With nine Oscar nominations and a leading 14 nods for next month's Bafta film awards, it could become the most decorated German film of all time. But in its country of origin, Edward Berger's All Quiet On the Western Front has left critics distinctly unimpressed. ... [U]pon its release in Germany the first world war drama has been at the receiving end of a critical drubbing, with critics complaining that it turns a beloved literary classic into a spectacle "horny for an Oscar", and military historians bemoaning its "black-and-white" historical inaccuracies. Much of the criticism has to do with the enduring popularity of Erich-Maria Remarque's 1928 anti-war novel, which was banned by the Nazis and is a set text at many schools across modern Germany. With more than 20m copies sold worldwide since publication, it is, as Süddeutsche Zeitung writes, "one of the most important books ever written in the German language". Yet Berger's film, the same Munich-based broadsheet wrote, showed that "no book is so good that you can't turn it into a terrible film". With new subplots, absent central characters and added backstories, Süddeutsche's critic Hubert Wetzel wrote, "you have to ask yourself whether director Berger has even read Remarque's novel".

There are good literary adaptations and there are bad ones, and then there is All Quiet on the Western Front by director Edward Berger. ... His version of Erich-Maria Remarque's classic is a piece of indescribable impudence. It takes a considerable portion of ignorance, disrespect and Oscar-lust to mess up a masterpiece in such a fashion, to pulverise its content and story so mercilessly.

The inner plot, the brains of the story, have been removed by Edward Berger and his scriptwriters and replaced with a Hollywood programme.