MARCH 21, 2023 (48hills.org)
As the Oscars seem to be getting more international—perhaps because Hollywood itself produces so few award-worthy movies these days—a sign of the times was that the annual evening’s second-most-laureled title was a German language feature. All Quiet on the Western Front ultimately lost the Best Picture award to Everything Everywhere All At Once, the event’s big winner, but for a while there it looked likely to clean up all night. It was surprising, given that it was a non-US film without English dialogue and big-name stars, and which had largely bypassed theaters for the major studios’ nemesis, Netflix.
It did have an Academy pedigree of sorts: The first screen version of Erich Maria Remarque’s celebrated novel, duly shot on Universal Studios’ sound stages in the Hollywood hills, was one of the very first Best Picture winners almost a century ago. Ironically, the German author would soon find himself and his most famous work banned at home for the supposedly “unpatriotic” nature of their anti-war stances throughout the Third Reich. (He fled to Switzerland, where he would spend most of his remaining life.) Even after the war, many Germans considered him a “traitor.” So it may seem odd that the new version has found least critical favor in Germany, where it’s been picked at for deviations from the book, and being too 21st-century blockbuster in overpowering style.
Nonetheless, from this writer’s view, it’s one of the best combat-focused cinematic depictions of war in years, if not ever, and its main flaw was simply having to be viewed at home—few movies of substance released last year merited the “big screen” so fully in terms of engulfing audiovisual expansiveness.
