I’ve seen a lot of war films. Some are exciting. Some are beautifully made. And a very few manage to touch you on an emotional level that stays with you long after the credits roll. War films come in all shapes. Some, like Saving Private Ryan, focus on the chaos of the battlefield. Others, like Grave of the Fireflies, show us civilians caught in the storm. Some, like Full Metal Jacket, focus on how war breaks down the human spirit.
Most of these films don’t shy away from showing how brutal war really is. War is hell plain and simple. Mass death. Human suffering.
The constant, suffocating presence of fear. It’s ugly. And yet, that ugliness often makes for great cinema. The tension is built into the premise. You already have opposing sides. You already know who to root for, because the camera follows a certain group. And war films almost always include explosions, gunfire, and high-stakes moments that keep us on the edge of our seats.
“Only the dead have seen the end of war.” – Plato.
A lot of war movies end up glorifying war sometimes without even meaning to. Because history has drawn clear lines around who was “good” and who was “bad,” these films often lean into the idea of duty, honor, and fighting for something noble. They focus on bravery and courage, which can make war feel less like a nightmare and more like a proving ground.
Take Captain America: The First Avenger. It’s technically a superhero movie, but the war setting is just a backdrop. We don’t see the horrors of battle. We see clean fights, heroic poses, and clear villains. And let’s be honest it’s not hard to root against the Nazis.
Other films, like Saving Private Ryan, absolutely show the horror. The D-Day landing at Omaha Beach is brutal and terrifying. But even in that film, there’s a moment at the end where things shift. Tom Hanks lies wounded, a German tank creeps forward, and then air support swoops in. The tank explodes, the music swells, and suddenly you feel a rush of pride. It’s effective, emotional, and well-crafted. But it also reminds us how easily war stories can slip back into feeling heroic.
Dunkirk does something similar. We see soldiers suffer, we see the chaos of the beach. But when they return home, they’re welcomed as heroes as they should be. Still, that celebration adds a layer of triumph, and that can easily be read as a kind of glory.
Many war films today have tried to remove the glory from war. They focus more on the emotional devastation, the psychological toll, and the trauma left behind. But even then, especially in American war movies, I often feel like there is still some layer of glorification. The battles look intense but heroic. The endings are sad, yet hopeful. We may see a soldier suffer, but we still usually get a victory or a moment of triumph.
A happy ending for one soldier is not enough. War does not end neatly for most people, and its consequences spread far beyond any one person’s survival.
To truly be an anti-war film, a story has to be so bleak and so emotionally shattering that it completely kills the fantasy of joining the military. After Top Gun was released, Air Force recruitment spiked. An anti-war film should have the opposite effect.
In my view, there are only two films that succeed in this completely. One is Come and See. The other is the one we’re about to explore.
All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front began as a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a former German soldier. Since then, it has been adapted into three major films — in 1930, 1979, and most recently in 2022. This post will focus mostly on the 2022 adaptation and the original book. Mostly because its always fun to compare the book to the movie.
I believe this is the greatest anti-war story ever told. In the next sections, I’ll explain why, and also explore how the 2022 film compares to the novel that inspired it.
The story
The story of All Quiet on the Western Front follows Paul, a young German soldier who enlists in the army full of belief in glory, honor, and duty to his country. Alongside his friends, he enters the front lines of World War I — and one by one, they are broken by the brutal, meaningless violence of the war.
To really understand this story, you have to understand World War I.
Unlike World War II, which was largely driven by fascism and a clear ideological enemy, the First World War was a buildup of political tensions, alliances, and fear. It was a war with no real villain. That makes it easier to follow someone like Paul, a German soldier, and still feel for him as a human being.
World War I is remembered for trench warfare. Long trenches were dug by both sides — the Germans and the French — with a stretch of open, deadly land in between. They called it “no man’s land.”
Attacking meant running straight through that space, exposed to machine guns, artillery, and certain death. Thousands died just trying to cross a few meters. And when the war finally ended, the front lines had barely moved.
Life in the trenches was beyond grim. Soldiers lived in mud with barely enough food, constant rain, and the threat of being shelled at any moment. Rats would crawl over them in their sleep. Many soldiers developed what we now call PTSD, then known as Shell Shock. For those who survived, returning home did not mean peace. Their minds had been torn apart, just like their friends had been by shrapnel.
1930 film version
The 1930 version is a decent enough entry into the story. It was one of the first movies ever to win a Best Picture Oscar. Even Though it’s old it still has some unbelievable imagery. One of the most iconic ones is the two serpent hands clinging to some barbed wire.
The movie is made by Americans and contains American actors talking in a very thick American accent. This makes it impossible to believe it’s about German soldiers. The effects are also very dated though the spirit of the book is still somewhat present albeit hidden. While it’s faithful, it doesn’t quite capture the same emotional devastation. The 2022 adaptation might take more liberties, but it feels more immersive. It digs deeper into the horror and hopelessness, which makes it, in my opinion, a more powerful version of the story.
The 2022 version
And they told me original Netflix movies were always bad. HA!
The 2022 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, directed by Edward Berger, is visually stunning. The picture quality is almost too clean, which you might expect to work against a gritty war story. But instead, it enhances the experience. Every detail is sharp. Every moment of violence and horror feels uncomfortably real.
What this version does better than any other is build empathy for the characters. Each of Paul’s friends has a distinct personality and appearance. They feel like real people, not just uniforms in a trench. That clarity makes their deaths feel personal. It hurts more when you lose someone you’ve come to know.
One of the smartest additions is the subplot involving Matthias Erzberger, played by Daniel Brühl. He’s the German politician working to sign the armistice. These scenes contrast sharply with the battlefield. We move from mud and death to polished boots and political delays. While Paul fights to survive, diplomats argue over wording. The result is quietly infuriating.
The film opens with a quiet, haunting sequence. A young soldier named Heinrich dies in battle. His uniform is cleaned, patched up, and handed to Paul. Paul notices the wrong name stitched inside. The officer removes the label without a word. In that moment, the film shows what war really is. People become replaceable. Lives get recycled. Nothing is personal.
That same idea returns in the final moments. Paul dies just before the ceasefire. The young recruit he tried to protect is then told to collect the dog tags from the dead. The cycle has begun again. The war keeps eating people alive, even as it ends.
This version also gives us more time with the soldiers outside of combat. We see them joke, talk, dream, and break. That time makes the losses feel heavier. Each death isn’t just another casualty. It’s another piece of Paul falling apart.
The book
The book version of All Quiet on the Western Front is heartbreaking, but not in the way you might expect. It’s not emotional because it dwells on suffering. It’s emotional because it doesn’t.
The first-person perspective brings you into Paul’s head completely. You don’t just see the war. You feel his numbness growing with every chapter.
Remarque writes with a cold, restrained precision. The prose is clean and clinical. Horrors are described in a few sharp sentences, then the story moves on. You want him to pause. You want him to scream, to hold the moment and explain how unbearable it all is. But he doesn’t. He brushes past each scene like it’s just another fact of war.
That distance is what makes the book feel so hopeless. You don’t need flowery language or dramatic description. The raw reality speaks for itself. The way Remarque tells the story feels almost numb, as if the narrator has already been worn down past the point of reacting.
There are also several moments in the book that didn’t make it into either film version. One of the most powerful is the “undying room.” It is the part of the hospital where wounded soldiers go when they have no chance of surviving. Paul fears being sent there. It would mean not only the end of his life, but the death of his dream to return home with glory.
That chapter shows how disconnected he has become. He feels closer to the men in the hospital than he does to his own family. He belongs to the war now, not to the world outside.
Where the 2022 film shows horror in visual detail, the book simply states it. The result is just as devastating, maybe even more so.
The French Soldier
The moment with the French soldier is possibly the most haunting part of the entire story. It appears in every version of the film, and of course in the book — and for good reason.
During a brutal attack, Paul ends up trapped in a crater. A French soldier jumps in too. Paul reacts on instinct and stabs him. But the man doesn’t die right away. He lies there, suffering, choking on his own blood, and Paul can do nothing but watch.
It’s not a heroic kill. It’s not even a necessary one. It’s a human tragedy.
In the book, Paul says:
“Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death and the same agony — Forgive me, comrade: how could you be my enemy?”
This is the moment where the enemy becomes a person. Not a uniform. Not a target. A man with a life, a family, and a future that just got taken away. Paul sees himself in the French soldier, and it breaks him.
Up until this point, the enemy has always been distant. Faceless figures firing from across no man’s land. But now, death has a face. And it looks a lot like Paul.
This is the heart of All Quiet on the Western Front. It is not about good versus evil. It is about how war turns human beings into enemies by accident. How it makes murder feel normal. And how it leaves the people who survive with more grief than anyone can carry.
When Kat is taken away I will not have one friend left.
His leave with his family
At one point in the story, Paul is granted leave and returns home to visit his family. This scene appears in the 1930 film, but it is missing from the 2022 version. In the book, however, it is one of the most powerful chapters.
Paul is back in his hometown, surrounded by the familiar comforts of home. But nothing feels right. He cannot talk to his mother about what he has been through. The horror runs too deep. How do you explain gas attacks, rats in the trenches, and the screams of dying friends to someone who has only known peace?
Even though his mother worries for him, and even though he loves her, there is now a wall between them. She will never truly understand what war has done to him.
At the front, Paul feels like a stranger to himself. At home, he feels like a stranger to everyone else. He has been broken into two halves — one that still pretends to be the son he was, and one that knows he will never be that person again.
the end
In the 1930 film, Paul is shot on a quiet day while reaching out to touch a flower. The final image is simple and poetic: his hand, lifeless, resting beside the delicate flower. It’s a moment of peace interrupted by violence.
In the 2022 version, Paul dies in a much more brutal fashion. He is stabbed from behind just moments before the ceasefire takes effect. He had just saved a young recruit, and then, without warning, he is gone. His death happens as the war is ending, which makes it feel even more cruel. His life, like so many others, is lost for nothing.
But the book delivers the most devastating version of all. Paul is already broken. He has nothing left to live for. All his friends are dead. His spirit is gone. He reflects on this during his final leave, saying he will keep going because that’s all he can do. And then the story ends with this:
“He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.”
In a way it’s a good ending since Paul finally found peace from the war. It would have been impossible for him to return to a normal life after what he had been through. Like so many other times in history Plato was right, Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Conclusion
In the end, what was it all for? Glory? The fatherland? The emperor? The president?
Who has the right to send young men to die?
The dream of glory in war is exactly that — a dream. And like all dreams, it fades. What remains is the nightmare. Those who did not die came back worse than when they left. Today, we still see war in the news. Still see destruction. Still ask, “For what?”
We talk about fallen soldiers like they were pieces on a chessboard. But they were not symbols or slogans. They were people. Just like you. Just like me.
That’s what makes this story so powerful. It gives a voice to the broken. It does not seek to accuse or excuse. It simply speaks for a generation that was shattered, even if their bodies made it home.
As Remarque wrote at the start of his book:
“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”