Hollywood has long excelled at mining beauty from war. Some of the moviemaking’s most indelible images have come from dramatizations of battle, from the early Oscar winner All Quiet on the Western Front to Christopher Nolan’s 2017 blockbuster, Dunkirk. Taking any situation, such as the horrifying trench combat of the First World War, and turning it into cinema will smooth away some of the crueller realities, no matter the director’s intent. Sam Mendes’s 1917 is a particularly beautiful war film, a technical feat that turns a sombre mission into a burnished action thriller, one designed to look like it was shot in two hour-long single takes.
1917 is a bit of a brag track, a cinematic flex by people who are really damn good with a camera. The World War I film from Skyfall director is made to look like one continuous shot, a harrowing nonstop journey through war-torn France in the first modern conflict. After winning Best Drama Motion Picture at the Golden Globe Awards last weekend, it’s easy to imagine a world where it kills at the upcoming Oscars. It hits a lot of the right notes. 1917 is a solemn war movie with popular appeal, the kind of thing that makes award nominations guaranteed. But it’s also hollow, lacking the emotional heart that makes the genre more than empty spectacle.
1917 tells a focused, briskly paced story. Inspired by stories Mendes heard about his grandfather who served in the war, the film follows Schofield and Blake, two British soldiers in northern France who are tasked with delivering an urgent letter to another battalion ordering them to call off a pending attack, lest they be slaughtered in an ambush. And follow them it does. The camera becomes the third member of their party, disguising every cut to make the film appear as one unbroken sequence. Clever staging and wonderful composition help 1917 pull this feat off incredibly well, but in embracing cinematic showmanship, the film leaves little for viewers to grab on to when it comes to characters. This makes the whole endeavour feel both valiant and vain, a stunning movie experience that evaporates in your mind not long after seeing it.
1917 has been widely praised as a mind-boggling technical achievement. It certainly is, though I’m less convinced that it’s a great movie. Inspired by his grandfather’s experiences as a soldier in World War I, the writer-director Sam Mendes has made a harrowing combat picture by way of a suspenseful, beat-the-clock thriller about two British soldiers on a dangerous mission in northern France in April 1917. And he has shot the movie in what looks like one long continuous take, with no visible edits except for one dramatic cut to black midway through.
This visual gimmick – call it the one-take wonder – has a long Hollywood history. Alfred Hitchcock famously used it in his 1948 thriller “Rope,” and in recent years, advances in digital technology have made it easier for filmmakers to simulate the illusion in movies like “Birdman.” You can understand why Mendes chose the technique for “1917.” He and his co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns tell a lean, pared-down story in something close to real-time. He wants to erase the distance between you and his characters to make you feel as though you’re right there with them in the trenches and on the battlefield.
1917 has a small cast, but there are more than a few faces you’d recognize. Colin Firth makes an appearance, as does Andrew Scott of Fleabag fame, and Mark Strong. You might miss them entirely, though, because the camera never really gets close to them. It never lingers, never engages with them on a level any deeper than the bare minimum for establishing the action. Close cuts are used to foster intimacy, and if a camera never truly gets close to anyone, then we aren’t likely to either. In 1917, the horror and spectacle of war are impressive but never felt.
Schofield and Blake are stoic protagonists, and though MacKay does particularly well shouldering the burden of having the action constantly centred on him, there isn’t a lot of depth to either soldier. Better-known actors such as Firth, Andrew Scott, Mark Strong, and Benedict Cumberbatch stop by for brief cameos that each have more life. But since the mission demands that our heroes press on, those all-stars depart just as quickly, unable to keep up with the camera. Scott, in particular, makes a huge impression early on as a trench commander dripping with cynicism; his character’s backstory seems far more interesting than Schofield and Blake’s trek, but there’s no time to delve into it.
The script, by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, keeps hinting at the ultimate futility of the First World War, during which millions of men heaved themselves out of trenches and toward certain death for the sake of a few miles of territory. Though 1917 tries to communicate that nightmarish reality, its long-take trickery ends up feeling similarly pointless. 1917 is tense, captivating, meticulous, horrifying and stirring – an exceptional achievement in filmmaking. All these factors firmly put director Sam Mendes in the upper echelon of directors currently working today, if he wasn’t there already.
