All Quiet on the Western Front. Best movies of 2022

All Quiet on the Western Front, dir. Edward Berger, Netflix, 2022

This new German film has been submitted for the Oscars and currently competes for the Golden Globe in the Best Picture - Non-English Language category. And even if the plot differs slightly from its book source by Erich Maria Remarque (one may say that the book is only a formal pretext for grandiose production), this is not treated as a bad creative decision - we only have a different angle on the soldier drama. Nevertheless, some fragments from the novel have been skillfully recreated - for example, the scene with the dying enemy is still one of the strongest literary and film moments in history.

This version does not seem to be more interesting than the one from 1930, when we are talking about the main story or focusing on book characters. This does not change the fact that in the near future you will not find a new film that portrays dirt, death and diseases in such a ruthless way, i.e. all the elements that we can call the components of war drama. All Quiet on the Western Front shows the horrors of war as they were a hundred years ago.