Mark Reviews Movies: 1917

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 24, 2019

The foundation of co-writer/director Sam Mendes' 1917 is a technical gimmick. The film, which follows a pair of soldiers (at first, at least) as they make their way from one battlefield to another with urgent orders in hand, is set up to look like two, unbroken tracking shots. The characters here don't really matter, except that they're always moving. The plot is no more complicated than what already has been described. In terms of observations about the causes and consequences of the Great War, the film only offers that it was a significant waste of resources and human lives, although the lives lost were among the best of that generation.

The central storytelling conceit of Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns screenplay is, weirdly then, an adventure. The soldiers exist within the story to take us on a walking, running, hiding, and shooting tour of the trenches, the "no man's land," the countryside, a city, and a couple more trenches for good measure of war-torn France. They face assorted challenges and obstacles along the way.

Watching the film, one is often taken aback by the specifically horrific conditions of this particular war, in which corpses are left to rot in and around craters, while rats scurry around searching for food—and often, apparently, find it within the dead bodies. Flies buzz around the carcasses of horses, left behind after what must have been a misguided charge toward an opposing trench defended by machine guns, and the camera, always following at least one of the soldiers, moves right through the hovering swarm. The water in the giant craters left behind from artillery fire is a sickly green. It's as if the entire landscape has become infected by the pestilence of warfare.

We want to look away from these sights—to escape the constant reminders of how brutal and uncaring humanity can be to itself in the fruitless pursuit of inches of land. Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins' camerawork, though, ensures that we cannot. There's only one obvious cut in the film (Considering the scope of the journey and the logistics of certain setpieces, there are probably dozens of others, seamlessly concealed by editor Lee Smith), so we are never really granted a pause to the horror or the tension of knowing that another horror could be just ahead—over the edge of a trench, around any corner, in the skies, among the ruins of a city.

That is perhaps the most generous way to look at the filmmakers' intentions here, because they certainly aren't concerned with the characters, the politics of this particular war, or any kind of moral or psychological dilemma that might arise from the situation of the plot. The main takeaway from the film is its gimmick. The central rationale for telling this story is to tell it in this extravagant way.

We may be taken aback by the terrible sights, the sometimes sudden and usually grisly violence, and the sense of a world plunged into pure chaos, but we are primarily impressed by the staging, the trickery, and the sheer audacity of the film's form. Mendes and his team clearly want us to notice it, and they have accomplished that—if at the cost of telling a story that's as compelling as the way it has been told.

The lead characters are Lance Corporals Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), who are awakened from rest to meet with a general, played by Colin Firth (one of several recognizable cameos, which include Andrew Scott as the cynical leader of a team that has lost track of the days, Mark Strong as a kindhearted officer who warns that some of his ilk might like a fight too much, and Benedict Cumberbatch as the colonel who will decide the ultimate fate of the battalion). After a long walk through a trench, the two soldiers receive their mission: to reach another battlefield several miles away on foot. An assault is planned there for the following morning, but the German forces have set a trap for the British battalion. If the two men don't make it in time, 1,600 men, including Blake's older brother, are almost certainly lost.

That is the extent of the plot. The rest of the story follows Schofield (who's left as a puzzle until a final moment) and Blake (who's only defined by his determination to save his brother) from their trench and through no man's land (where, in addition to the aforementioned horrors, a mess of barbed wire creates a rather intimidating maze). From there, it's into a German trench (where everything—from the barracks to the rats—is bigger and a booby trap awaits anyone curious) and out to the countryside (where the two witness a dogfight in the sky—the results of which have dire consequences for the men on the ground). At that point, things change in a way that we don't quite expect, and one man is left to travel the rest of the way—across the rest of the farmland, through the rubble of a city, and, finally, to the destination.

There are, of course, action and suspense sequences galore, which happen suddenly and with little warning. The most terrifying is a chase through the ruins of a city, illuminated by the eerie glow of flares in the pre-dawn sky. The combination of the frantic movement, the inconsistent lighting, and the surrounding devastation turns the sequence into something akin to a tour of hell.

The film's formal trickery is impressive, to be sure. It also, though, puts a certain limit on what 1917 can accomplish as an act of storytelling. The film becomes less a story and more an experience—intense and notable, yes, but also shallow and indulgent.

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