More Than a History Lesson, All Quiet on the Western Front is a Powerful, Moving War Drama.

Rating: 10/10 (11 January 2020)

The first silent film I ever watched was Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush, as part of a film class in college. I thought it worked well as an introduction to silent film, and as a way to convince steadfast casual viewers that very old movies can have just as much impact as anything today.
Then I saw All Quiet on the Western Front.
This is the film to show to people who refuse to touch anything made before 1985. It's not a movie to passively appreciate like so many other influential silent films, it's a movie that grabs you by the collar and forces you to stare at unthinkable tragedy. All Quiet on the Western Front is a war film as viscerally and emotionally powerful as any ever made.
What impresses me most about All Quiet on the Western Front is its complete confidence. We may think of silent cinema as simplistic, juvenile even. Maybe it was more of a realm where filmmakers had to find their footing rather than show off their skill. And yet, as a piece of storytelling and as moving pictures, All Quiet on the Western Front is extremely assured. It has the David Lean-ian breadth of scope, the Spielberg-ian iconography (a masterful sequence follows a pair of boots' point of view through the war), and the kind of filmmaking craft that doesn't even seem possible from a movie made in 1929.
All Quiet on the Western Front gives proper credit to the colossal bravery of WWI's soldiers, but it is emphatically anti-war. The miraculous thing about the film is that it earns every bit of its lofty message. Nowhere is that message better visualized than in the film's final images, of a butterfly, and of innocent faces that look directly at us, silently pleading to make it stop. Those final seconds, and the film as a whole is a burning reminder of the tragedy of war. If you only see one silent film in your life, this is the one.
95/100