BLITZ (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Blitz, Apple Original Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 21, 2024

The structure of Blitz, writer/director Steve McQueen's melodramatic account of the German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom during World War II, is strange. The movie focuses on two characters, a mother and her son, who are separated near the beginning of the story. McQueen's screenplay cuts back and forth between their experiences, one filled with harrowing adventures and the other rather sedate for a while, and also jumps backwards, as well as forwards, in time to offer some minimal context about the characters, as well as hinting at their fate.

There's not much to them, of course, because Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and her young son George (Elliott Heffernan) aren't really people here. That makes sense to some degree, since their lives under the constant threat and terror of bombings are entirely defined by survival and fear. When McQueen portrays that reality within sequences of mass destruction and claustrophobic dread, the movie possesses a certain power.

The scale of devastation here is alternately expansive, as the young boy runs through the chaos of people fleeing from great fires and firefighters running toward them in one scene, and intimate, as the lonely Rita offers and takes comfort by consoling a little girl whose mother has been killed in the attacks. The smaller or more generalized details of life under the Blitz have more of an impact than the story itself, which keeps adding obstacle after obstacle in front of Geroge, keeps Rita in the wings until the third act, and keeps ruining its own momentum by constantly drifting to and fro in time and focus.

Before the story proper begins, McQueen offers a moment of unexpected confusion and disorder, as a stray firehose knocks one man unconscious and a team of firefighters struggling to control it as an entire block of buildings burn. There is no sense of control in this place and at this time, and the rest of the movie could be seen as a group of characters trying to wrestle order out of or, in one particular subplot, exploiting chaos.

After the opening (Its place in the movie's timeline is hinted at by way of a clock tower that stands in this London neighborhood), we quickly meet Rita, and George, whose lives seem perfectly ordinary and calm, with Rita's father Gerald (Paul Weller) softly playing the piano downstairs as her son sleeps soundly in bed. Only Rita's eyes, watching George in a state of alertness, suggest what's to come, and sure enough, the family rushes out of their home at the sound of air raid siren.

After taking shelter in a local subway station, Gerald tells his daughter it's time to send the boy to the relative safety of the countryside, as part of an evacuation program transporting millions of mostly women and children out of the cities. She agrees, but an upset George tells his mother he hates her before boarding the train. Feeling guilty and homesick on the train, George jumps off it and starts a long hike home.

Most of this, then, is about George's journey, as he meets new friends, allies, and some foes along the way. The tale may have a sense of adventure to it, as the kid and a trio of brothers stowing away on a train climb to the roof of the car to experience the view, and hints of optimism, especially when George meets Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), a kindly African immigrant currently serving as an air raid warden.

However, it's ultimately bleak by the end of every turn, with kids' fun coming to an abrupt, tragic end at a train station and Ife's compassion leading to what feels like an inevitable end amidst the inhumanity of war. One stage of George's trek has him tied up with a local gang of thieves, led by Stephen Graham's temperamental Albert, and that Dickensian setup leads to one of the movie's more horrific scenes, as the group scavenges jewelry from the dead bodies of a night club that was hit by a bomb. They're preserved and mostly unscathed, appearing as if they're simply sleeping after a long night of partying.

As for Rita, she spends most of this story in a state of ignorance about George absconding from the train, leaving her to continue work at a munitions factory, volunteer with a group helping those displaced by the bombings, and, apparently, recall what happened to the boy's father for our clarification. Ronan may bring a lot of pain and mourning to a hollow and, for most of the plot, inert role, but Rita never quite feels like a piece of this story until she finally learns that her son is missing, sending the two unknowingly toward each other, as the occasional image of a single bomb falling from the sky perhaps portends some final tragedy.

Rita's uncertain place in this story gets the core of its issue. The movie always remains about what happens, instead of to whom it happens. Blitz certainly gives one a sense of the continual anxiety about the bombings and the sheer panic of living through them (A late sequence in a subway, as people scurry around and trample over one another to escape what has been unleashed by the destruction, is genuinely harrowing). The human tale at the heart of it all, though, is too thinly devised to be effective.

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