Review: 1917

1917 (15)

UK/USA 2019  119 mins  Dir: Sam Mendes  Cast: George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman, Mark Strong, Andrew Scott, Richard Madden, Claire Duburcq, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch

As with its WWII counterpart, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, Sam Mendes’s Great War flick has attracted criticism for not taking a different approach, which seems rather unfair. If you’re looking for political context, psychological depth and repeated cutaways to generals explaining strategy to one another in smoke-filled war rooms, this ain’t the ‘war is hell’ drama for you. If, on the other hand, you’d prefer to be immersed in a tense and visceral mission movie, with the great Roger Deakins’ camera clinging closely to its protagonists as they race against time and seemingly impossible odds, you will not be disappointed. It isn’t perfect: the single-shot, real-time conceit with the camera following our heroes into no man’s land occasionally gives the feel of watching someone else play a computer game – which, with apologies to esports enthusiasts, must surely be the most boring and pointless pursuit known to humanity.

The set-up is simplicity itself, based as it is on a family story told to Mendes by his grandfather. Two fresh-faced young lance corporals stationed in northern France, Schofield (MacKay) and Blake (Chapman), find themselves volunteered for a life-or-death mission. The dastardly Boche have set a trap which could claim the lives of two entire battalions. Our heroes’ task is to carry a message from General Erinmore (Firth) to Colonel Mackenzie (Cumberbatch) instructing him to call off an attack that will result in a massacre of 1600 men. Just to raise the stakes a little higher: if the duo fail in their mission, one of the casualties is likely to be Blake’s brother.

It’s an incident-packed journey that initially requires negotiating a desolate muddy battlefield filled with huge bomb craters, rotting dead horses and piles of human corpses. Then there are the booby-trapped German trenches, which are teeming with rats despite being conspicuously better maintained than the British ones. All the while, Deakins’ camera is in constant restless motion as it swoops, tracks and circles.

Wisely, Mendes limits familiar faces to the peripheral figures of the toff brass, permitting talented MacKay and Chapman to establish and differentiate their characters. Blake is the bantering jolly chappie, while Schofield is quieter, scarred by his (undisclosed) experiences on the Somme and, tellingly, declines to wear his medal. The absence of grandstanding and background detail works in the film’s favour by immersing us in the young soldiers immediate experiences – though there are hints of the wider context if you choose to look for them, such as the cannon fodder’s open mockery of the officers.

We’ve been here before, of course, with the likes of Saving Private Ryan and Kubrick’s Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket, which took a similar approach to the depiction of warfare at close quarters. Alas, Mendes’s film gets seriously computer-gamey when it reaches the fiery hell of the burned-out village of Écoust-Saint-Mein, where enemy soldiers lurk around every corner. And while there are a couple of authenticity issues – Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old showed us that the WWI troops were considerably more gnarly, especially in the gnasher department, than those depicted here – 1917 is a powerful, gripping and skilfully constructed addition to this over-stuffed genre. One word of advice: Mendes doesn’t permit us to see anything that isn’t experienced directly by the soldiers themselves, which means that many surprises are sprung. To get the most from the film, you should do likewise and don’t let anyone tell you what happens.