#635: 1917
It’s their war. We’re just along for the ride
Initial release: December 25, 2019
Director: Sam Mendes
For whatever reason, World War I just has not gotten the kind of coverage in film the way its sequel did. For every All Quiet on the Western Front there have been a dozen Casablancas, a score of Great Escapes, and untold Saving Private Ryans. Maybe it’s because of how bleak the theme is — a pointless, hopeless war, four and a half years of meaningless death and destruction for the most esoteric of geopolitical reasons. Easier to make World War II movies, easier to make movies about good versus evil, about the fight against fascism. Oh sure, there were a couple movies here and there over the decades — a surprising lot of the more recent ones are horror themed, as if Verdun or Isonzo weren’t a vision of Hell on Earth already; but it took the 100th anniversary of the war for Hollywood and its European counterparts to really come back around to the idea of talking about it in earnest. We can probably thank Sam Mendes’ 1917 for starting that conversation.
It’s not hard to compare 1917 to Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk; while both are about different wars, both are profoundly artful, packed with meaning and a showcase for technique. Dunkirk used a slim, smart script and a carefully disordered chronology, beautifully blending the score with the action — it’s as much music video for a grim ambient soundtrack as it is a war movie. And through the use of fakery, drones and just plain cinematographic genius, 1917 uses the illusion of an almost entirely unbroken long take to tell its story.
I suppose we should talk about the way certain video games — I’m thinking primarily of The Last of Us, though there’s tons of other examples — also feel like interactive cinematic long takes, especially if the camera remains mostly behind the player character. 1917 with its smooth tracking shots (achieved through clever use of drones) certainly feels almost like a cinematic video game; when I was watching it I actually thought a lot of the game Inside. 1917 has a lot of the same vibe, the way the main characters are always on screen. After Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), one of the two characters, dies — tragically, cruelly, unfairly — we’re left with his reluctant buddy Schofield (George MacKay), and while Schofield’s got the lion’s share of the focus in the first 45 minutes of the film, it becomes truly his story when he continues the mission to reach the front with orders to stop an attack before 1600 men charge into a trap.
I have to give Mendes credit — it takes a lot of guts to make a movie like this. Audiences have certain expectations with movies, war movies especially so; but like Dunkirk, this is less about script and more about immaculate timing and cinematography. The first forty-five minutes of the film are almost a buddy movie, grim as it is — Blake tells funny stories, Schofield resents being picked for a mission before Blake even knew what it was, they argue, they talk about cherry trees, they look for food. But then, because this is a war movie, Schofield is alone. (MacKay absolutely deserves recognition for his performance in this film, too.) There is to be no solace in his fellow Tommies, no camaraderie with the Germans, no romance with the frightened French girl he discovers hiding in a cellar. We are his only companions, separated by a camera; we revel in his successes, we gasp at his tribulations. We cheer him on as surely as we would if we were holding a controller in our hands. After everything he’s been through, he deserves victory. We deserve victory.
1917 is unlike any other war movie I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot! While it certainly won’t pass the Truffaut test — despite the horrors that Schofield and Blake are put through, this is still a product intended to thrill — it is nonetheless a unique film, one of the purest films ever made — no mere stage play on camera this, but a journey, a true example of how film can bring something to life, put us right there. Even if ‘there’ isn’t anywhere you’d want to be, in the real world.
