Oscar time is ideal for catching up with Edward Berger’s ferocious anti-war epic about young German soldiers dying in WW1 trenches. The German-language film boasts a wow nine nominations, including Best Picture, and tragically its message never gets old.

This new adaptation of a classic book about young German soldiers in the First World War does everything well, except keep faith with Erich Maria Remarque’s novel.

Berger’s film is a powerful plea for pacifism that comes riding on a trenchant critique of the inhumanity of statecraft. One in which the enemy is not necessarily out there across the border but within.

While All Quiet has fittingly been lauded for its technical achievements–it’s...cruelly intimate moments that allow this latest adaptation of Remarque’s novel to find new resonance and potency nearly a century after its publication.