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)
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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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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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.
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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.
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Visually, I really liked it a lot. The cinematography perfectly heightened the tension and brought the viewer all the natural beauty, the ugliness of war, and the fear and harshness of the time. As for the story itself, it looked promising, but I wasn't such a fan towards the end. Still, I'm satisfied, if only because I had Colin Firth there for a while, whose involvement escaped me, and whom I might not have recognized without the sound. But because I'm a sucker for his voice and English, he gave himself away right away. In fairness, my rating may be a little skewed by the joy of finally going to the cinema again after more than a quarter of a year, but the film deserves 4 stars from me.
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