Directed by:
Sam MendesCinematography:
Roger DeakinsComposer:
Thomas NewmanCast:
Dean-Charles Chapman, George MacKay, Daniel Mays, Colin Firth, Pip Carter, Josef Davies, Billy Postlethwaite, Andrew Scott, Spike Leighton, Robert Maaser (more)VOD (4)
Plots(1)
At the height of the First World War, two young British soldiers, Schofield and Blake are given a seemingly impossible mission. In a race against time, they must cross enemy territory and deliver a message that will stop a deadly attack on hundreds of soldiers - Blake’s own brother among them. (Universal Pictures US)
Videos (14)
Reviews (18)
Visually perfect. Deakins outdid himself again. Director/screenwriter/producer Mendes, who put together tales told by his grandfather and built a story around them, put his heart into 1917. The technical precision and illusion of one continuous shot make the whole movie an unbelievably intense experience that showed me that the topic of war still has something to say to the modern audience. But the movie does not fail to present a deeply human story, the most moving scene of which was the reciting of nursery rhymes to babies in a dark cellar somewhere in France. Newman’s music is strong and sometimes chilling.
()
1917 will be talked about as the war film that was shot in one take. Which it isn't, but we all know that, and I don't feel like anyone should mind. However, it would be a big mistake to just look at it as a technically perfect film where Sam Mendes and Roger Deakins fool around with the camera. The latter is, of course, amazing; 1917 looks like a computer game, with the camera managing to pan around the characters during dialogue, crawling along with them across the battlefield with cameraman looking for the craziest but still functional angles from which to capture everything. But the main star here is still Mendes as the narrator, who manages to get under the skin of both the characters and the audience in that "one shot". Initially, cold and distant, and like one of the soldiers, he treats the whole mission as just an order to be carried out, hoping to survive. Gradually, however, he begins to acknowledge the importance of the mission and very powerful and emotional scenes subtly, but eventually very intensely, surface. And for example the whole passage in the burning village or the very end are incredibly powerful moments. The film doesn't just look great. It's great throughout.
()
The cinematography was worked out to a monomaniacal degree of detail (all those trenches strewn with corpses, barbed wire and razed, burning cities), the mise-en-scene is composed masterfully and the special effects are fantastic but don’t seek to draw attention to themselves, nor are they in the audience’s face. In short, I’ve never before seen such production values in any film whose subject is World War I. And then there’s Mendes’s sheer virtuosity, captivating camera equilibristics, and (from the meeting with the young French woman) the requisite rush of emotions. I consider it a sad error in judgment on the part of the Academy that it preferred the shallow Parasite over this masterpiece.
()
I think that Sam Mendes was aiming for the Oscar here, I don’t know why there aren’t more films about the First World War, but it’s probably because most of the time the soldiers were battling boredom in the trenches rather thanfighting for territory on the ground. Sam Mendes, however, went a bit too far here, replacing filmmaking with an attempt at absolute realism. The illusion that everything is a single long shot makes the scenes look remarkably surreal. It all starts with the crash of a German plane into a dilapidated barn, continues with ruins of the town illuminated by flares and ends directly in the trenches, a few seconds before running into the turmoil ofbattle. I was bating my breath, fascinated by the fabricated scenes, and enjoyed one of the best war films made in the last few years. The trio of good old British actors (Firth, Cumberbatch, Strong) is the icing on the cake, which will draw you into the depicted events of the war and remind you that it is “only” a film.
()
From start to finish, a formally perfect spectacle where I marvel at how much work went into each shot and how many trenches had to be dug for each scene. However, the captivating visuals are where it ends. The heart-wrenching journey did not captivate me even for a moment, the narrative style forces me to reminisce about many genre predecessors, and in the end I only see the most clichéd war story, which it fundamentally is.
()
Ads