The New Netflix war film All Quiet on the Western Front is receiving raving reviews and has practically a flawless Rotten Tomatoes rating. The film, which has one of Germany’s highest production values and is the nation’s submission for this year’s Oscars in the Best International Feature Film category, presently has a critics’ score of 94% and an audience score of 91% on the review aggregation website.
All Quiet on the Western Front is described as “remarkable if harrowing, film-making” by The Observer(opens in new tab) and “a film that feels both aesthetically dazzling and full of necessary truths: an antiwar drama that surpasses propaganda’s bombast largely because to how masterfully and irrevocably created it is.”
The film follows youths Paul Baumer, and his pals Albert and Muller, who willingly serve in the German army, and is based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 classic World War I novel. Though first fervently patriotic, as they experience the horrors of life on the front, their notions about good and evil gradually disintegrate.
The book has already been adapted for the cinema and won Best Picture at the Oscars in 1930. A Golden Globe-winning TV movie was released in 1979, and this is not the first time it has been done. But this is the first time a German director has adapted it. The film was directed by Edward Berger, who has also worked on shows like the Showtime series Patrick Melrose with Benedict Cumberbatch and the AMC series The Terror with Tobias Menzies and George Takei.
Netflix now has All Quiet on the Western Front accessible for streaming.