Review by Logan Kenny
1917’s entire filmmaking ideology is summed up in one sequence. It is about a third of the way through the film, if not a little later. The two protagonists have made their way through an elaborate Indiana Jones-style trap, experiencing the dark realities of their hellish environment as they leap and grunt through the physical environment. The world comes collapsing down upon them: a plane has crashed, and its pilot has fatally wounded one of the two boys before being killed by the other. For minutes, the camera looks upon these young boys, no older than 25, as both come to the realisation that this is the end. Panic sets in from the one bleeding to death, whereas his friend is trying to stay calm and look after him without knowing the right things to say. After a couple of moments, the injured boy collapses dead in his arms, nothing but empty weight now. A lifetime of experiences and memories all faded to dust, all for nothing. The camera lingers on George MacKay’s shocked, numb expression of grief for a little while, properly signifying the grandiosity of this loss. And then, because of the confines of Sam Mendes’ production, the camera begins to move. It hovers around this young man’s body, moving closer to his corpse, lingering upon the blood that soaked his photographs. The camera loses its sense of distance and respect in death, becoming a naked observer, lingering cruelly on the most intimate and heartbreaking moment a human being can ever experience. There is no passivity here. Instead of letting the moment breathe and showing respect for a fallen friend, the camera must move along its arcade shooter path. Whether its subjects gain any form of respect from this format is irrelevant.
1917 wants you to know that it’s important. It wants you to know that its portrayal of war is something major. It glams itself up with famous British actors from across mediums, who are all adorned with trophies and adoration. It has the pretenses and cultural conversation of a work that is truly significant: a movie about War that captures the visceral experience of it. More importantly than anything else, 1917 is being heralded as an unparalleled technical achievement, using photography and digital editing techniques to blend together multiple long takes into the illusion of a two hour single take. The amount of work that it must have taken to do this is incredible! The level of technical prowess that’s shown by the cinematographer Roger Deakins for being able to plan and execute this filmmaking approach is unprecedented in a film of this size. Sure, there have been real one take films like Russian Ark, and similar simulated ones such as Rope and Birdman beforehand, but this is bigger! There are more elements in play, more dramatic elements of war and suffering that Sam Mendes has to balance with his filmmaking – more things that could go dramatically wrong. This work, 1917, is supposed to be important. It has to be, to justify its own existence. But honestly, who gives a shit?
Does it matter that something is a technical achievement when it shows such apathy for the lives it depicts? Does it matter that something is a technical achievement when it has no weight or substance beyond the supposed impressiveness of its aesthetic? To me, there’s no merit in a film that exists entirely based off of surface-level accomplishment, especially when that accomplishment is actively undermining the film’s potential and subject matter. The one-shot gimmick actively detracts from the emotion on display.
The issue with the single shot continues in multiple instances. The consistent commitment to the one-take format in a narrative based around huge treks across European landscapes means that the geography is nakedly incoherent, which takes away from the supposed immersion that Mendes’s rigid direction is intending to create with the one shot. For example, right after losing his friend, MacKay’s character encounters three soldiers around the area who are on his side and who take him with them on their journey. Reflecting on the film’s interest in traversing, it would make sense that these men take some time with him to exchange dialogue as we follow their movement to wherever they’re going, but Mendes instead decides to hide an obvious transition between cuts so that they can magically appear next to a fleet of trucks and soldiers. The shot is framed as the three men stepping into a house at the back of the frame and exiting the other side of it to see the rest of the squadron. However, due to the geographical framing, there’s no logical way for these trucks to be present in the frame beforehand, or in this location when a plane crashed approximately a two-minute walk away from them. While plot-holes are not an interesting mode of criticism to me personally, it’s a testament to Mendes’s lack of imagination as a writer and his ineptitude at establishing a cohesive environment that he hasn’t worked within the confines of his shot to make the most effective narrative development. He has limited himself by conceiving of a script that fundamentally goes against the formal aims he’s going for.
This problem continues in a purely aesthetic sense. Deakins creates beautiful isolated images (for example: the sunrise in the water, with lightly coloured petals falling into the beautiful blue waves) that are mutated by Mendes’s forceful refusal to allow moments to breathe in the slightest. This is not helped by every single transition being wonky. Lee Smith’s editing was fundamentally jarring in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk as well, building the entire film around a temporal process that was out of sync while having terrible moment-to-moment cuts. His work here is more minimal but arguably worse, the one job of achieving a seamless transition between simultaneous long takes is largely unsuccessful. The most obvious cut is when the camera literally sinks into the water and does multiple dramatic movements to try and erase the seam between takes. This is made worse by the legitimate cut to black halfway through the movie, which absolutely does not work and undermines the entire filmmaking experiment! Mendes has limited the potential of his production based around a single idea, but doesn’t even have the commitment to stick to it for 120 minutes.
The idea of imprinting aesthetic experiences onto real life experiences that killed millions of people is hard to reconcile at the best of times. While it’s possible for war to be conveyed with sufficient horror or even a as a form of sadistic pleasure (depending on the genre), 1917 feels more interested in video game aesthetics and the 4DX experience. There are brief moments of contemplation that are always be drowned out by an action sequence, a loud music cue, the camera lingering on corpses or on pained expression. This is cinema of apathy. If the aim is to make it feel like a detached video game where lives are traded with clinical pointlessness in order to make a formal statement on the suffering of war, that would at least be a cohesive idea – even if it would likely have gone very wrong. Mendes not only has no convictions, but also no real insight or conveyed compassion. He is desperately strains to imbue his characters with emotions and meaning, but lacks the wherewithal to prioritise their struggles over his desired template of rigid aestheticization. It’s also really funny how over dramatically he directs moments of conflict: one German dude runs through fire moving like Brock Lesnar at George McKay, yet the camera is framed like Deakins is filming Crash Bandicoot, with the requisite jumps and obstacle avoidances that come with that territory.
There are brief gestures at the politics of war – the pointlessness of these battles and miscommunication of the British forces – but 1917 has no interest in examining the politics of World War 1 at all. While the film is constantly stretching for “immersion” with its aesthetic choices, it remains rooted in the same form of ideological and national bias that a British soldier would have had at the time, despite the German soldiers being victims of pointless political cruelty as well. 1917 is the latest film to seemingly conflate the actions of Germany in World War 1 with their soldiers’ ideological beliefs in World War 2, which reinforces British propaganda used to recruit millions of people. There is no glory found from defeating the Germans, no moral superiority from killing their troops of scared young boys brainwashed into fighting for their nation, and no ostensible reason to promote British nationalist thought as justifiable by continuing the eternal cycle of boys dying for a bloodstained flag. Every German in this film is a threat either vaguely or directly; there is not a chance for shared humanity to be found, just evil. There is no comment made about the way war brainwashes people, no presence in its hollow template for nuance around national bias.
Released at a time when the country is haunted by the spectre of Brexit and ideological British conservatism is running rampant throughout the nation, what purpose does 1917 serve? What is the impact of a film with all these stars, that has no other thematic ideas other than “war, it’s bad” in a climate so inextricably linked to nationalist propaganda’s poisoning of the British public? A movie about World War 1 should bring life to the soldiers that were murdered for no reason, it should explore the fractured nature of politics in causing this atrocity for dozens of countries and millions of families, or at the very least, it should at least fucking succeed at being immersive! Mendes has no aim, he has no political foundations other than the idea he should represent “the stories of war” without getting into what they mean, why they mean it, and why these people deserve to be remembered. It is a hollow husk, a decrepit abyss of hamfisted bullshit, that adds no value asides from a bunch of technical feats that don’t even make the movie any better. This is the type of film that makes money off of the legacies of the long-gone, and the kind of film that is designed to be forgotten seconds after it sweeps yet another awards ceremony. It might not be the worst film nominated for the big gold trophy (Jojo Rabbit), but it is staggeringly obtuse and miserably pointless – a film with no fury, no ideas, no heart, and no soul.
There is one moment that works. Towards the end, our protagonist reaches his destination and finds the man he was supposed to find, the brother of his fallen comrade. He explains to the man (played by Richard Madden) that he’s been sent by another regiment and that he knew his brother. Madden’s face lights up with delight as MacKay struggles to maintain eye contact, before he asks where his brother is. Without having to hear an answer, he realises that he’s lost his little brother in this pointless war. His face breaks, his eyes stare into MacKay’s with visceral unexplainable sadness as you watch an entire man’s world collapse in five seconds. It is a beautiful moment – a flawless performance from Madden, who has been stuck in several films I’ve intensely disliked as of late but has managed to impress in spite of them. Here, he’s never been better and almost had me welling up myself despite my active contempt for the majority of the film. Then, they shake hands, and they walk away from each other. Instead of cutting, the task fulfilled, the photography challenge over, the camera still follows MacKay, shaking behind him as his tired body shifts in motion. The camera positions itself in the perfect laborious angles around him as he sits down, lingering clearly on his broken body and sad eyes as he stares at a photograph and the bright sunlight. For a single moment, he gets peace, the climax of the film that’s supposed to be so overwhelmingly affecting, and it means nothing. There is nothing there but a man sitting against a tree. To me, that’s Sam Mendes’s entire career: the aesthetic of profound significance but nothing that makes it matter.