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)
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Reviews (19)
Sam Mendes delivers a nerve-wracking wartime experience that will annoy action fans, as there are no big battles, and I take two points off for that as well, but otherwise it’s a flawless and excellent work in every way, and a lot of the credit goes to Roger Deakins, because the cinematographer is simply a genius. The film is shot in one take and so authentically that you feel like you are among the soldiers and experiencing the horrors of war with them. 1917 is basically a war road movie drama where you travel from A to B and even though nothing much actually happens, it has a gripping atmosphere, believable actors, awesome music and about three suspenseful, climactic scenes where I, a horror fan, wish Sam Mendes would make a horror movie next time. The intense finale ends up being highly emotional and had just about everyone with a heart in the theater rubbing their nose, so have tissues at hand. A nice experience, a must see at IMAX, and if Mendes had pushed the envelope a bt more and served up a proper war cry, this would be a clear contender for film of the year.
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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.
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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.
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1917 is a gut-punching cinematographic exhibition with stunning sets, a pulsating rhythm and cinema-loving details (I was most pleased by Mark Strong’s entrance into the scene). All of that is true of the first half. In the second half, less comprehensible things start to happen and the whole thing becomes a forced march towards the story’s conclusion. Nothing else in the plot is surprising, which only confirms the excessive simplicity and transparency of the subject, relying on clichéd symbols (sacrifice for a higher purpose, milk – unboiled?? – given to a child). It is far from the philosophical statement that it pretends to be. But the visuals are truly outstanding, and it was pleasing to see Thomas Newman step out of his comfort zone. It would be wrong to see 1917 anywhere other than at the cinema. Just like Gravity the other day.
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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.
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