I suppose it’s inevitable that director Sam Mendes‘ war epic 1917 is mostly only critiqued or praised by the framing device he employs in telling the story. The film takes place on a single day and is presented as one continuous shot, which as a storytelling trick presents a host of entertaining challenges, though many critics found fault in the style, thinking it took away from the narrative experience or was used as a manipulation gimmick rather than a chance to draw us closer into the character’s plight. I find that kind of approach to criticism rather blunt and feel if you’re going to blame the director for trying something creative then you can’t let any filmmaker try any cinematic manipulations, such as black & white or slow motion or animation because, duh, it’s all manipulation to try and get the audience to feel something about what they are watching.
Anyway, I’m not here to say 1917 is or isn’t great, as these are things I hope you decide for yourself. Having rewatched it recently, I found myself more affected by the film’s close and urgent themes and while the movie’s style helps a lot in maintaining that, there are plenty of things happening on screen that kept me searching the corners for more. The film takes place during World War 1 on the French front where armies are dug into the ground along vast fields of the countryside. We begin with British forces and two young soldiers, William Schofield (George MacKay) and Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), who are awoken to take on a new mission, given by the in-company General Erinmore (Colin Firth). As phone lines and communications have been severed, the boys are tasked with delivering a message across the front several miles away to another British regiment and change their orders so they do not carry on with an assault as new intel suggests they are being lured into a death trap. Needless to say, it’s a harrowing journey. Here’s 5 reasons why it’s time you watch.
The Trenches
As is well known at the time for large-scale long-term battles and defense, trench warfare was the way of the fight during the first world war. Mendes constructed what seems like endless snaking tributaries of them for the film on both sides of the conflict, weaving Schofield and Blake through some of the most jarring and haunting images of war ever made, more so because there is actually no fighting within them, only the waiting for, the anticipation of, and the aftermath of battle. As Schofield and Blake make their way through the crowded British ranks, these narrow, muddied, burned out, and foul looking holes in the ground are alive with activity and character, the men within each seen only for glimpses but as a chain tell a profoundly enduring tale of pain, suffering, hope, and unity. The details that surface every piece of board, sandbag, rock, and especially the faces of these soldiers stick with you long after we leave them behind. I paused the film numerous times and replayed whole sections at a time to admire the incredible sense of immersion every frame offers while sunken into the bowels of this horror. Notice how they change the closer to the front they get. This is amazing set design.
No Man’s Land
Once Schofield and Blake go over the top and must make their way to the opposing trenches, which they are told aerial recon claims are abandoned, they must cross a swatch of land that is in no uncertain terms, a hellscape. It is littered with burned barbed wire, dead and decaying horses and scattered with the corpses of men from both fronts who perished in volleys of bullets and bombs. Again, while the camera follow and lead Schofield and Blake, we are given sight to the cost of war as the blood soaked mud around them is caked in rotted flesh, rats, and what feels like an unforgiving weight of extreme peril. It’s breathtaking and weirdly beautiful how unearthly it looks, the land scorched by fire yet pocked by pools of soiled and corrupted water. This is a brief section of the film but it has lasting resonance for the tension it establishes, though more so, for the stark reality that lays right in front of men awaiting their time to enter.
The French Girl
One may wonder why a film like this needs a break from the action to spend a few minutes with a young woman, as it is a jarring slip away from the immediacy that grips the story, but there is great reason to allow its interruption. Schofield is on the run in the blown out French village of Écoust-Saint-Mein. Literally, he is being chased. In the cover of darkness, he manages to dip into the basement of a nearly destroyed building and elude death, only to find that he is in the makeshift dwelling of a young woman (Claire Duburcq) in hiding. She is frightened and desperate, tending to an infant that is not hers. She initially tries to tell him that there is nothing here for him, perhaps fearful of what he may do to her, but Schofield assures her she is safe and with broken French and English, they work to communicate. She tends to his wounds and shows him the baby, and in an aching moment of humanity, pleads with him to stay with her when he tells her he must go. I love how this play out, the film sort of becoming a bit of an odyssey where things feel real but are perhaps allegorical, the sense that the film needs a moment to remind us why we fight, why the love of a woman matters, and why the future of all children is cause enough to leave one behind.
The Dogfight
While Schofield and Blake work their way forward, we see hints of aerial fighting in the backdrop, the boys at one time taking a second to figure out which side the biplanes are fighting on. However, a bit later, as the the two soldiers enter an abandoned farm, the fight in the sky draws nearer as two British pilots battle a lone German. There is a short dogfight with these planes looping and dipping about, gunfire echoing over the pasture while Schofield and Blake look on, again a sense of how small and intimate a war can be washing over the screen until, in a shocking and suddenly harrowing moment, that war in the sky comes straight at the boys. I will not say what happens, but this entire sequence from when the planes first break the horizon to the impact they have on the story strikes is pure movie madness in all its glorious wonder. How any critic can say this movie’s unbroken shot is a manipulation gimmick while watching this moment simply doesn’t get it.
The Lorrie
At one point, Schofield finds himself alone in the back of a British Army lorrie along with a group of other soldiers in a different regiment. They are giving him a ride though they don’t know who he is or really why their commanding officer (Mark Strong) has put him there. They are soldiers of a separate fight, comrades in a mission far removed from Schofield, frustrated by their travels on blocked and ruined roads. They know nothing of the meaning behind Schofield’s drive or motivation, only the smallness of their covered transport and the brief respite together they have between where they were and where they are going. Schofield’s addition means little to them and he is initially ignored because so. However, the camera stays on Schofield as the men around him laugh and talk nonsense, Schofield almost crippled by an unfathomable degree of pressure and pain he does not let show on his face, left only to our own thoughts as we watch him stare off into the distance with hollow eyes. It’s devastating.