All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Key Battles of American History

History

4.6 • 936 Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2026

⏱️ 74 minutes

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Summary

In this episode, Sean and James discuss the 2022 film adaptation of the classic novel All Quiet on the Western Front. The film depicts the Great War through the experience of a young German soldier on the Western Front, charting his rapid disillusionment as patriotic fervor gives way to mechanized slaughter. The film juxtaposes brutal front-line combat with detached armistice negotiations, underscoring the indifference of political leadership to human cost. Visceral and unsparing, the film presents the First World War as an industrialized process of annihilation rather than heroism.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding
0:10.7	right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its
0:16.4	size, and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.
0:23.9	Welcome to Key Battles of American History,
0:26.7	a podcast in which we discuss American history
0:28.9	through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.
0:32.7	Here is your host, James Early.
0:43.4	Thank you. host, James Early. Hello and welcome back to key films of World War I.
0:46.4	I'm your host, James Early, as always.
0:49.6	And as always, I'm joined by my co-host of my good buddy, Sean McIver, the human movie database.
0:57.1	That's my nickname for him.
0:59.6	Well, this is our final film in the series, and this is one we didn't do back when we
1:05.4	recorded our first set of film reviews for World War I movies in 2020 or 2021 because this one didn't even
1:12.6	exist at that point. That's right. You've been waiting for this. You've been waiting very
1:17.3	patiently. I've been waiting very patiently. I've been wanting to discuss this with Sean ever since
1:22.7	it came out. We're talking about the 2022 version of All Quiet on the Western Front.
1:28.6	This is a German film, unlike the two previous versions of All Quiet on the Western Front,
1:34.2	the 1930 version and the 1979 version, which were American films.
1:38.4	So here we go.
1:39.2	Yeah, I've had a lot of requests for this show on, too.
1:41.6	I don't know that I've passed that information on to you, but as soon as this came out, I said, oh, I've got to do this with Sean. I can't wait, but I like to wait. When a new movie comes out, I like to wait a few months just to kind of, one, give more people time to see it and two, well, first of all, it needs to come out on streaming.
2:01.6	Of course, that wasn't a problem with this movie because this movie was a direct to Netflix. I don't know, it may have been in some theaters here and there, but, but for the most part, it was a Netflix movie, so it wasn't like, say, Oppenheimer where we had to wait a few months for it to come out on streaming. I like to do that because I can watch it over and over relatively economically,
	...

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