Erich Maria Remarque's book was inspired by his own experiences as a German soldier in World War I. Although Remarque never fought in the trenches, the novel is notable for its realistic depiction of the horrors of battle, and the trouble soldiers face during and even after the fighting.
This is the third rendition of this story. The other two are the renowned Academy Award-winning Best Picture version, Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), and the lesser-known version by Delbert Mann, All Quiet on the Western Front (1979). This is also said to be the most expensive German film in the history of Netflix.
The director used a military area and an airfield north of Prague to film the battlefield. It was a huge mud field, the size of 10 football fields.
The French tanks shown are Saint-Chamonds. Between 350 and 400 were produced between April 1917 and July 1918. The Saint-Chamond weighed 23 tonnes, had a theoretical top speed of 7.5 mph (almost never achieved in action) and was armed with a 75mm heavy gun. It was widely disliked by its operators because of its poor trench-crossing ability and because its heavy nose often caused it to bog down. By the end of the war it had been all but phased out, to be replaced by the Renault FT. One surviving Saint-Chamond is in a museum in France.
This film is not technically positioned as a remake of an older movie, but a re-adaptation of a book. Ian Stokell and Lesley Paterson wrote the script based on the 1928 novel by Erich Maria Remarque.