meeting with Hindenburg and the high command, but the film cuts away. Later Erzberger sends a telegram from Compiegne with the peace terms, and receives a telegram from Hindenburg ordering him to sign.
• Grey-and-Grey Morality: While the movie is centered on the German side of World War I, there are moments where the French are humanized too, such as when Paul is stuck in the shell hole with the dying French soldier, or in a brief Perspective Flip where the French soldiers are shown relieved that the war is about to end before Paul's company are forced to attack them. Neither are the Germans and French portrayed as wholly innocent either, as both are shown killing surrendering soldiers.
• Gunship Rescue: During the last battle, the French get support not only from tanks but also a wing of military biplanes.
• Hate Sink: General Friedrichs, The Neidermeyer General Ripper who represents everything wrong with the Prussian Junkers attitude. He has absolutely zero redeeming qualities, acting as if moving pieces on a board of a game, resenting the mere concept of peace and wanting to fight for as long as possible - and preferably forever. In the very end, he sends his own men into a completely pointless assault, minutes before armistice, just so they can "die with their honour intact", with anyone protesting being rounded up and executed as deserters on his authority. All while he's simply sitting in a chateau close to the frontlines.
• Hell Is That Noise: Paul can't take the noises the French soldier makes in his agony.
• The Hero Dies: The movie ends with Paul getting killed in combat.
• Historical Domain Character: Matthias Erzberger was a real person who did in fact sign the armistice.^note For doing so, he was assassinated in 1921. When he arrives at Allied headquarters he meets several other historical domain characters, such as the Allied commander-in-chief, General Foch.
• Historical Hero Upgrade: Matthias Erzberger. In the movie, he is presented as a Reasonable Authority Figure that wants to end the war as quickly as possible, in contrast to the Honor Before Reason approach of the German officers. While a centrist with some Progressive views who opposed unrestricted submarine warfare and was instrumental in the peace effort, Erzberger was also known to be a political opportunist that supported the German militarization that led to the war, even though he was aware of the consequences. He also not only enthusiastically supported Germany's involvement in the war but was known to support extravagant and bizarre proposals, like annexing Belgium.
• History Repeats: At the end, we see a boy collecting dog tags, the same way Paul did early on.
• Home by Christmas: That's what the soldiers are made to believe in order to join the war.
• Hope Spot: It's November 11, 1918, and the armistice has already been announced. Kat and Paul talk about what they're going to do after the war; Kat wants to roast a goose for Christmas. Then Kat is killed by a French civilian boy, and Paul dies in General Friedrichs's insane last attack.
• If We Get Through This…: While heading towards the French farmhouse for the second time, Paul promises Kat that after the war is over, the both of them will do something big. Shortly afterwards, Kat is dead.
• In Medias Res: Subverted. While the book starts well into Paul's war experience, and so did previous adaptations, having flashbacks and conversations about the past, one of the easiest to spot deviations in this adaptation is the chronological order of events. Specifically, the film begins by focusing on a Decoy Protagonist, Heinrich, who is killed in the opening battle. His uniform is then retrieved, repaired, and handed to Paul, the actual protagonist as he signs up for the war effort alongside his friends, all in chronological order.
• Insert Grenade Here: During the French counter attack, after the tanks drive off the main German force from the trenches, Kat catches up to a tank and places a grenade on the treads, which immobilizes it. Once the tank is stationary, he goes to a machine-gun slot, and inserts another grenade inside. After the grenade goes off inside the vehicle, the wounded tank crew crawls out of the smoking vehicle allowing Kat and Paul to gun them down with ease.
• Intergenerational Friendship: After the Time Skip, Paul and Kat have become close friends. Paul is a former student who is 19 at most by this point, while Kat is a married tradesman in his 30s who had a son 10 years ago.
• In the Back: Paul dies getting stabbed from behind by a French soldier with a bayonet.
• Karma Houdini: As far as we can see in the film, General Friedrichs faces no serious punishment or comeuppance for coldly ordering his men on a pointless Suicide Mission in the literal last minutes of the war just to assuage his own ego.
• Life/Death Juxtaposition: The opening shots show a fox in a forest, nursing her puppies. The film then cuts to no-man's-land, littered with dead bodies.
• Light Is Not Good: In their first night in the trenches, Paul and Albert are practically hypnotized by the beauty of the signal flares that the enemy is firing off. The bright, arcing flares are the signal that a French attack is coming.
• Living Prop: At the armistice talks there are two British naval officers, Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss and Captain Jack Marriott. Notably, they never speak, and whilst discussions are translated into French and German, no one also translates it into English.
• Man on Fire: Many German soldiers end up getting burned to death by French flamethrowers in the counterattack, including Albert.
• The Mountains of Illinois: There is a scene early on where we get introduced to the heroes in a small town in Northern Germany. The background shows the town being located on a hillside which is very untypical for the area. The scene was most likely shot in some town in the Czech Republic where principal production took place.
• Never Learned to Read: Kat, a cobbler, is semi-illiterate, attending school briefly and only when he was already an adult. He has to get Paul to read a letter from his wife just to double-check if he got everything right. Towards the end he mentions how embarrassed he was by this and tells Paul to go to university after the war, or else he will shoot him.
• New Meat: The constant influx of ever-younger recruits, with less and less training and dying faster and faster due to that. When Paul and his friends arrive at the front themselves, they are expected to "give Kaiser 6 weeks". After the time skip, there is no bottom life expectancy for fresh recruits, who are both figuratively and literally kids.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: While General Friedrichs is simply an allegory of German officers that kept ordering pointless attacks after the armistice, he is heavily inspired by General Ludendorff. His father fought in the German unification wars and it's implied that he never participated in combat himself due to the long period of peace, just like the real Ludendorff. Politically, he also mirrors Ludendorff's far-right views, his hatred of Social Democrats (blaming them for the armistice), and his belief in the "stab-in-the-back" theory.
• Not Quite Saved Enough: All of the characters, but especially Paul and Kat.
  • Kat dies of a small bullet wound given to him by a child mere hours before the end of the war, and Paul rescues him and takes him to the medical hut, still talking to him all the time. He then turns around and Kat dies, with the doctor telling him that the bullet went to his liver and he might as well have not bothered.
  • Paul, and all the dead of the last strike. There are only fifteen minutes left until the armistice, General Friedrichs fanatically forces them to go on a last charge. It's suicidal, and Paul (along with plenty of soldiers who survived that long) all die.
  • Paul even has it rougher than that. He makes it across the whole way in the final suicidal strike, before being stabbed to death by a bayonet in the literal last minute of the war.
• Oh, Crap!: Paul and his fellow comrades' reaction upon seeing a wave of French Saint-Chamond tanks advancing on their positions.
• Old Soldier: Kat, the veteran of trench warfare who gives the newbies advice on stuff like how to deal with frozen hands (stick them in your pants) and how to not get shot after firing off a round while on picket duty (move ten meters, because the French will aim at your muzzle flash). While he's older than Paul by almost a generation, he's not even 40 and his wartime experience isn't that much longer, either - it's just how this particular war re-evaluated what "old, experienced veteran" means. Despite only serving for 18 months, Paul qualifies as one after the time skip.
• Ominous Fog: The trenches are often obscured by ominous fog and mist in the mornings, like in the opening shots of the movie, or when Paul's unit is sent back to the front line in the last days. This invokes a sense of fear and dread.
• One Last Smoke: Paul wants to remove the bullet from Kat's stomach but the latter requests a cigarette instead. Soon after he is dead.
• The Oner: There is an effortful one-minute action sequence during the last battle showing Paul violently killing enemy soldiers.
• Patriotic Fervor: Used, as always, to manipulate the people. A gung-ho teacher at Paul's school tells his students that they will be "the Iron Youth of Germany", that they're going to march on Paris, and they must fight "for Kaiser, God, and Fatherland!". It works, as all the boys march off to war.
• Peaceful in Death: Just as described in the original novel, Paul's body is found with "an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come."
• Personal Effects Reveal: Paul goes through the pockets of a French soldier that he has just killed and finds various personal effects, including an ID and, worst of all, a Fatal Family Photo of the man's wife and daughter.
• Plot Armor: Paul somehow manages to survive against all odds in all the hellfire he goes through. This protection finally runs out at the end of the movie, when a French soldier stabs him in the back with a bayonet.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: When faced with the non-negotiable conditions of the armistice and surrender, Major General von Winterfeldt suggests ending the talks and simply leaving. Erzberger, who by now is sick and tired of having to butt heads with every single officer on his path, chews him down for the stubborn refusal to accept the reality of the war and how stalling the cease-fire will only make things worse.
  Erzberger: Now we are here, to eat the soup you and your fathers cooked for us. If you want to leave - be my guest! But we're staying here.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: In his speech to the troops just before his final attacks, Friedrichs outs himself as something of a proto-Nazi since he accuses those who signed the armistice as traitors who stabbed Germany in the back, which is the Big Lie that would form the central pillar of the Nazis' platform.
• Recruiters Always Lie:
  • Paul's teacher gives a bombastic speech about courage, glory, and the boys being this close to pushing the war to victory when encouraging Paul's class to enlist. What might have been misguided optimism at the start of the war is a complete damned lie by this point.
  • When Paul notices that his uniform has the name Heinrich in it, the military officer that issued it rips the nametag out and glibly lies that it must not have fit that other person to not scare Paul off. The pile of nametags underneath the desk just underscores how many times this exchange happened that day alone.
• Retirony:
  • Kat is killed on the morning of the armistice (after talking about his plans for after the war, and saying "I'll be right back").
  • Paul is fatally wounded just seconds before the ceasefire.
• Rule of Symbolism: The opening scene in which Heinrich's uniform is refurbished before being given to Paul is filled with this.
  • The uniforms, upon being cleaned up, are hung in a way that gives them the haunting visage of meat being hung in a slaughterhouse.
  • The sewing machines that are used to repair tears in the uniforms sound identical to machine gun fire.
  • The music that underscores the entire scene has a loud, industrial sound that plays throughout it, symbolizing World War I's status as the first industrialized war.
• Sacrificial Lamb: Ludwig dies in the trenches early on to show how dangerous the battlefront is.
• Scare Chord: Whereas most of the film's score consists of standard subdued strings and organ, a number of tense scenes will feature a loud synthesizer riff to mark the profound danger looming over the characters.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: Played for Drama. Albert and his comrades scream in terror as the French tanks overrun their positions and roll over their trench above their heads.
• Screw the War, We're Partying: Defied. When the news of an imminent armistice causes impulsive celebrations and drinking in the German lines, General Friedrichs becomes appalled by the lack of discipline and orders a pointless, suicidal attack in the last fifteen minutes of the war, having anyone who balks summarily executed.
• Shovel Strike: Heinrich in the opening sequence and Paul at the halfway point are both seen using sharpened shovels to stab enemy soldiers. This is Truth in Television, as both sides found during the war that sharpened entrenching tools were effective weapons in the close combat of the trenches.
• Silent Credits: There is no sound playing during the first part of the closing credits.
• Stress Vomit: A soldier turns around and vomits on-camera into the trench, as all the men stand at the ready, waiting to go over the top in a counterattack.
• Table Space: Brixdorf has dinner with General Friedrichs. The lavish food on the table is itself a jarring contrast with the lives of the common soldiers, but also, Brixdorf and the general are on opposite ends of a long table, further emphasizing the isolation of the German high command.
• Tank Goodness: After successfully raising a French trench, the Germans' position is assaulted by Saint-Chamond tanks, which prove immune to their bullets and drive straight over them. The Germans are routed and soon flee.
• Tanks, but No Tanks: Some sharp-eyed viewers noted that the Saint-Chamond tanks featured in the climatic French counterattack are actually modified from Soviet-era BMP infantry fighting vehicles chassis. There is only one surviving Saint-Chamond restored to running condition that is preserved at the Musée des Blindés at Samur.
• These Hands Have Killed: Paul tries to wipe the blood from his hands after he stabbed the French soldier.
• This Is Going to Be Huge: During a dinner, General Friedrichs comments with conviction that the future of his aide, Brixdorf, is secured, for his family owns a saddle-making factory and those will never go out of demand.
• Time Skip: After the first half hour which shows the boys joining up and their first horrifying taste of combat, the film skips forward 18 months to November 7, 1918.
• Too Hungry to Be Polite: When Kat and his fellow German soldiers discover the French mess room, they stuff food into their mouths as quickly as they can with no thought to etiquette or dignity.
• Undignified Death: Kat is fatally shot in the liver by a farm boy while in the middle of urinating in the woods, and dies very slowly bleeding out as Paul tries to find an allied base for him to recover at.
• Vader Breath: The gas masks that the soldiers have to wear to protect against gas attacks give them all Darth Vader-breath. You can even see their masks expanding and contracting with each breath.
• War Crime Subverts Heroism: Both the Germans and French are depicted killing injured and surrendering soldiers, which is a war crime. One particularly gruesome example of this is when a group of Frenchmen kill a surrendering Albert by torching him with a flamethrower.
• War Is Glorious: Paul and his friends come to believe this thanks to unending propaganda and the Rousing Speech delivered by their high school principal, who congratulates all the young men who valiantly signed up to fight for the honor of the Fatherland. Paul and his friends even gleefully chant how they'll be in Paris in a short few weeks. Keep in mind this is three years into the war, rather than the opening months of it.
• War Is Hell:
  • As Paul and his friends march towards the trenches, several shells land nearby, terrifying them. Then they get to the cramped and filthy trenches they'll be calling home for their tour of duty, and then they are forced to take shelter from a French artillery bombardment in a bunker, that soon starts to collapse due to the intensity of the shelling. It gets worse from there.
  • There are scenes of horrific violence throughout. In one scene they come across the rotting upper torso of a soldier, high up in a tree, apparently blown up there by a trench mortar. In another scene Paul sticks his entrenching tool into the gut of a French soldier, then has a beat to look at the Frenchman's face with its mute plea of mercy before another German finishes him off with a gunshot to the head.
  • The French counterattack is horrifying to witness. After the Germans cause the French to retreat, Paul and his squad mates enjoy a quick bite from food abandoned in a pantry, only to feel the ground shake, see rats running away, and hearing the mechanical rumbling of a French armored column headed their way. The tanks blast their way through the German infantry using machine-guns, and cannons, and the sight of them rolling over the Germans in the trenches below causes them to scream in panic, when one tank rumbles through a semi-collapsed trench it drives over an unlucky German. Once the tanks have the main German force on the run, French infantrymen rush over to shoot the stragglers, and back up the flame thrower troopers who burn any stranded Germans where they stand.
  • A scene taken straight from the book has Paul, stuck in a shell hole with a French soldier, stab him several times—but Paul does not finish the job. He then has to stay there, in the shell crater, as the Frenchman twitches and gasps while slowly dying.
  • The closing narration makes clear that months of very bloody misery by both sides was done over the same one-mile stretch of battlefront.
• Wham Shot: Several:
  • After the bunker collapse, Paul is tasked with collecting the dog tags of the soldiers who died in the attack. To his horror, he steps on Ludwig's glasses. He then turns over what is revealed to be his corpse a mere few feet away, a leg severed and his face disfigured.
  • While eating food found in a recently captured French dugout, Paul and his comrades are alarmed by the sight of rats escaping the dugout and the sound of mechanical rumbling outside. Realizing that they are about to face a French counterattack, they rush outside to the trench and man their positions. They are shocked to see not one but an entire wave of French Saint-Chamond tanks slowly advancing out of the fog.
  • Towards the end of the film, during a tense moment between Paul and a French soldier, the two are at a standstill in a bunker, neither one of them seeming to want to make a move. The camera turns to Paul just in time to catch him get stabbed through the back by another French soldier.
• What a Senseless Waste of Human Life:
  • Erzberger's stance towards the ongoing war. When he's about to face Hindenburg, he has just a single paper file as his argument: the sheer unsustainable number of men that Germany is losing every day even as it keeps losing territory.
  • Invoked and subverted mid-way through the film. When protagonists are sent to search for a missing detachment of New Meat, they eventually find the missing soldiers all dead inside a building: after thinking they had survived a gas attack, the inexperienced men took off their masks too early and got killed by the lingering fumes. Kat briefly talks with Paul about how stupid it is, but they are both thoroughly hardened by their war ordeal and just roll with the fact that fresh recruits are useless and die by the dozen.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: During the frantic retreat from the French counterattack, Paul's friend Franz is separated from the group, his fate left uncertain.
• Within Arm's Reach:
  • Paul when a French soldier tries to drown him in a puddle. As he holds him down in thick, muddy water, Paul grabs a rock that's just within arm's reach, and hits him with it, allowing him to escape the puddle.
  • A bit earlier during the same battle, Paul is able to fend off a French soldier with a helmet he finds close by.

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