Written by Kianna Best on Mar 8, 2023. Posted in Production News

All Quiet on the Western Front makes noise with Oscar nomination dominance

BAFTA film winner and 2023 Oscar contender All Quiet on the Western Front authentically captures the realities of World War I soldiers through the attentively written narrative and a set design mirroring the actual infrastructure of the time. Starring Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch and Aaron Hilmer, the 2022 remake is a unapologetically gut wrenching and brutally graphic display of the western front experience.

Whilst the adaptation has been critiqued to me a diluted version of its original source material, All Quiet on the Western Front is loudly being championed as a predicted winner for the 95^th instalment of the Academy Awards. Nominated for 9 Oscars, Including Best Picture and Production Design, any Academy Awards win will follow the critically acclaimed Netflix project’ winnings at the BAFTA and European Film Awards.

From screams to gun shots exploding across the battle fields, the thud of bodies and the eery silence of soldiers in waiting, All Quiet on the Western Front is a multisensory experience of World War I.  Edward Berger’s adaptation of the novel visually follows the journey of German teenager Paul Bäumer, and the downward spiraling experience from optimistic soldier to traumatised shell of himself.  Berger, along with set designer Christian M. Goldbeck and writers Leslie Patterson and Ian Stokell, take the audience as deeply into the lives of the soldiers as they can, moving accounts and staggering set constructions that drops viewers and the actors alike into the war torn environments.

“Our view of war is dominated by sorrow and shame, by devastation and guilt,” Berger told Netflix. “Nothing positive remains, not the tiniest spark of heroism. I found making our history, our background and our attitude to war the driving force behind a film a great challenge. And I thought that this very specific German perspective may well be of interest to people in other countries too. Especially at the moment.”

Running from the North Sea coastline to the Swiss border and passing through Belgium, north-eastern France and southern Germany, the Western Front was a 700 kilometre frontline of turmoil and devastation. Raw and unfiltered, All Quiet on the Western Front set designer Christian M. Goldbeck’s inspiration from a series of devastating battleground photographs were pivotal in creating the authenticity of the war movie. Measuring to the equivalent of four football fields, the filmed battleground was excavated in Milovice, Czech Republic. With the majority of the shoot taking place in Czech Republic for the film, other locations include Belgium and Germany.

“We decided in a very early stage to make it visceral and physical, to s how what we can lose in war,” Goldbeck told Deadline . “To beautify war would be propaganda.”

Images courtesy of Netflix and Reiner Bajo