Nine Oscar nominations, 14 Bafta nominations (British counterparts to the previous ones): the admiration shown by Anglo-Saxon cinema professionals for the German feature film by Edward Berger is surely due to its spectacular qualities, even if this new adaptation of the novel by Erich Maria Remarque has only briefly known the dark rooms and can now be seen on Netflix. The story ofIn the west, nothing is new in vain – in this version – going from the summer of 1917 to the armistice of 1918, these images of men killing each other, suffering, dying in the mud of an eternal European winter struck us so vividly because they reflect what we see from the war in Ukraine.
Which does not make the film a masterpiece, unlike the adaptation made in 1930 by Lewis Milestone (just venture on the Cinetek site to (re) discover it in an impeccable copy ). In Edward Berger’s version, wealthy small-town German high school students join the ranks of the Imperial Army not in the excitement of the early days of war, but in 1917, as the Russian Empire and the Entry into the War of the United States. They leave all the same for the French front, the flower with the rifle. Immediately, by dint of spectacular sets and digital special effects, Berger gives the dimension of the disaster that has been raging for three years now.
The filmmaker first stages the industry that the conflict has become. The first sequences detail the stages of the recovery of uniforms from the corpses of men killed in combat. Dressed in these relics, Paul Baumer, the central character, a 17-year-old boy, and his comrades, who saw themselves as heroes, are immediately brought back to their condition as cogs in a monstrous mechanism. Except that the cogs are flesh and blood and Berger lets nothing be ignored of what can happen to them. From bayonets to flamethrowers to tanks just spun from the imaginations of weapons engineers, there are so many ways to smash and dismember bodies.
A utilitarian impression
Nothing – not the lyricism to which Spielberg resorted in War Horse, nor the technical virtuosity of Sam Mendes in 1917, to cite only two films recently devoted to this conflict – does not come to bend the brutality of the staging, but also its dryness which is also due to the soulless precision of the digital effects.
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