Ever since Saving Private
Ryan revolutionized the war film with his POV depiction of the Battle of
Normandy, there has been at least one war movie every two or three years that
tries to drop the audience in the middle of the action, whether it be The
Thin Red Line, Flags of Our Fathers or Dunkirk.
And ever since Alfred Hitchcock pulled the magnificent feat of making a movie
look like it was done in one long take with Rope, many filmmakers have
taken a crack at it, whether through meticulous editing like with Birdman,
Son of Saul or that one episode of The Haunting of Hill House, or in
the case of Russian Ark, doing them one over and actually filming it in one
shot. Put in the hands of a director like Sam Mendes, the man who brought us American
Beauty, Road to Perdition and Skyfall, you get the best of both
worlds with 1917, a movie that it would’ve made my
year end list had it premiered in my city two weeks earlier.
Our story is set during World
War I and follows two British soldiers, Lance Corporals Blake (Dean Charles
Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay), who are given an impossible mission. A
neighboring battalion is poised to launch an attack on enemy territory, completely
unaware that they’re walking into a trap. With communication lines cut, Blake
and Schofield must venture on foot through No Man’s Land to relay an order from
their general (Colin Firth) to call off the attack and retreat. If they don’t
succeed, 1,600 men, including Blake’s brother, will be slaughtered.
And that’s it. The whole movie
is watching these two soldiers being sent off on a suicide mission, navigating
their way through trenches, tunnels, forests, abandoned farms and bombed out towns,
wading through waves of mud, barbed wire, blood, corpses and debris in a race
against the clock to prevent a massacre. The angle here is that the whole movie
is carefully and meticulously edited to look like it was shot in a single
continuous take. The gimmick has been done before, of course, but 1917
pulls it off with such virtuosity that it leaves its predecessors in the dust. While
it’s not that hard to spot the cuts if you know where to look since it makes
liberal use of Rope’s pull-in-pull-put techniques and makes one hard cut
to black that serves an important narrative function, what’s more challenging
is figuring out how they successfully traversed the camera through the terrain
the way it did. Certain moments that are clearly done on handheld but transition
seamlessly into shots that could only be pulled off with a crane or Steadicam. This
gives the movie a sense of scale that reminded me of Watership Down, in
that while the distance between Point A and Point B is only a few miles long,
the sudden shifts in scenery and dangerous obstacles laid throughout make it
feel like the distance between The Shire and Mordor.
This technical wizardry comes
to us from cinematographer extraordinaire Roger Deakins, whose more than earned
his reputation as one of the all-time greats (Look no further than his work on Blade
Runner 2049, his multiple works with the Coen brothers, or his last collaboration
with Sam Mendes, Skyfall,) and provide some of his most brilliant compositions
here. While his camera finesse makes the audience into unwitting tourists in
this venture across the war-torn French countryside, it also paints a vivid
picture, creating beauty from distant dogfights that suddenly get too close for
comfort, or a breathtaking nighttime sequence where a massive fire creates an
apocalyptic duel between dazzling lights and hazy shadows.
That’s not to say this is all just
a glorified Battlefield 1 playthrough. While 1917 has its fair
share of heart-stopping set pieces, they’re all broken up by quieter moments
that allow the protagonists and the audience to catch their breath. An escape
from a bunker laced with booby traps is followed by our two protagonists
sharing stories from home. A walk through an unspoiled pasture is interrupted
by a close call with a crashing plane. An attempt to cross a collapsed bridge
is turned into a deadly game of hide and seek with an enemy sniper. A fall into
a river that takes them off-course is proceeded by a squadron listening to a
sermon before they march into battle. While this does come at the expense of our
two main protagonists being a bit one-note, with little motivation beyond not
wanting their fellow troops become cannon fodder, trading the baggage of tedious
exposition and backstory for the simple desire to survive gives more urgency to
their mission. This is supplemented by a revolving door of cameos from
recognizable British actors like Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Richard Madden and
Benedict Cumberbatch who show up to give words of encouragement or nihilistic intransience,
and an exchange between two actors at the very end that convey a well of
emotion with very little dialogue.
Bottom line, 1917 is a
tremendous display of technical prowess, a tense race against the clock that
stacks up the stakes the closer we get to the goal, and a grand salute to those who sacrificed themselves for their country. (There's a post-credits dedication to Sam Mendes's grandfather.) It’s clearly more about the
shock to the system of the battlefield than the psychological toll of war
itself, but there’s nothing really wrong with that. As far as big, grandstanding
look-at-me spectacles go, it’s the best of its kind.
9/10
No comments:
Post a Comment