Film Review - 1917 (15)

Blake... Pick a man. Bring your kit. 

Sam Mendes' grandfather Alfred waited fifty years before sharing his stories from the Great War. As his film-maker grandson tells it, they weren't tales of heroism, but rather shocking ones of 'luck and chance and coincidence'. In the movie 1917 Mendes takes these vivid wartime recollections and shapes them, with the help of skilled screenwriting partner Krysty Wilson-Cairns, into an epic narrative - one that captures the random horrors of human conflict, together with spontaneous acts of bravery and self-sacrifice. Along the way he crafts one of the most remarkable film experiences I've covered since beginning this blog and one you absolutely have to see. Preferably on a very big screen.

 

In April 1917 on the Western Front lance corporals Blake and Schofield are given a formidable mission. With German troops having retreated from the front-line trenches, 1600 soldiers are primed to launch an assault next morning at dawn, Blake's brother among them. But the intelligence is outdated and the troops are about to charge into a trap. The two young NCOs have hours to make it across No Man's Land and through war-ravaged enemy territory to deliver an order - one that will stop the offensive and prevent a massacre. And we get to experience ever fraught footstep of the journey with them.

Mendes' decision - one central to the buzz surrounding this movie - was to shoot as if in one continuous take (arguably two due to a time-lapse in the later stages). It's more than a piece of gimmickry, however. With the camera weaving around the story's subjects in an smoothly choreographed dance, we experience the lads' ordeal in one uninterrupted flow. Sometimes the current of their adventure is painfully sluggish, at other times it moves in spate. (At one point that river metaphor becomes scarily literal.) Point is, we're there with them - a third participant in this grim moment-to-moment struggle through the shell-blasted fields of France. Each time our callow heroes climb up a rise or edge through the labyrinth of a booby-trapped trench, we feel their tension palpably.

1917 is a miracle of miles-long production design, the camera gliding - often at the soldiers' eye level - through a meticulously recreated vision of the Great War. It makes for an immersive adventure, one bolstered by Roger Deakins' awe-inspiring cinematography. The man who gained his long-overdue Oscar for Blade Runner 2049 has outdone himself, his lens capturing the Western Front's varied hellscapes - and they do change, like in some real-life Dantean odyssey. No Man's Land recalls the nightmare poetic imagery of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon (staples of a UK schooling), while later scenes reflect the hallucinogenic response of an exhausted mind to a devastated French town. Yet as with war films from All's Quiet on the Western Front to The Thin Red Line the horror is cut with moments of aching beauty. Take all that and enhance it with a subtly poignant score by Thomas 'Shawshank Redemption' Newman (he might actually have out-Shawshanked himself here) and you have an experience that frequently overwhelms.

But it's not just the technical aspects that prove powerful. This is also an experience of enormous heart, due in no small measure to the two leads. As Blake and Schofield relatively fresh faces Dean-Charles Chapman (he's sat on the Iron Throne) and George MacKay (you might have seen him in Sunshine on Leith or Captain Fantastic or Pride) disappear into their roles, conveying all the camaraderie, conflict and desperation you'd imagine in such dire circumstances. One a reckless joker, the other reserved and cautious, they're unlikely army pals together thrust into unthinkable peril. A host of better-known faces - Colin Firth is only the first of those - punctuate their progress in brief but fully realised cameos. But it's the boys and their heroism-born-of-necessity that will eventually take hold of your emotions and squeeze.

There are good films and there are outstanding ones and then there are a few that attain greatness. 1917 - I think - is an example of that final kind, and not just because of its superbly achieved 'single-shot' effect. It carries you on a quest every moment of which you'll feel, through dangers that will startle and confound, to a conclusion that will resonate long after you've left the cinema. There's a reason Mendes' movie takes that year as its title. In Blake and Schofield's quest we see in microcosm all that made the Great War so uniquely terrible and cruel. Yet due to our heroes there's a powerful nobility too. It can't redeem the terrors surrounding them, but it does provide a flicker of light in all that wretched darkness.

Gut Reaction: Gaze locked on screen throughout, lots of leaning in like it was drawing me closer. Knuckle-gnawing tension - leaped clean out of my seat at least twice. Heart pounding all through the final act, then moved to your actual tears.

Memorable Moment: Which to choose? One that made me wince, jump or sob? I'm going for the one inside the truck. Thomas Newman's music spoke volumes. 

Ed's Verdict: 10/10. There, I've done it. No mucking about with 9s and 9.5s. You might nitpick implausibilities in the plot, but then war is fundamentally insane. 1917 - terrible beautiful genius from first to last. Go see it.