YMMV / All Quiet on the Western Front

• Anvilicious: War. Is. Hell. Especially to modern audiences, who are far more used to the treatment of war as something truly awful. Justified because this was written in 1929, 11 years after World War I ended, four years before Germany turned to Adolf Hitler for help, and ten years before World War II rendered the author's efforts All for Nothing.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Storm of Steel, another German novel based on WWI experience, except the latter is an autobiographical work of the author Ernst Jünger's personal experience as a soldier, and is a lot less negative on perceiving battle and violence. Since Storm is endorsing war as an adventure despite the WWI backdrop and All Quiet... is one of the seminal anti-war works of fiction, go figure.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Young man who believes in victory and glory, the homefront who is believing that they can win the fight: In the 1930 film, it becomes very apparent that the war spirit has not died yet.
  • The experience of making the 1930 version hit star Lew Ayres especially hard, and he became a pacifist. This came back to harm his career somewhat during World War II when, as general call-ups started to hit Hollywood as well, he sought to become an unarmed combat medic, a specialty that did not yet exist. The draft board could only offer him conscientious objector status, and an undeserved reputation of being a coward. He was fired from the popular Dr. Kildare series of films (the series was retooled into stories about Lionel Barrymore's Dr. Gillespie) and was unemployable for a couple of years until circa 1943, when the Army did begin to allow pacifists who wished to be medics to join without undergoing weapons training. He served in the South Pacific, which as anyone can tell you, was not a theater for cowards.
• Ho Yay:
  • In the 1930 movie, in the scene where Paul is comforting Kemmerich after Kemmerich loses his leg, is very heartwarming, and also very shippy.
  • Do not forget the relationship between Paul and Kat.
• Memetic Mutation: The entire ending of the film, including the scene where Paul reaches out for a butterfly.
• Narm: In the 1979 film, the scene in which Paul catches a random soldier from the other side and stabs him...and proceeds to watch him for ten straight minutes (in real time) while the man just lays there dying with a goofy expression on his face. Possibly a commentary on how it was a fellow human being that is being killed for a pointless war, but still absurdly executed nonetheless.
• Once Original, Now Common: Originally, it was The Anti-War Novel. Nowdays, many themes can look dated, because so many other war novels and films repeated them.
• One-Scene Wonder: Two from the novel. Josef Behm, whose death scene is near the beginning and helps set the tone for what follows (he gets a little more screen time in the films) and Mittelstaedt, another former classmate of Paul who was sent to the reserves after being wounded and ends up as Kantorek's commanding officer, running his former schoolmaster ragged in one of the funniest scenes of the novel (which, regrettably, has yet to be featured in any of the adaptations).
• Signature Scene : The ending., Paul trapped in the shell hole with a (quietly) dying French Soldier and the attack on the German Trenches by French troops., but especially the French infantrymen getting mowed down by the machine guns.
• The Woobie: Paul at the end of the film and the book. He lost every last one of his friends, and he can never become the person he was back home before the war.

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