By: Miguel Ernesto Yusty

Some make films about wars to celebrate them, while others make them to show that the best thing about them is that they don't exist. From 2022, the year of the war in Ukraine, comes a film that transcends time to demonstrate that wars are gambles in which everyone loses, even though the film has been nominated to win everything.

Three films have been made of the novel by German writer Erich Maria Remarque: one in 1930, another in 1979, and the most recent, which is the subject of this review, in 2022. All have retained the same title, ALL QUIET ON THE FRONT, and without exception, have captivated critics. The most recent film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was subsequently added to the Netflix catalog, the streaming service that also produced it. Just days after its release, it had already reached second place in viewers' viewing preferences.

Unlike other films that use war as their theme or context, the soldiers' participation in the conflict is not glorified. That is, the film does not seek to have the audience identify with those who demonstrate courage in defending a particular ideology and consequently eliminate their enemies. On the contrary, ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT argues that enlisting to participate in the First World War is a mistake that the characters in this film pay for with their lives. This premise is applicable to other conflicts because these characters are timeless; that is, their behavior is that of people from the beginning of the 20th century, but they love, laugh, hate, and kill, just as they would in a modern war.

World War I shattered the paradigm of the soldier as hero. Because it was a conflict that employed weapons produced by the armies of industrialized nations, these weapons became the central focus, overshadowing the warrior and their skills. Thus, from the second decade of the 1900s onward, there was no way to romanticize the soldier's role, as they were not only victims of ideologies but also of technology that surpassed them. For this reason, ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, first as a novel and now as a film, is irrefutable proof of the senselessness of war.
By Miguel Ernesto Yusty