Having read the book recently, I didn't succeed in having an "independent" reading of the movie. So, sorry, this is an "annoying guy that read the book" type of commentary.
The main aspects that the movie failed to convey was 1) the repetitive nature of exposition to brutality, which leads to despair and PTSD (the movie kind of concentrates the violence in one harrowing scene) and 2) the constant shelling noise (this is just impractical to do with a movie, unless you want spectators to go crazy alongside the characters).
Interestingly, the movie still choose to explore some internal considerations of the main character in the book, about bureaucrats making decisions while having no "skin in the game" about the consequences of their decisions. This is done with no voice-over, but just by contrasting the visuals of war with those of the lavish food the bureaucrats are eating. However, the philosophical consideration about the failure of civilization allowing such atrocities to happen is gone (it was one of the most important aspect of the book for me).
There are some innovations in the movie, such as the scarf from the French woman being passed on as a token of survival (what does it mean?), a side plot about time trouble with the armistice (what?), as well as a particularly shocking choice to end the movie, which, unfortunately, defeats a significant theme from the book, most notably carried by none other than its title (WWI soldiers who came home couldn't really talk to their closed ones about the war, because of the unhealed trauma and also the fact that what they had seen was so outlandishly horrific that people literally couldn't compute what they were saying. So they ended up just saying that nothing was really happening: "all quiet on the western front". This is also presented in depth in Peter Jackson's documentary They Shall Not Grow Old)
Having read the book recently, I didn't succeed in having an "independent" reading of the movie. So, sorry, this is an "annoying guy that read the book" type of commentary.
The main aspects that the movie failed to convey was 1) the repetitive nature of exposition to brutality, which leads to despair and PTSD (the movie kind of concentrates the violence in one harrowing scene) and 2) the constant shelling noise (this is just impractical to do with a movie, unless you want spectators to go crazy alongside the characters).
Interestingly, the movie still choose to explore some internal considerations of the main character in the book, about bureaucrats making decisions while having no "skin in the game" about the consequences of their decisions. This is done with no voice-over, but just by contrasting the visuals of war with those of the lavish food the bureaucrats are eating. However, the philosophical consideration about the failure of civilization allowing such atrocities to happen is gone (it was one of the most important aspect of the book for me).
There are some innovations in the movie, such as the scarf from the French woman being passed on as a token of survival (what does it mean?), a side plot about time trouble with the armistice (what?), as well as a particularly shocking choice to end the movie, which, unfortunately, defeats a significant theme from the book, most notably carried by none other than its title (WWI soldiers who came home couldn't really talk to their closed ones about the war, because of the unhealed trauma and also the fact that what they had seen was so outlandishly horrific that people literally couldn't compute what they were saying. So they ended up just saying that nothing was really happening: "all quiet on the western front". This is also presented in depth in Peter Jackson's documentary They Shall Not Grow Old)
For this one literature wins over cinema.