Movie Review: 1917

This is a very good if not quite great film.  It is well made in all the usual technical aspects: acting, costumes, sets, action, effects, etc.  The story's pretty good too.  In a nutshell, two corporals are picked to carry a message from a General to a Colonel in order to call off a British attack before it rushes into the teeth of a German trap.  To ensure motivation, one of the corporals has a brother in the attacking unit.  The route is through a recently German-held area, which is a nightmare-scape of ruined lands, shattered bodies, and brutal pitfalls.  This is a natural set-up for all kinds of action as well as cause for reflection.  Things are frequently not as they seem, and in this upside-down world, the outcomes sometimes do not match the obvious intent.  A simple act of human decency is repaid with butchery; a cow munches peacefully on the one patch of grass seemingly left in the entire shelled-out county; an ominously left-behind bucket later becomes a lifesaver – and that's just from one scene.  More of this sort of thing abounds throughout the film.

The two downsides to all this are that the storyline feels somehow too thin, and that the action sometimes devolves into almost video game-like sequences of improbable events.  Also in a video game-like way, the movie steps through well-delineated action sets: now we're in the trench level, next we go to the no-man's-land level, now we're in the abandoned German trench level, etc.

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't comment on the one-continuous-take camera point of view.  It works here.  It gives an immersive feel to the proceedings, and in this way it adds to the film.  I don't know that it adds all that much however, but it is something a little different.  Gimmick?  No, not really, it's better than that.  The only other major continuous sequence that comes to mind was the two hit men's banter-filled walk from their car to their victims' apartment in Pulp Fiction.  There as here, it was used to give a can't-look-away feel.  So yeah, I'd say it works.

But setting all the video gaminess aside, this is still a very good movie.  If you enjoyed (perhaps not exactly the right word here, but go with it) 2018's documentary They Shall Not Grow Old (reviewed here), you'll get something out of this film too.

Three out of Four Stars.

postscript:  It is unusual that three WWI-centered movies have popped up this year, this one, the afore-mentioned They Shall Not Grow Old, and the recently reviewed Tolkien.  Maybe the movie industry is on a WWI roll.  There are some interesting films to be made showing the beginnings of tank warfare, the nightmare and gut-wrenching decisions around poison gas use, and perhaps most importantly of all, the rise of infiltration tactics, the resistance to their use, as well as some downstream effects.  Lots of plot line material to be found here.