Arms and Arguments January 2026 Reviews

All Quiet on The Western Front (1979) 

The 1979 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, while less renowned than the 1930 and 2022 versions, offers a distinctive and deeply human anti-war message. Rather than relying on graphic spectacle or large-scale brutality, its power lies in its focus on the inner lives of its soldiers and in its charting of the slow erosion of their identities. Unlike the 2022 adaptation, which presents soldiers as interchangeable cogs within the machinery of war, the 1979 film insists on their individuality. Each member of Paul’s company is marked by specific traits, backgrounds, and vulnerabilities that set them apart from the grey mass of uniforms.

These personal characteristics are not incidental; they are central to the film’s anti-war argument. Detering, the farmer, is driven to hysteria by the suffering of horses during an artillery barrage, an emotional response rooted in his connection to animals and rural life. Paul’s recurring habit of sketching birds reminds the viewer of the creative, sensitive young man he was before the war. Sergeant Katczinsky, the group’s surrogate father, risks his life to provide food for his men. These traits humanise the soldiers, yet in the logic of war, they are framed as weaknesses, often leading directly to their deaths. Detering disappears after following his love of nature, Kat is killed while scavenging for food, and Paul dies not in a grand assault, but while trying to look more closely at a bird he is sketching.

Over the course of the film, Paul’s humanity is stripped away piece by piece, leaving only his fragile attachment to art, an attachment that ultimately kills him. As a made-for-TV production with a lower budget, the 1979 film is less overtly brutal than the 2022 version, but its anti-war force is no less devastating. By showing what is lost within each young man, passions, creativity, tenderness, it reframes war not just as a destroyer of bodies, but as a thief of futures, identities, and human potential.

All Quiet on The Western Front (2022)

Edward Berger’s 2022 adaptation of Remarque’s anti-war masterpiece, while departing substantially from the novel’s psychological focus, offers a distinctive and visually devastating critique of militarism. Rather than relying on character interiority, its power lies in its unflinching documentation of institutional dehumanization and the machinery through which war transforms human beings into disposable units. The 2022 film presents warfare as a system designed to render individuality irrelevant. Each soldier functions not as a distinct personality but as a replaceable component within a structure that prioritizes institutional continuity over human survival.

Throughout the movie we see how the sorting and redistribution of identity tags and clothing turn the passing of every soldier into a bureaucratic problem rather than a personal one. In one example, the repeated recycling of uniforms, garments which were previously soaked in blood of soldiers killed days earlier, helps us to visualise this perceived disposability of soldiers in military organisation. Sergeant Himmelstoss embodies this institutional cruelty while General Fridrich represents the abstract power that continuously demands human sacrifice. These institutional forces, not the weakness of individual soldiers, determine their fates. And he can be replaced before he hits the ground. 

As a Netflix production with substantial technical resources, the 2022 film embraces visual spectacle: wide cinematography that dwarfs human figures, composed frames that merge soldiers into masses, and elaborate sound design that renders individual voices almost inaudible. Its anti‑war force derives not from mourning specific futures, but from demonstrating that war is an apparatus designed to produce expendability. By showing how the institution systematically destroys human agency and treats people as replaceable material, rather than focusing on their individual creativity and tenderness, it reframes war’s tragedy as one arising from its very structure: a machine that can function only by erasing the value of the individual.

Conclusion & Comparisons

We have chosen to examine these two adaptations of Remarque’s original novel because they articulate fundamentally different anti-war arguments through contrasting conceptions of what war is and how it operates. The 1979 film foregrounds individual humanity, emphasising character development and emotional intimacy to show how war erodes personal identity and human potential. By contrast, the 2022 adaptation focuses on institutional machinery, depicting soldiers as interchangeable components within a dehumanising system rather than as distinct individuals.

These differences reflect their contexts of production. Made in the post-Vietnam era, the 1979 film aligns with a cultural focus on trauma and personal loss, while the 2022 version reflects contemporary concerns with bureaucratic power and mechanised violence. Together, they demonstrate that war’s violence operates both through the destruction of individual lives and through systems that render such destruction routine.