The difficulty level of Sam Mendes's World War I film 1917Movie doesn’t really make up for its hollowness
In the trenches in 1917. Photo: Universal Pictures 1917 is a war movie made to look as though it were shot in a single continuous take. Or, to be entirely precise, a single take that cuts off while its hero is unconsciousness for a few hours in the middle, which is, I suppose, the body’s answer to editing.
The main characters are just more men in uniform until an assignment transforms them into something else — messengers tasked with warning another battalion that they’re headed into a trap. Blake gets chosen for this urgent mission because his brother is a member of the imperiled unit, and the powers that be believe that will give him extra incentive to get the job done.
Mendes, who wrote the script with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, conceived of the look of the film from the start as a kind of blunt-force approach to immersion that would make the audience travel with these characters every step of the way. The single-take approach was, for him, meant to be a means of conveying immediacy and intimacy. But in practice the showy complexity of the undertaking achieves the opposite effect.
But it’s less convincing as the homage it seems intended to be to the men who took part in this conflict — one of them Mendes’s grandfather, a veteran of World War I whose stories provided the initial inspiration. “There’s a feeling about this war, that it is in danger of being forgotten,” the director told Variety. For something that strives to bring century-old hostilities back to vivid life, 1917 feels unduly concerned with boring whoever might be watching by lingering on details.
Formal ambition doesn’t have to equal distance. The obvious comparison for 1917 is Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, which was about a different war but which opted for its own high concept by tracking the evacuation of its title through three timelines. The puzzle-box nature of its construction didn’t diminish the events it was portraying or the tangible humanity of the characters navigating them.
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