1917 (2019)
Hope is a dangerous thing.
THE SUMMARY: Two young British soldiers are tasked to deliver an urgent message to call off an attack on retreating Germans before two battalions charge to their deaths in the midst of the Great War - great start, great ending, and a lot of artistic choices I like, but the middle drags and there are several plot points that make little sense.
FROM MOVIE-PICKER DEREK: A great film that came out a few years ago - it’s one of few films about the First World War. The score is amazing, the story excellent and fantastically shot. Great acting from newer actors George MacKay and Dean Charles-Chapman who also played Tommen in Game of Thrones.
The continuous opening shot
Schofield’s run
THE BEST:
Impressively shot: The opening scene in the trenches is fantastic, both in the level of detail in the set and how it was filmed: walking right alongside the actors in one continuous, ten-minute take. It creates the effect of being right there in the muddy trenches with the soldiers, almost a party to the conversation yourself. Plus it makes the actors’ performance very impressive - to create the scene at that length without mistakes isn’t commonly done, because it isn’t easy.
Cool color style: As a subtle point of the presentation, I love the color style - drab and desaturated, except for the vivid earth tones. It creates a cold and dirty feel, exactly what you want for the mud and rotting corpses of the battlefield.
‘Schofield’s run’ is an amazing scene: All of the movie’s artistic merit culminates with Schofield’s run across the battlefield to deliver the General’s orders. The explosions, the charging soldiers, the sprint with the leading camera - all of it required complex choreography over multiple days to achieve (each take took five hours to reset the dynamite and other effects), and perhaps it’s best moment was still unscripted. Schofield actor George MacKay had two unintentional collisions with extras as charging soldiers, and rather than stopping because of the accidents, he just kept running. This was the take that made the final cut. It couldn’t have actually been scripted, or if it was, it wouldn’t have been presented as authentically. Credit to the actor for completing the scene, rather than breaking character.
Don’t complain about your fate: This movie isn’t a deep thinker necessarily, but I do appreciate the plot point of Schofield’s initial complaining about the difficulty and danger in the mission converting into purpose and unstoppable motivation to complete it. Even if your circumstance is unfair, even if your circumstance is seemingly impossible to overcome, complaining and defeatism is no path beyond it. Find purpose, find courage, find motivation, and work your way out. Or die trying.
THE WORST:
Implausible plot points: I get it - war movies are supposed to feature improbable feats against near impossible odds. That’s the genre. So my issue isn’t just that Schofield gets cut, puts his open wound in a rotting dead body, takes an IED in his face, has hundreds of pounds of rubble collapse on him, gets shot, or at least grazed, runs away from several of the worst riflemen ever to serve Germany, would-be suicide-dives over a waterfall, and finally sprints across an open battlefield (though it is a cool scene), all without any serious injury.
My issue is the main premise of the plot is silly. You have a crucial and urgent message, on which thousands of lives depend, so you send two inexperienced lance corporals to deliver it? Just because one of them has a brother who might die? And then when one of them dies, and the other finds his way to another unit, he says nothing of the urgency of his mission and just leaves them to go solo? Perhaps his mission is ‘secret,’ but why? If thousands are set to die tomorrow, why would secrecy in calling off the attack be necessary? Communication is the entire point of the mission. The delivery of this message would be the priority of every British soldier and officer in the area.
Not only that, but it makes no sense for two battalions of the British Army to be nine miles beyond the old German line, without knowledge of whether that German line was manned. If it was so dangerous to get to this position, then how did those British battalions get there? Don’t take it as my curiosity and skepticism alone - these are the same questions of a military historian reviewing the movie.
Why the side quests?: The biggest plot hole of all is all the side quests: investigating the country home for no reason other than to get stabbed by a crashed German pilot you waited around for fifteen minutes to encounter. Playing peekaboo with a baby. A quickdraw contest with a sniper just to see who’s the better gunslinger. Fine, maybe the sniper is a debatable necessity to eliminate, though Schofield runs past many more threats after that without neutralizing them first, but all of these are pointless pitstops in what is supposed to be a mission of the highest urgency. Not only do they not fit the premise of the story, but they’re almost all boring too.
Implausible diversity: Why is there a Sikh in the British Army? Why are there black guys? There is no purpose to this other than forced diversity - it’s certainly not for historical accuracy. As even Wikipedia sees fit to note, black membership in the British military at the time was negligible, and the few there were served in their own regiments in Africa and the West Indies. Likewise, Sikhs had their own regiments as part of the British Indian Army, and by the end of 1915, these regiments had been withdrawn from European lines and sent to the Middle East.
THE RATING: 3/5 Wickies. Some artistic choices I love. Some writing choices I hate. Evens out to a movie that’s just okay.
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NEXT WEEK: No Country for Old Men (2007)
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