The Novels Behind This Year’s Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar Noms

At Sunday’s Oscars show, five scripts will be up for Best Adapted Screenplay. Two of them are derivative dogs that have no business being anywhere near the Dolby Theater—Top Gun: Maverick and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, both considered “adapted” due to their being sequels—while the others, all of them with literary source material, make for an intriguing three-way race. So let’s focus on those three, shall we?

Trench-Warfare Porn

Based on the timeless anti-war novel by Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front was co-written by Lesley Paterson, Ian Stokell, and director Edward Berger. It’s the third screen version of the novel, following Lewis Milestone’s early sound film (winner of the 1930 Academy Award for Best Picture), and a lesser 1979 TV movie adapted by Paul Monash. With the carnage in Ukraine now in its second year, this new retelling of an old story should feel timely and relevant.

If the first duty of an adapted screenplay is to remain faithful to the spirit of the source material while bringing something fresh to the game, this script is full of holes. The movie is a German production (it’s also up for Oscars for Best Picture and Best International Film), and the German press has pilloried the screenwriters) return to his hometown on a brief leave, a wrenching set piece in the novel that allowed Remarque to portray how the front had pulverized Paul’s generation and rendered them forever unable to fit back into with the world that made them. This was Remarque’s great theme, one honed by his own service in the trenches, where he was wounded five times but miraculously survived the slaughter. Another omission is the German soldiers’ brief flirtation with some French girls, which leavened the horror with some welcome levity and humanity.