Courtesy of Universal Studios
1917 (2020)
War is never pleasant, but war was seldom bloodier than the conflict that dragged on across both ends of Europe from 1914 to 1918. World War I was a stubborn struggle of national egotism with morally blind leaders playing chess with millions of lives. The trench warfare on the Western Front was especially appalling. Both the Allies and the Germans were willing to lose tens of thousands of men to gain 10 yards of mud.
Writer-director Sam Mendes (Skyfall) was inspired to make the Golden Globe-winning 1917 by the war stories told by his grandfather. In 1917, two British soldiers, Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), are dispatched on a dangerous mission. Their task is to deliver an order to a frontline regiment poised to attack the ostensibly retreating Germans. However, aerial reconnaissance reveals that the Germans have set a trap. The order: Cancel the attack! The clock is ticking, and zero hour is only a day away.
During World War I, radios were rare and telephone lines were easily cut. Runners really did deliver orders by hand to forward positions, but few messengers were as hard pressed as Schofield and Blake. They embark on an odyssey across No Man’s Land, trying to reach their destination before it’s too late and more lives are squandered.
1917 contains some of the most graphically realistic depictions of the Western Front ever committed to a feature film. Part of the audience’s immersion results from Mendes’ decision to film 1917 as if in in one long, continuous shot. With the edits between scenes invisible, 1917 appears to unfold in real time. Schofield and Blake advance toward the camera in the opening scene, passing through their encampment and stepping down into trenches reinforced by timber and sandbags. Schofield and Blake turn at an intersection in the network of trenches and the camera follows into a dark dugout where the general hands them their orders. The camera races ahead and then moves alongside as they carry out his instructions, scrambling over the high top of a trench and into the nightmare of No Man’s Land.
The apocalyptic landscape is exceptionally well detailed. Flies swarm over horses with twisted Guernica mouths, dead men are impaled on barbed wire, fat rats scamper through an abandoned enemy dugout, and lurid fires burn at night. Embedded in the hardened dirt walls of the shell craters are the faces of the dead, buried alive. Sounds are acutely handled—the slosh of boots on slippery mud surfaces and the dull clunk of heavy rifles and kits at close quarters.
Eventually, the realism is dampened by too many adventures in No Man’s Land. Halfway through, 1917 starts to resemble a video game whose avatars must find their way out of a labyrinth where a new danger lurks at every turn.
Unlike, say, the guys in Saving Private Ryan, Schofield and Blake don’t have time for sentimental soliloquies. And yet, as the odyssey continues, just enough of their character and back story emerges. Visually, they look like figures from a century-old motion picture shot during the war. The cynicism, anger, determination and camaraderie of frontline soldiers is caught in many small scenes,
It’s a testimony to Mendes’ reputation that Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch agreed to play cameo parts as British officers.
