1917 (2019)
Directed by Sam Mendes
At the height of the First World War, two young British soldiers must cross enemy territory and deliver a message that will stop a deadly attack on hundreds of soldiers.
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It's the driest World War I movie since Gallipoli, the famous muck and rain and fog of the trenches replaced by a spring of wildflowers and chalk soil.
Construida sobre una premisa muy simple (que algo le debe a Gallipoli, 1981, de Peter Weir) –dos soldados ingleses son encomendados con la misión de alertar a un distante regimiento sobre un inminente ataque sorpresa de los alemanes–, la película es una aventura bélica que en mucho se parece a un videojuego, porque está filmada en lo que aparenta ser una sola toma continua.
While there are stylistic parallels to Christopher Nolan’s 2017 WWII drama, “Dunkirk,” there may be more similarities to director Peter Weir’s stirring 1981 Australian WWI film “Gallipoli,” starring Mel Gibson, which also hinged on the plot device of delivering a message to prevent a massacre of Allied troops.
(It would spoil the film to describe scenes that stretch time, but viewers may flash on the superior antiwar film, “Gallipoli,” in one instance).
Clearly much of 1917 is fictional, and the fact that one of the messengers has a brother in the first wave of the doomed attack is one of the notes that rings unnecessary and untrue here — it’s a bit like Gallipoli meets Saving Private Ryan, which detracts from the realism that is the film’s greatest strength.
There's an obvious parallel to 1917, and that's Gallipoli, Peter Weir's heartbreaking story of the doomed ANZAC campaign.
The greatest war films are those which capture the terrifying physical and psychological ordeal that soldiers face, along with the sheer folly and waste of it all – Paths of Glory, Come and See, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, most recently Dunkirk.
Director Sam Mendes, telling a tale based on stories that he heard in his youth from his grandfather (who at age 19 had been a messenger for the British Army during WWI) has here combined elements of “Dunkirk” and “Saving Private Ryan,” among others, and used Alejandro González Iñárritu’s single-shot storytelling method (used for “Birdman” and “The Revenant”) to create some impressive, innovative world-building.
This is Mendes’ Saving Private Ryan , albeit with a different war.
The latest from director Sam Mendes (Skyfall, American Beauty), 1917 ranks second only to Marriage Story as the best picture of 2019 and second only to Saving Private Ryan as the best war movie of the past quarter-century.
All war films, even before Saving Private Ryan's pants-shittingly intense opening sequence, have tried to put the audience in the trenches with the troops, often through bombastic sound design and onscreen chaos.
Mendes’ film cannot help but evoke a WWI version of Saving Private Ryan (predictably, that film’s director, Steven Spielberg, has heartily endorsed this film): an attempted mash-up of visceral war action to a mission with an emotional “this time, it’s personal” hook.
Like Birdman and Rope before it, the “cheat” cuts in 1917 are easy to spot, but the act of looking for them amidst the soldiers’ trek across torched farmland and sniper-filled, bombed-out towns, and simultaneously taking in the endeavor’s overall technical marvel yields a sense of awe rarely achieved in film.
It’s a trick deployed before, by Alfred Hitchcock in the stage-born 1948 thriller “Rope” and Alejandro González Iñárritu in his 2014 Best Picture Oscar winner “Birdman.”
Essentially filmed in one long, two-hour shot, the film—which features the masterful cinematography of living legend Roger Deakins—is a cinematic feat rarely attempted, though not without precedent (Birdman, Rope, and Russian Ark are other examples of one-shot films).
These titles include Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, the Best Picture Oscar winner Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), and Russian Ark, the latter actually filmed in one single take rather than just being crafted to appear that way.
Add a self-styled auteur’s flourish—in this case, the cinematic-stunt illusion of the film’s two hours being shot in what appears to be two unbroken “takes,” or camera shots (achieved in large part by the brand of editing trickery seen in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Best Picture”-winning Birdman and as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope), and you have a recipe for Hollywood hype.
1917 evokes the relentless movement of Stanley Kubrick’s WWI drama Paths of Glory but commits to a video game’s ever-shifting environments.
His character is the closest the movie comes to suggesting the absurdity of war itself; you have to go back to a different era (Stanley Kubrick’s unforgettable WWI film “Paths of Glory,” for instance) for that.
The greatest war films are those which capture the terrifying physical and psychological ordeal that soldiers face, along with the sheer folly and waste of it all – Paths of Glory, Come and See, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, most recently Dunkirk.
“1917” occupies a kind of unusual no-man’s land, somewhere between Kirk Douglas’ “Paths of Glory” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.”
Even films that are unambiguously anti-war – such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Paths of Glory (1957), and The Thin Red Line (1998) – include scenes where the drama of battlefield peril is designed to elicit excitement in the audience.
Certain scenes, though lovely in passing or elaborately ghastly, seem to place themselves in competition with Dunkirk or Paths of Glory or Alejandro González Iñárritu’s last two movies.
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The list is exemplary: Apocalypse Now, A Bridge Too Far, The Thin Red Line, Platoon, Saving Private Ryan, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Fury, Dunkirk.
The greatest war films are those which capture the terrifying physical and psychological ordeal that soldiers face, along with the sheer folly and waste of it all – Paths of Glory, Come and See, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, most recently Dunkirk.
Not since Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk has time itself been so foregrounded as a war film’s scariest foe.
Director Sam Mendes, telling a tale based on stories that he heard in his youth from his grandfather (who at age 19 had been a messenger for the British Army during WWI) has here combined elements of “Dunkirk” and “Saving Private Ryan,” among others, and used Alejandro González Iñárritu’s single-shot storytelling method (used for “Birdman” and “The Revenant”) to create some impressive, innovative world-building.
Mendes works closely with the legendary Roger Deakins, and wisely borrows Dunkirk editor Lee Smith, to build and keep a perspective that moves with his heroes throughout the movie.
But I can’t say how long it will stick in your mind compared to any of the idiosyncratic war films listed above– or Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan’s structurally adventurous World War II film with which 1917 shares a significant amount of DNA.
Maybe because it sounds near-impossible to streamline the unpredictability of a live battlefield as opposed to, say, the urban Broadway-ness of Birdman or the Berlin nightlife of Victoria.
Like Birdman and Rope before it, the “cheat” cuts in 1917 are easy to spot, but the act of looking for them amidst the soldiers’ trek across torched farmland and sniper-filled, bombed-out towns, and simultaneously taking in the endeavor’s overall technical marvel yields a sense of awe rarely achieved in film.
One year later, Birdman, another film mostly presented as a single shot, would sweep the Oscars.
It’s a trick deployed before, by Alfred Hitchcock in the stage-born 1948 thriller “Rope” and Alejandro González Iñárritu in his 2014 Best Picture Oscar winner “Birdman.”
Essentially filmed in one long, two-hour shot, the film—which features the masterful cinematography of living legend Roger Deakins—is a cinematic feat rarely attempted, though not without precedent (Birdman, Rope, and Russian Ark are other examples of one-shot films).
Director Sam Mendes, telling a tale based on stories that he heard in his youth from his grandfather (who at age 19 had been a messenger for the British Army during WWI) has here combined elements of “Dunkirk” and “Saving Private Ryan,” among others, and used Alejandro González Iñárritu’s single-shot storytelling method (used for “Birdman” and “The Revenant”) to create some impressive, innovative world-building.
Essentially filmed in one long, two-hour shot, the film—which features the masterful cinematography of living legend Roger Deakins—is a cinematic feat rarely attempted, though not without precedent (Birdman, Rope, and Russian Ark are other examples of one-shot films).
It is not the first time this gimmick was used in a film – Alexander Sokurov’s “Russian Ark” got there earlier in 2002.
These titles include Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, the Best Picture Oscar winner Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), and Russian Ark, the latter actually filmed in one single take rather than just being crafted to appear that way.
There have been a few similar experiments over the years (the breathtaking Russian Ark perhaps being the most famous example), but recent efforts have seen the trick very nearly becoming a genre unto itself.
In 2000, Mike Figgis released the experimental drama Timecode ; two years later Alexander Sokurov made Russian Ark , a lyrical one-take journey through Russian history composed of a single Steadicam sequence shot in almost constant motion that deserves substantial credit as 1917 ’s technical predecessor.
With the exception of All Quiet on the Western Front , stand-outs about the first conflict of machine warfare are sparse.
Most of the acclaimed films about World War I - from "Lawrence of Arabia" and "All Quiet on the Western Front" to "War Horse" and first Academy Award winner "Wings" - are sprawling epics.
The list of great films about World War I in Europe is surprisingly short: After the acknowledged masterpieces All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Paths of Glory (1957), there aren’t many more worth discussing.
But its inherent devotion to life and beauty is part of its power, in the same way that Lewis Milestone’s quietly wrenching 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front —a story not about the experience of English soldiers but of German ones, adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s novel—stressed that individual moments of life, grasped and held tight, are the only real protection we have against the pointlessness of war.
Reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan in its concept and All Quiet on the Western Front in its display of the battle grounds, 1917 pulls in tight on the storyline.
That exclusive list includes All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), La Grande Illusion (1937), 1960’s Paths of Glory, Wings (1927), and War Horse (2015).
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The greatest war films are those which capture the terrifying physical and psychological ordeal that soldiers face, along with the sheer folly and waste of it all – Paths of Glory , Come and See , Apocalypse Now , Saving Private Ryan , most recently Dunkirk .
Technical brio, however, cannot redeem all that is callow and crass in Mendes’s movie: the dialogue is pure placeholder stuffing, the approach a clumsy collision of the Assassin’s Creed video games and Elem Klimov’s Come and See; the muck-daubed stars register as 21st-century theater kids who’ve been instructed to issue routine “Fucks” for purposes of establishing “raw” authenticity; and the lyric grace notes—a field of cherry trees chopped down in blossom, an abandoned baby being nurtured in a basement in a bombed-out cityscape—strain for a pathos that’s out of reach.
It’s etched in the face of Schofield, who evokes the hollow horror in the eyes of Florya, the shattered child in Come and See.
Join him for what he calls the scariest war film since Come and See.
Viewers concerned that they might be in for a gruelling first-person war story like Come and See or Son of Saul , two masterpieces that Mendes has cited as influences, can rest easy.
Even films that are unambiguously anti-war – such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Paths of Glory (1957), and The Thin Red Line (1998) – include scenes where the drama of battlefield peril is designed to elicit excitement in the audience.
At other points, he seems to be yearning after the strange poetry of The Thin Red Line , especially with a suspended, dreamlike scene set in an Edenic forest as a soldier sings Wayfaring Stranger .
With communication channels cut and no way of contacting those outfits, the British commanding general (Colin Firth, one of several stars cast as officers, each appearing only briefly, à la George Clooney and John Travolta in Terrence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line”) sends two lance corporals, Blake and Schofield, across the French countryside to deliver the warning and call off the attack.
The consensus great war movies and TV shows of the modern era come from wars we could see back home like World War II (“Saving Private Ryan,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “The Thin Red Line”), Korea (“M*A*S*H*”) and Vietnam (“Apocalypse Now,” “Full Metal Jacket”).
That was the fundamental difference between Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line .
The director Sam Mendes, fresh from two Bond films, has learned from A Bridge Too Far and The Thin Red Line the value of sprinkling recognisable actors among the khaki greens of a war movie.