Reviewed by Michael F. Duggan
Spoiler Alert: You will likely be able to piece together the plot of this movie from this review.
Yesterday I saw 1917, the blockbuster by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Revolutionary Road) that has walked away with a trenchful of awards, a trend likely to continue through the Oscars. For anybody with an interest in the Great War, it is a must see.
Above all it is a brilliant technical achievement: a movie that seems to be a single shot done in one take (although knowing this ahead of time proved to be distracting as I watched closely for breaks in the shot). Because of this, there is a seamless quality to the film that allows one to easily replay the general outline over in the mind.
The film is conceptually related to Peter Weir’s 1981 Gallipoli (the race-against-time, WWI buddy film), and Saving Private Ryan (the search for an imperiled sibling). As with Saving Private Ryan (another DreamWorks production) the film embraces a tangible realism that strips away the sepia tone, and the 103 years of First World War historical accretion since the purported events of the story. In terms of appearance, it is the most realistic portrayal of First World War I have seen on the big screen. While it is as gritty as Private Ryan, it never attempts to achieve the intensity of the famous landing scene at Omaha Beach.
The film appropriates a number of devises and themes from other books and movies. Without giving away the story, it borrows a plot twist from Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and there is an escape scene right out of A Farewell to Arms. The latter scene—and a plane crash more than reminiscent of the one in Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient—leaves one wondering how they shot these segments.
The camerawork is especially interesting: a soldier’s-eye-view that makes the range of vision both narrow at points—even claustrophobic—and wide-angle at others. A scene late in the film where one of the protagonists runs parallel to a trench line as an attack begins is impressive.
There is a single scene that made no sense to me as two British soldiers on a high-priority, time urgent, mission whose success will save an entire regiment, feel compelled to stop to make sure that a deserted French farm is really deserted. There is also a nighttime chase scene in a ruined French town that is right out of a nightmare.
My only other criticism is that at times the front seems too quiet and depopulated, but then this was the period in 1917 when the Germans withdrawn from their front line trenches to occupy the Hindenburg Line (Siegfriedstellung). As with Apocalypse Now, the film’s greatest star power—Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch—is limited to brief scenes that bookend the action. In a way this is a strength and the film centers around two English Tommies, Lance Corporals Tom Blake and Will Schofield played pitch-perfect by Dean-Charles Chapmen (Game of Thrones) and George MacKay. These two actors look the part of the quintessential British every men who fought and died—the “lions led by donkeys,” the latter of whom are appropriately played by big names. The rest of the trappings and material culture of the First World War are causal, accurate, and ubiquitous (even down to the mean and rough-hewn depictions of British trenches relative to the cleaner and perhaps overengineered German trenches).
Overall it is a terrific film, perhaps a great movie, and, with all of the impressive technical aspects, the question is the degree to which the story itself draws you in (arts is even more about feeling than it is about technical mastery). Although like life itself, it may be a film worth seeing once, and, unlike most other movies I like, I am not sure I will watch this one over and over again. Time will tell.