To those who lived (and died) during the “war to end all wars,” it was anything but trivial. Forty million people (military and civilian combined) died as a result. Humanity experienced unimaginable suffering in the four+ years of a conflict that has mostly been relegated to dusty history books.
Swiss director Edward Berger has determined to make that suffering very imaginable and horrifically unforgettable with his adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s seminal 1929 antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front. Remarque was a veteran of WWI, and he relayed the horrors of what he saw in battle through his protagonist, the patriotic German Paul Bäumer. Three years into the conflict, Paul enlists with most of his high school classmates in order to defend the glory of his homeland.