1917 review
– Sam Mendes turns western front horror into a single-shot masterpiece
1917
This
phantasmagoric first world war nightmare from the British director is ambitious
and unshakeable storytelling
Peter
Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Mon 25 Nov
2019 23.00 GMTLast modified on Fri 10 Jan 2020 13.35 GMT
5 / 5
stars5 out of 5 stars.
Sam
Mendes’s 1917 is an amazingly audacious film; as exciting as a heist movie,
disturbing as a sci-fi nightmare. Working with co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns,
he has created a first world war drama of the Western Front and a terrible
journey undertaken by two boys like a ghost train ride into a day-lit house of
horror, periodically descending into night and then resurfacing into an alien
world, bright with menace.
And it’s
filmed in one extraordinary single take by cinematographer Roger Deakins, a
continuous fluid travelling shot (with digital edits sneaked in, evidently at
those moments where we lose sight of them, or in moments of darkness or
explosion – but where exactly, I mostly couldn’t tell) .
Mendes
shows us what these soldiers see and sometimes wheels the camera around so we
can see them seeing it: a gruelling odyssey whose trench scenes are perhaps
intended to recall Kubrick’s Paths of Glory – and later our stricken hero
enunciates a panicky line in the midst of his terrified comrades that reminded
me of something similar from Apocalypse Now: “Where’s your commanding officer?”
(The single-take horror also reminded me of the TV director in that film, frantically
telling the numbed grunts not to look at the camera. I wonder if this might
have inspired Mendes?)
The
situation is that Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay)
are lance corporals – and messengers. These men, like the rest of their
company, have been lulled into a false sense of security by what appears to
have been a German retreat, and an imminent “big push” from the Allied forces
to clinch victory.
But the
gruff General (Colin Firth) tells them that aerial photo reconnaissance has
disclosed that so far from having retreated, the Germans have simply withdrawn
to a position where they are better defended, luring their enemy onward into a
trap. Now another British division is about to advance into certain slaughter.
Field telephone communication having been cut off, the only way to tell them to
call off their attack is via messenger. And so these two shivering soldiers
have to make their way across no man’s land, across the abandoned German lines,
through (supposedly) vacated German territory and as far as the advancing
Allied troops.
Blake and
Schofield travel through a postapocalyptic landscape, a bad dream of broken
tree stumps, mud lakes left by shell craters, dead bodies, rats. And then when
they stumble into the German trenches, they discover how much better built they
are, and how much better quipped, trained and led the Germans are – and how
much they are more likely to win.
But they
must carry on, and Mendes and Deakins convey, along with these men’s sense of
futility and fear, the strange nausea and exhilaration that Blake and Schofield
feel, the nihilist elation that comes with the moment-by-moment experience of
survival, fiercely holding on to life with every eardrum-splitting sniper shot.
But ahead of them lies chaos and loss.
The most
extraordinary sequence comes when a German airman crash lands almost on top of
Blake and Schofield and there is a moment of simple human compassion when the
German staggers out of his blazing craft, dying and begging for water.
Schofield runs to get him some from a rusty pump and behind his back – behind
the audience’s backs – the story’s most fateful event occurs, off camera. It’s
a staggeringly bold bit of storytelling, and it comes off.
The
single-take technique fascinatingly creates a kind of theatrical effect: the
spectacle of two people moving through an unbroken space. It is immersive, yes,
but that overused word does not quite convey the paradoxical alienation that is
being created: the distance, the pure strangeness. The two men’s experiences
are bizarre and shocking, but a poignant and then tragic sympathy is finally
dredged up from the mud of their ordeal.
1917 is
Mendes’s most purely ambitious and passionate picture since his misunderstood
and underappreciated Jarhead of 2005. It’s bold, thrilling film-making.
• 1917 is
released in the US on 25 December, in Australia on 7 January 2020 and in the UK
on 10 January 2020.
‘1917’
Review: Paths of Technical Glory
Sam Mendes
directs this visually extravagant drama about young British soldiers on a
perilous mission in World War I.
By Manohla
Dargis
Published
Dec. 24, 2019
Updated
Dec. 27, 2019
On June 28,
1914, a young Serbian nationalist assassinated the presumptive heir to the
Austro-Hungarian throne, thus starting World War I. That, at any rate, is the
familiar way that the origins for this war have been shaped into a story, even
if historians agree the genesis of the conflict is far more complicated. None
of those complications and next to no history, though, have made it into
“1917,” a carefully organized and sanitized war picture from Sam Mendes that
turns one of the most catastrophic episodes in modern times into an exercise in
preening showmanship.
The story
is simple. It opens on April 6, 1917, with Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles
Chapman) and Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay), British soldiers
stationed in France, receiving new orders. They are to deliver a message to
troops at the front line who are readying an assault on the Germans, who have
retreated. (Coincidentally or not, April 6 is the date that the United States
formally entered the war.) The British command, however, believes that the
German withdrawal is a trap, an operational Trojan horse. The two messengers
need to carry the dispatch ordering the waiting British troops to stand down,
thereby saving countless lives.
It’s the
usual action-movie setup — a mission, extraordinary odds, ready-made heroes —
but with trenches, barbed wire and a largely faceless threat. Blake jumps on
the assignment because his brother is among the troops preparing the assault.
Schofield takes orders more reluctantly, having already survived the Battle of
the Somme, with its million-plus casualties. The modest difference in attitude
between the messengers will vanish, presumably because any real criticism —
including any skepticism about this or any war — might impede the movie’s
embrace of heroic individualism for the greater good, which here largely
translates as vague national struggle and sacrifice.
What
complicates the movie is that it has been created to look like it was made with
a single continuous shot. In service of this illusion, the editing has been
obscured, though there are instances — an abrupt transition to black, an
eruption of thick dust — where the seams almost show. Throughout, the camera
remains fluid, its point of view unfixed. At times, it shows you what Blake and
Schofield see, though it sometimes moves like another character. Like a silent
yet aggressively restless unit member, it rushes before or alongside or behind
the messengers as they snake through the mazy trenches and cross into No Man’s
Land, the nightmarish expanse between the fronts.
The idea
behind the camerawork seems to be to bring viewers close to the action, so you
can share what Blake and Schofield endure each step of the way. Mostly, though,
the illusion of seamlessness draws attention away from the messengers, who are
only lightly sketched in, and toward Roger Deakins’s cinematography and, by
extension, Mendes’s filmmaking. Whether the camera is figuratively breathing
down Blake’s and Schofield’s necks or pulling back to show them creeping inside
a water-filled crater as big as a swimming pool, you are always keenly aware of
the technical hurdles involved in getting the characters from here to there,
from this trench to that crater.
In another
movie, such demonstrative self-reflexivity might have been deployed to
productive effect; here, it registers as grandstanding. It’s too bad and it’s
frustrating, because the two leads make appealing company: The round-faced
Chapman brings loose, affable charm to his role, while MacKay, a talented actor
who’s all sharp angles, primarily delivers reactive intensity. This lack of
nuance can be blamed on Mendes, who throughout seems far more interested in the
movie’s machinery than in the human costs of war or the attendant subjects —
sacrifice, patriotism and so on — that puff into view like little wisps of
engine steam.
The absence
of history ensures that “1917” remains a palatable war simulation, the kind in
which every button on every uniform has been diligently recreated, and no
wound, no blown-off limb, is ghastly enough to truly horrify the audience.
Here, everything looks authentic but manicured, ordered, sane, sterile. Save
for a quick appearance by Andrew Scott, as an officer whose overly bright eyes
and jaundiced affect suggest he’s been too long in the trenches, nothing
gestures at madness. Worse, the longer this amazing race continues, the more it
resembles an obstacle course by way of an Indiana Jones-style adventure,
complete with a showstopping plane crash and battlefield sprint.
Mendes, who
wrote the script with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, has included a note of dedication
to his grandfather, Alfred H. Mendes, who served in World War I. It’s the most
personal moment in a movie that, beyond its technical virtues, is intriguing
only because of Britain’s current moment. Certainly, the country’s acrimonious
withdrawal from the European Union makes a notable contrast with the onscreen
camaraderie. And while the budget probably explains why most of the superior
officers who pop in briefly are played by name actors — Colin Firth, Mark
Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch — their casting also adds distinctly royal
filigree to the ostensibly democratic mix.
1917
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