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This dark and visceral adaptation of the eponymous novel by Erich Maria Remarque, published in 1929, brings to light an interpretation of the trenches of WW1 that resonates like a muffled scream, a reflection on despair and abandonment. Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) isn’t just a film about war. It is a meditation on the biopolitics of war, on the human body as disposable commodity, and on how war dehumanises both those who fight it and those who observe it from afar. The film, like Remarque’s novel, dismantles patriotic idealism, exposing the visceral horror of combat.
We meet Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), a young German soldier who enlists in the army with the same youthful excitement as his school friends. Seduced by patriotic rhetoric and fed promises of glory, they leave behind their student lives and plunge into the unknown of war. But what they find in the trenches is not heroism or honour, but instead a brutal and inhumane reality. Death lurks around every corner. Youthful dreams turn into nightmares of blood, mud, and loneliness.
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A not-so-great cause
Paul Bäumer’s story is, in a way, the story of a generation consumed by war. Initially, he believes that his sacrifice would contribute to a greater cause, a worthy purpose. But he soon finds himself swallowed up by the vastness of violence, where patriotism dissolves in the mud and heroism is replaced by pure survival. In Paul’s eyes, the brightness of youth quickly fades, giving way to a vacant stare, like so many others who died, not for the fatherland, but for the absence of meaning.
Alongside his friends, Paul faces the abyss of war. The trench environment, captured masterfully by James Friend’s camera, is a claustrophobic and relentless space where the sound of explosions mixes with the groans of pain from the soldiers. Each day is a fight for survival, where time seems to stretch into an endless cycle of fear and suffering. There is no victory, no honour. Only bodies falling, and those who remain are consumed by the feeling that nothing else matters.
Edward Berger’s film, like Remarque’s book, highlights the discrepancy between those who fight and those who decide the wars. While soldiers face death, while political and military elites negotiate humanity’s fate from a cynical distance. Power, in this scenario, reveals itself as a game of chess where the pieces are the bodies of the youth who, in the end, are discarded as if they were disposable pieces.
War isn’t just a matter of physical death, but also of psychological death, a transformation of the individual into a war machine, a soulless cog, without identity. The biopolitics of war is a matter of control over body, mind, emotions and dreams.
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Glory is useless
War is not a stage for heroism. It is a field of extermination of dreams, an arena where honour is replaced by fear and death presents itself as an inevitable fate. The truth Remarque offers us, both in the novel and in Berger’s film, is that war has no winners, only victims. Unlike the heroic narratives that often glorify feats on the battlefield, the war portrayed in All Quiet on the Western Front is ruthless, desolate, and meaningless. The sacrifice of young soldiers is not transformed into glory, but instead into a deep emptiness, an irreparable loss.
Paul and his friends see the uniforms as symbols of honour and heroism, as if the battlefield was a stage. But the reality is very different. On the battlefield, the uniforms become just another tool of the State, a way to rob humans of their individuality, turning them into numbers in a great game of destruction. The young soldiers are no longer people with dreams and desires; they are simply bodies to be sent to the front line, with no regard for their humanity.
The process of dehumanisation is powerfully depicted in Berger’s adaptation. In one scene, Paul receives a used uniform, with the name of another soldier already erased by death. The exchange of uniforms is not just a change of clothes, but a change of identity, an annulment of the self, a reduction of the individual to an anonymous body, dissolving into the war machine. This process of depersonalisation is central to understanding the biopolitics of war: bodies are treated as commodities, as pieces that serve to sustain the state.
War is the physical process of extermination and also the process of identity erasure. The figure of the soldier is a representation of a body stripped of its individuality, its aspirations, its history. What remains is an empty frana, ready to be consumed by war, without questioning its purpose. As the war advances, Paul loses his humanity. He transforms from an idealistic young man into a shadow of himself, a being without a name, face, or history.
This process of dehumanisation is intensified by the contrast between the frontlines and the behind-the-scenes diplomatic negotiations. While Paul and his friends are sent to face violence, political and military leaders enjoy comfort and security, distanced from the blood-soaked reality of war. The duality between these two worlds is a sharp critique of the power of biopolitics in war: those who make the decisions do not suffer the consequences. The bodies of the soldiers are mere tools for maintaining the status quo. Their suffering is thus irrelevant.
Paul’s silence and his empty gaze of despair are the expression of a pain that cannot be articulated. The agonising that finds no words. For him, war is no longer just a matter of survival, but of resistance. He survives, but he no longer knows what it means to live. The biopolitics of war not only destroys the body but also the soul, leaving the soldiers as spectres. The living dead continue to walk toward the abyss, never finding an escape.
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Nothing but emptiness
Paul’s journey is the journey of an entire generation that was destroyed by war. The young soldiers are sent to the battlefield with the hope that their sacrifices will have some meaning. But they soon find themselves consumed by violence, fear, and death. Each battle is another step in the loss of their humanity, until they finally become mere shadows of their former selves.
The sacrifice leads to nothing; war is an insatiable machine that consumes everything in its path. Paul, like the other soldiers, learns to survive mechanically, burying his friends with hands stained in blood and dirt, knowing that, the next day, he may be the next forgotten.
Edward Berger’s film is a sharp riff on the biopolitics of war, a reflection on how human bodies are used as tools of power, discarded after they have served their purpose. It is also a meditation on the psychological impact of war, on how it turns soldiers into killing machines, stripped of everything that makes them human. At the end, what remains is emptiness.
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