The first few scenes of All Quiet on the Western Front announces as loudly as it can that this is a war epic.
Cutting to an aerial view where the smoke clears to reveal corpses strewn around in a vast area, the camera pans to show the full extent of the carnage of battle. The audience then sees a terrified Heinrich (Jakob Schmidt) charge into battle, only to get killed offscreen. We then see a pile of shoes and military gear being stripped off of corpses, to be shipped, laundered, and repurposed for new soldiers. The main protagonist, Felix Kammerer’s Paul Baümer, receives the uniform with Heinrich’s name on it. His own ordeal is about to begin.
Baümer’s optimism and naïveté at the start of his deployment would eventually become a portrait of shattered innocence as he gets marooned in static trench warfare, made all the more heartbreaking because the battle he’s in is taking place before 11 o’clock, the hour of the armistice that would end the war.
Eloquent, aesthetically dazzling, and conscientiously impassioned, the movie puts its faith on magnificent sets and powerful images to translate Remarque’s plainspoken prose.
This World War I epic earned a total of nine Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Production Design, and Best International Film.
Director Edward Berger told Deadline that the nominations were a “wonderful surprise.”
“There has been a lot of love from everyone for the past few months, but I guess overwhelmed and stunned in a way by the love that’s been pouring out from colleagues and members and other filmmakers — that’s definitely overwhelming,” he added.