The Pitch: It’s 1917 (no, not that one), and Germany is on the back foot fighting the French in the First World War. Piles of bodies stack up in the trenches of the Western Front — hundreds of thousands, just to advance and retreat over the same few hundred yards — with new regiments of fresh-faced recruits to fill their dead comrades’ hastily-repaired uniforms.

One such kid is Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), lured to war by blustering politicians and schoolmasters who romanticize the glory they’ll bring to themselves and Germany. It’s not long before Paul and his schoolmates are disabused of that notion: War, as they say, is hell, and the bleak conditions and bursts of bloody violence wipe clean the innocence from their faces. Soon, it becomes less about winning the war than getting out alive.

We Have So Much To Say… It’s strange to think it’s taken this long to get an honest-to-goodness German adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s seminal 1928 novel, following Lewis Milestone’s Oscar-winning American version in 1930.

But Edward Berger’s take on the material feels stark, visceral, and urgent, even as it streamlines the book in some ways while needlessly complicating it in others. It’s a film with singular purpose: To hammer home to its audience the horrors of war, and it wants to offer that point in no uncertain terms, no matter how much blood must be spilled or how many souls must be destroyed.

Even before we meet Paul, Berger sets him up as just more meat for the grinder: In its brilliant opening minutes, we follow a soldier named Heinrich in the heat of battle, eventually shot and killed while the rest of his friends fall shouting his name.

Then, just like that, he’s disposed of — his dog tags taken, his body stripped of its uniform, and the bullet holes in the fabric stitched together in a busy, noisy warehouse. (The rat-a-tat of the sewing machine takes on the repeater pattern of a machine gun, one of the film’s grimmest bits of sound design.) Paul gets this uniform and notices the name tag; the recruiter reassures him that it just probably wasn’t Heinrich’s size. But thanks to Berger, we know better.

All Quiet on the Western Front (Netflix)