German critics slam Oscar-nominated All Quiet On the Western Front | Film

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With nine Oscar nominations and 14 Bafta film award nominations next month, it could become the most decorated German film of all time. But in his home country, Edward Bergers All Quiet On the Western Front left critics distinctly indifferent.

The film, which was commissioned by Netflix and aired on the streaming platform a month after its theatrical release, could in March become the first German production feature to win an Oscar since 2007’s The Lives of Others, accentuating a growing appeal for non- English language cinema.

Yet upon its release in Germany, the World War I drama received a critical thrashing, with critics complaining that it turned a beloved literary classic into an exciting Oscar-winning spectacle, and military historians lamenting its black-and-white historical inaccuracies.

Much of the criticism has to do with the enduring popularity of Erich-Maria’s 1928 anti-war novel Remarks, which was banned by the Nazis and is a fixed text in many schools across modern Germany. With more than 20 million copies sold worldwide since its publication, it is, as Sddeutsche Zeitung writes, one of the most important books ever written in the German language.

German director Edward Berger. Photograph: John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images

Yet Shepherds’ film, written by the same Munich-based newspaper, showed that no book is so good it can’t be made into a terrible movie. With new subplots, absent central characters, and additional stories, wrote Sddeutsches critic Hubert Wetzel, you have to wonder if director Berger even read the novel Notes.

Even the film’s title had lost its meaning, the newspaper complained. True to its unsentimental narrative style, the novel ends with a terse epilogue noting the death of narrator Paul Bumers. It fell in October 1918, on a day so calm and motionless along the entire front, that the army report was limited to a single sentence: all calm on the Western Front.

The film’s protagonist, played by Austrian actor Felix Kammerer, on the other hand, dies in a loud and action-packed close combat scene.

Sddeutsche suggested the film was primarily smart marketing for a streaming platform keen to convert the film’s prices into new subscriptions. 148 minutes of blockbuster-compatible war kitsch are slapped with an internationally known title that guarantees prestige and good sales. Maybe even an Oscar.

Thirty percent of Netflix’s content must come from the EU in order to operate there. As an on-demand service, the platform was able to stream some of its non-US films to multiple audiences around the world at the same time, rather than waiting for them to hit the film festival circuit.

Netflix won its first Oscars for Alfonso Cuarns Roma in 2019, thanks in part to a lavish marketing campaign, but fell short of the coveted Best Picture award.

Yalitza Aparicio in a scene from Alfonso Cuarn’s film Roma. Photograph: Image by Alfonso Cuarn/AP

Outside of Germany, All Quiet on the Western Front garnered mostly favorable reviews, with a score of 98% on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. But German coverage largely lamented a lack of emotional intimacy.

The inner plot, the brains of the story, was removed by Edward Berger and his screenwriters and replaced by a Hollywood program, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said.

If Remarks Bumer was a thoughtful narrator who gradually awakened to the cruelty and uselessness of war, the hero of Shepherds is a simpleton, a fool, who still hasn’t realized in the end what is happening. on the battlefields of Flanders.

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Even the Bild tabloid, barely known as a haven for arthouse snobbery, published ax work. There are good literary adaptations and there are bad ones, and then there’s director Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front, the Bilds reviewer wrote.

His version of the classic Erich-Maria Remarks is indescribably impudent. It takes a considerable amount of Oscar’s ignorance, disrespect and thirst to spoil a masterpiece in this way, to pulverize its content and story so ruthlessly.

A scene from All Quiet on the Western Front depicting an attack from the trenches. Photography: Netflix/Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

TV ad magazine Spielfilm at least tried to be charitable. All Quiet on the Western Front is a well-made film, but a failed literary adaptation. he wrote.

Several English-language critics praised the films’ realistic portrayal of battlefield scenes, but in Germany historians disagree.

Snke Neitzel, professor of military history at the University of Potsdam, said the brutal battle scenes were more accurate than those portrayed in earlier versions of the film by Lewis Milestone (1930) and Delbert Mann (1979), but said added that the film had finally fallen back to clichés.

In the film Shepherds, a German general, played by David Striesow, launches the Bumers Battalion in a doomed final counterattack hours before the armistice of November 11, 1918. Of course, this is a caricature, a Neitzel told broadcaster MDR. It is the story of evil generals and poor soldiers sacrificed as cannon fodder. I consider this to be pure nonsense.

Soldiers shot to prevent them from deserting, as seen in the Netflix film, would have been better integrated into a film about the international conflict that followed nearly 20 years later, he said. We know that only 48 soldiers were executed in World War I and 20,000 in World War II, Neitzel said.

He added: Historians research this subject until the cows come home and try to point out the complexity of what happened, and then you get films that show everything in black and white.

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