movie review of 1917

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At a time when it seems as if cinema experiences a new technological breakthrough every few months, it's oddly comforting that moviegoers can still be hooked by a film that's presented as being one unbroken shot. Granted, it's not a new idea, but the concept of an extended single shot, whether the shot is meant to stretch for an entire movie, or just serve as the focus for an especially showy scene, still has the power to excite viewers on some basic level. “1917,” the new film from Sam Mendes , is the latest attempt at the feature-length single-shot approach, and its technical accomplishments cannot be denied. But the film is so obsessed with its particular technique that it doesn’t leave room for the other things we also go to the movies for—little things like a strong story, interesting characters, or a reason for existing other than as a feat of technical derring-do. Sitting through it is like watching someone else playing a video game for two solid hours, and not an especially compelling one at that.

As indicated by the title, “1917” is set amidst the turmoil of World War I and takes place in and around the so-called “no man’s land” in northern France separating British and German troops. Two young corporals, Blake ( Dean-Charles Chapman ) and Schofield ( George MacKay ), are awoken from what could have only been a few minutes of sleep and ordered to report for a new assignment. A few miles away, another company, one that includes Blake’s brother, has planned an attack to commence in a few hours designed to push the Germans back even further following a recent retreat. However, recent intelligence suggests that the retreat is a ruse that will land them in ambush that will cost thousands of British lives. With the radio lines down, Blake and Schofield are ordered to head on foot to that company in order to call off the attack before it can commence, a journey that will force them to travel through enemy territory. Of course, the two have been assured that where they will be crossing is safe enough, but the tension within the soldiers they meet as they get closer to the front, and the recent nature of the carnage they witness when they first go over the top, suggests otherwise. And yet, that first glimpse of the literal Hell on earth they must journey through is only a taste of what they have to endure—at one point, one of them inadvertently plunges a hand recently sliced by barbed wire into the open wound of a corpse and that turns out to be one of the less excruciating moments in store for them.

“1917” essentially wants to do for World War I what “ Saving Private Ryan ” did for World War II and “ Platoon ” did for Vietnam—provide a visceral depiction of the horrors of combat for viewers whose only frame of reference for those conflicts has been history books or other movies. This is not a bad idea for a film, but "1917" never quite comes alive in the way that Mendes presumably hoped, and much of the reason for that is the direct result of how he has deployed to tell his story. Now, I enjoy an extended single-shot sequence that exists solely for a filmmaker to show off their technical finesse, but if I were to make a list of the most effective one-shot sequences, they would be the ones that are so absorbing for other reasons that we don’t even register at first that they have been done in what looks like one long take. Take the famous opening scene in Orson Welles' “ Touch of Evil ,” for example. Yes, it is a technical marvel. But at the same time Welles was pulling off this trick with the aid of cinematographer Russell Metty , he was setting up the story and introducing several of the key characters quickly and efficiently. When he did finally make a cut, it came as a genuine shock.

By comparison, there is hardly a moment to be had in “1917” in which Mendes is not calling out for viewers to notice all the technical brilliance on display. Taken strictly on those terms, the film is undeniably impressive— Roger Deakins is one of the all-time great cinematographers and his work here on what must have been a fiendishly challenging shoot is as impressive as anything he has done. The problem is that the visual conceit can’t help but draw attention to itself throughout, whether it is due to the increasingly showy camera moves or the sometimes awkward methods that are deployed to camouflage the edits and which begin to stick out more and more. (Oddly enough, the most blatantly obvious method used to hide a cut—one of the characters being briefly knocked unconscious—is actually the most dramatically effective of the bunch.) Instead of gradually fading into the background in order to make room for elements of a more dramatic or emotional nature, the distracting technique remains front and center.

Granted, one of the reasons that the visual style ends up dominating the proceedings is because there isn’t really much of anything on hand here that has much chance of stealing focus. The storyline concocted by Mendes and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns too often feels like an amalgamation of such classic WWI films as "The Big Parade," “All Quiet on the Western Front” and " Paths of Glory ." At certain points, the story stops dead for brief appearances by familiar faces like Colin Firth , Benedict Cumberbatch and Mark Strong in exposition-heavy sequences that feel exactly like the cut scenes that appear between the different levels in video games. 

“1917” is not entirely without interest. This was clearly a fiendishly complicated project to stage and execute and there are some scenes (such as an especially tense one set in a seemingly abandoned shelter that contains a few nasty surprises), that are legitimate knockouts. And yet, for all of its technical expertise, little of it helps viewers to care about the characters or what might happen to them. When all is said and done, "1917" is basically a gimmick film. If that is enough for you, you may admire it for its accomplishments. Personally, I wanted more.

Peter Sobczynski

A moderately insightful critic, full-on Swiftie and all-around  bon vivant , Peter Sobczynski, in addition to his work at this site, is also a contributor to The Spool and can be heard weekly discussing new Blu-Ray releases on the Movie Madness podcast on the Now Playing network.

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Film Credits

1917 (2019)

Rated R for violence, some disturbing images, and language.

119 minutes

George MacKay as Schofield

Dean-Charles Chapman as Blake

Mark Strong as Captain Smith

Andrew Scott as Lieutenant Leslie

Richard Madden as Lieutenant Blake

Benedict Cumberbatch as MacKenzie

• Krysty Wilson-Cairns

Cinematographer

• Roger Deakins
• Thomas Newman

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1917 Reviews

The power of 1917 lies in its ability to tell a human story of a single mission and translate that into an account that encompasses the brutality of trench warfare.

Full Review | Sep 17, 2023

Edited to look like one continuous shot, 1917 is a mind-blowing technical achievement, elevated by Roger Deakins’ jaw-dropping cinematography, Thomas Newman’s emotionally powerful score, Sam Mendes' impeccable directing, and Lee Smith’s seamless editing.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 24, 2023

Without a doubt, 1917 is technically brilliant, visually stunning, and occasionally moving. If not for its lack of fully realized characters and a deeper story, it might have been a masterpiece.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2023

With a fresh, new approach, Mendes memorializes not only his grandfather, but all the brave soldiers of WWI, reminding viewers of the individual tragedies that comprise warfare.

Full Review | Jun 5, 2023

1917 can best be described as a mediocre war film. Yes, Deakins worked his usual magic with cinematography...McKay did an adequate job...sadly, we know very little about his character, and the film does not allow him to grow...

Full Review | Apr 25, 2023

Sam Mendes’ technically dazzling and emotionally devastating World War I tale.../

Full Review | Dec 7, 2022

A technical marvel to behold that puts you right in the heart of war but ultimately leaves you emotionally cold to the resultant horror and heroics of the men involved.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 11, 2022

With “1917” Sam Mendes takes his audience on a perilous journey driven by a simple but tightly-wound story soaked in an unending tension. It’s a harrowing tale of heroism, friendship, and sacrifice.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 24, 2022

1917 is a stunning cinematic achievement.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 23, 2022

MacKay is simultaneously appearing in the lead role of Justin Kurzel's True History of the Kelly Gang, the latest film about the local folk hero who refused to take orders from anyone.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 18, 2022

For experiences like the one I had in the theatre watching this is why I love film. Constantly asking myself how they did this. Probably Sam Mendes' best movie to date. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jun 23, 2022

Unfortunately I dont see what most see in 1917. Respectively, I hardly feel anything except some respect for the technical achievements. But that alone isnt enough - it actually slightly damages the film overall.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Apr 25, 2022

The film's formal indulgences distract from its dramatic potential.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 22, 2022

What makes it so special is the balance between artistry and realism. Mendes reaches down into the mud and finds something beautiful.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 21, 2022

1917 is a technical masterpiece that comes together with genuine powerful emotion to become a captivating work of art.

Full Review | Feb 12, 2022

We should be drawn into the personal story--director Sam Mendes loosely based the movie on his grandfather Alfred's wartime experiences--but instead, we're watching all the smoke and mirrors. It's sound and fury that could signify so much more.

Full Review | Nov 16, 2021

What could have been a gimmick in the service of a weaker narrative becomes a masterstroke here, basically denying us any let-off from the tension of what is happening on the screen.

Full Review | Sep 17, 2021

The gimmicky side of [its single take] fades juxtaposed to the perspective it offers.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 31, 2021

In addition to Deakins, production designer Dennis Gassner and composer Thomas Newman also add layers of bravura artistry to create an experience that will leave you breathless, heart pounding and absolutely emotionally wrecked by the end.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 25, 2021

Mendes creates one of the best films released in 2019.

Full Review | Jul 23, 2021

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‘1917’ Review: Paths of Technical Glory

Sam Mendes directs this visually extravagant drama about young British soldiers on a perilous mission in World War I.

• Share full article

By Manohla Dargis

On June 28, 1914, a young Serbian nationalist assassinated the presumptive heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, thus starting World War I. That, at any rate, is the familiar way that the origins for this war have been shaped into a story, even if historians agree the genesis of the conflict is far more complicated. None of those complications and next to no history, though, have made it into “1917,” a carefully organized and sanitized war picture from Sam Mendes that turns one of the most catastrophic episodes in modern times into an exercise in preening showmanship.

The story is simple. It opens on April 6, 1917, with Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay), British soldiers stationed in France, receiving new orders. They are to deliver a message to troops at the front line who are readying an assault on the Germans, who have retreated. (Coincidentally or not, April 6 is the date that the United States formally entered the war.) The British command, however, believes that the German withdrawal is a trap, an operational Trojan horse. The two messengers need to carry the dispatch ordering the waiting British troops to stand down, thereby saving countless lives.

It’s the usual action-movie setup — a mission, extraordinary odds, ready-made heroes — but with trenches, barbed wire and a largely faceless threat. Blake jumps on the assignment because his brother is among the troops preparing the assault. Schofield takes orders more reluctantly, having already survived the Battle of the Somme , with its million-plus casualties. The modest difference in attitude between the messengers will vanish, presumably because any real criticism — including any skepticism about this or any war — might impede the movie’s embrace of heroic individualism for the greater good, which here largely translates as vague national struggle and sacrifice.

What complicates the movie is that it has been created to look like it was made with a single continuous shot. In service of this illusion, the editing has been obscured, though there are instances — an abrupt transition to black, an eruption of thick dust — where the seams almost show. Throughout, the camera remains fluid, its point of view unfixed. At times, it shows you what Blake and Schofield see, though it sometimes moves like another character. Like a silent yet aggressively restless unit member, it rushes before or alongside or behind the messengers as they snake through the mazy trenches and cross into No Man’s Land, the nightmarish expanse between the fronts.

The idea behind the camerawork seems to be to bring viewers close to the action, so you can share what Blake and Schofield endure each step of the way. Mostly, though, the illusion of seamlessness draws attention away from the messengers, who are only lightly sketched in, and toward Roger Deakins’s cinematography and, by extension, Mendes’s filmmaking. Whether the camera is figuratively breathing down Blake’s and Schofield’s necks or pulling back to show them creeping inside a water-filled crater as big as a swimming pool, you are always keenly aware of the technical hurdles involved in getting the characters from here to there, from this trench to that crater.

In another movie, such demonstrative self-reflexivity might have been deployed to productive effect; here, it registers as grandstanding. It’s too bad and it’s frustrating, because the two leads make appealing company: The round-faced Chapman brings loose, affable charm to his role, while MacKay, a talented actor who’s all sharp angles, primarily delivers reactive intensity. This lack of nuance can be blamed on Mendes, who throughout seems far more interested in the movie’s machinery than in the human costs of war or the attendant subjects — sacrifice, patriotism and so on — that puff into view like little wisps of engine steam.

The absence of history ensures that “1917” remains a palatable war simulation, the kind in which every button on every uniform has been diligently recreated, and no wound, no blown-off limb, is ghastly enough to truly horrify the audience. Here, everything looks authentic but manicured, ordered, sane, sterile. Save for a quick appearance by Andrew Scott, as an officer whose overly bright eyes and jaundiced affect suggest he’s been too long in the trenches, nothing gestures at madness. Worse, the longer this amazing race continues, the more it resembles an obstacle course by way of an Indiana Jones-style adventure, complete with a showstopping plane crash and battlefield sprint.

Mendes, who wrote the script with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, has included a note of dedication to his grandfather, Alfred H. Mendes , who served in World War I. It’s the most personal moment in a movie that, beyond its technical virtues, is intriguing only because of Britain’s current moment. Certainly, the country’s acrimonious withdrawal from the European Union makes a notable contrast with the onscreen camaraderie. And while the budget probably explains why most of the superior officers who pop in briefly are played by name actors — Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch — their casting also adds distinctly royal filigree to the ostensibly democratic mix.

Rated R for war violence. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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• <i>1917</i> Is a Movie About the Horrors of War, Told With a Devotion to Beauty and Life

1917 Is a Movie About the Horrors of War, Told With a Devotion to Beauty and Life

A good movie can be built from any number of components: a great story, distinctive visuals, a haunting score. But sometimes a face can take you 90 percent of the way. And although Sam Mendes’ extraordinary World War I drama 1917 is notable for the technical feat of its cinematography—Mendes and director of photography Roger Deakins have constructed it to be perceived as one unbroken shot—the true key to its effectiveness is the face of one of its central actors, George MacKay. MacKay plays a young British soldier, Schofield, who just happens to be nearby when one of his mates, Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), accepts a dangerous assignment: The two must cross enemy lines to deliver a message to British troops on the other side by the next day’s dawn. Blake has a personal stake in the assignment: he has a brother among the troops at risk. Schofield doesn’t think the mission is such a good idea—but he sticks by his friend anyway.

The first thing that strikes you is how young these two are, barely out of boyhood. That’s true of nearly all war pictures, though those set in World War I—including this one—come with a particular, sorrowful sting. The First World War, one of the deadliest in modern history, came with no satisfying “The bad guy is dead!” ending. The losses were devastating for all countries involved, certainly for Great Britain. And if the imagery we associate with this war are bleak enough—the dank trenches, the dead horses, the ghostly barbed wire—the rows of grave markers in its aftermath, most of them guarding the remains of very young men, make for an especially somber end note.

Mendes captures all of that tense sadness in 1917 , yet the film—which he co-wrote with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, and which is dedicated to his grandfather, a veteran of the war—also has a glorious, pulsing energy. It’s largely about death, or the risk of death, but in addressing some of the horrors of this particular war, Mendes has made a film that feels wholly alive. It’s a carefully polished picture, not one that strives for gritty realism. But its inherent devotion to life and beauty is part of its power, in the same way that Lewis Milestone’s quietly wrenching 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front —a story not about the experience of English soldiers but of German ones, adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s novel—stressed that individual moments of life, grasped and held tight, are the only real protection we have against the pointlessness of war.

1917 opens in a moment of repose: Blake and Schofield are lounging around a tree, reveling in the ultimate luxury of killing time, when they’re informed that they’re to report for a special assignment. (The general who gives them the order is a businesslike but clear-eyed Colin Firth—he looks from one lad to the other as if fully aware of the likelihood that neither will make it back.) Further afield, the Germans have allegedly retreated, and two English battalions, a total of some 1,600 men, have advanced and are ready to strike, hopeful that they can bring swift end to a war that has already been raging—and killing millions—for three years. But the retreat is a ruse. The Germans are now lying in wait for their prey. They have also, craftily, cut all lines of communication, so the message must travel in person, and it’s Blake and Schofield who must carry it.

Deakins’ camera follows this duo as they leap out of the bleak safety of the trenches and embark on a bone-rattling trek across no-man’s land. They pass dead horses ringed by haloes of flies, and the corpses of fellow soldiers, twisted and deformed in their shallow graves of mud. Schofield gallantly holds back a loop of barbed wire so that Blake might pass through; the thorns spring to life and pierce his hand. Shortly thereafter, he’ll lose his footing in a mud crater, instinctively breaking his fall with the wounded hand—it lands in the festering gut of a swollen corpse, a sick moment of slapstick. All of this is within the movie’s first 15 minutes or so, and you may be looking ahead to all the horrors that will surely follow, wondering if you’ll be able to bear them.

But Mendes knows what he’s doing. There are moments of horror and deep sorrow in 1917, including a scene of brutality followed by an aching loss—that this loss results from an act of compassion makes it even more cosmically cruel. This event occurs roughly a third of the way into the movie, and you feel its punch, hard. Yet Mendes’ aim isn’t to serve up relentless punishments for two hours. (The picture is just the right length for the story: You don’t need an epic runtime when your movie has an epic spirit.) Mendes moves his heroes through a field of chopped-down cherry trees, desolate in their lifeless beauty—though even then, there’s the promise that, after the stones have sunk into the ground, even more trees will pop up in their wake. There’s a deserted farmhouse whose environs are populated by one lonely cow. Someone—who?—has recently milked her, and Schofield, after testing to make sure it’s not poisoned, dips his hand in for a drink of the sublime. He’ll be shot at; he’ll have to silently kill a young German soldier with his bare hands. But Mendes is so careful with the story’s pacing that you never feel assaulted, even if you do feel the weight of every act.

And even if you fear the one-shot-effect might just be a gimmick, in Deakins’ capable hands, it works. The camera’s movement has its own silent dignity; there’s an overarching calmness to the film, even in its most intense moments. Deakins’ and Mendes’ sense of color may be even more wondrous than their one-shot feat: The ruins of a village lit by mortar explosions are bridal white. And if the colors of World War I are mostly brown, Deakins’ camera finds the stark beauty in its myriad hues, from dusky olives to soulful ochres.

The actors, moving through this world of terror with no glory, are terrific: Chapman’s baby face is sullen one moment, radiantly good-natured the next. Andrew Scott shows up for a few brilliant moments as a deadpan, disillusioned lieutenant. But it’s MacKay’s face that haunts you after the screen dims. It’s not a modern face, but a 1917 face, that of a young man who’s staunch in doing his duty but who has no idea what he’s gotten into. His ears stick out a little; he doesn’t smile much, but then, he can’t find much cause to. This is a face you might see inside an antique silver locket, the face of someone who’s loved very much, but who is very far away, and in danger. Through the space of the movie, we’re his guardians, keeping watch over him as well as we can. That he inspires this care in us is the key to the movie. He’s one of millions, but for the duration of 1917 , he’s our boy.

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‘1917’: Film Review

Actor George MacKay carries Sam Mendes' audacious real-time WWI adventure, which alternates between ground-level and God's-eye perspectives.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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How do you define heroism? For more than a century, movies have shaped our collective idea of the individuals and actions that qualify, often making the word appear out of reach to ordinary mortals. Now, along comes Sam Mendes ’ “ 1917 ” to smash those assumptions, revisiting a day in World War I when two ordinary British soldiers — Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman of “Game of Thrones”) and Schofield ( George MacKay ) — distinguish themselves by undertaking a mission for which neither is the slightest bit prepared.

Heroism reflects courage, of course. But that’s not the same as an absence of fear. There are scenes in “1917” when audiences will see Blake and Schofield panic-stricken, terrified and even in tears. Their errand calls for bravery, and yet, at times the pair can’t help but second-guess their decision to deliver a message that could save the lives of 1,600 fellow British soldiers. To do so, they must cross the battlefield in broad daylight, infiltrate booby-trapped German bunkers and confront the enemy face to face. One can hardly fault them for being afraid. If anything, the tension they feel makes the characters more relatable.

Heroism is about doing the right thing, but also about doing the thing that no one else wants to do. To a certain degree, it’s about luck, for many a heroic act has been thwarted by chance, leaving no one to acknowledge the sacrifice — although as “1917” demonstrates, glory plays no part in heroism. “Nothing like a patch of ribbons to cheer up a widow,” one officer cynically remarks. Drawing from war stories shared by his grandfather Alfred, who fought in the trenches, Mendes brilliantly re-creates the terrain — physical and emotional — navigated by its unlikely heroes, seen peacefully napping beneath a shady tree in the opening scene.

In the two hours ahead, Mendes will follow the pair into the realm of nightmares, depicting WWI as we’ve never seen it: simultaneously horrific and beautiful, immersive and detached, immediate and impossibly far removed from our own experience. These paradoxes define the unique sensibility of “1917,” which isn’t necessarily “better” than such iconic WWI films as “War Horse” and “All Quiet on the Western Front,” but different. Mendes has found an original approach to a familiar subject, refreshing events from a century ago in a way that looks, sounds and feels absolutely cutting-edge.

To maintain a sense of anticipation, the studio shared little about “1917” in advance, apart from the fact that Mendes had designed the entire movie to play out in a single shot — a “plan-séquence,” as the French call it, or “oner” among film students and cinephiles — à la Iñárritu’s “Birdman” and Hitchcock’s “Rope.” Such an audacious choice can often feel like a stunt, drawing audiences’ attention to the technique over the substance, which is intermittently the case here. The way Mendes collaborates with DP Roger Deakins , it’s as if someone pressed pause on the war and allowed two low-level infantrymen to poke around the spaces where it all went down — an almost-virtual-reality version of events, conveyed through the continuous-take (but not quite first-person-shooter) aesthetic of video games. All that’s missing is the ability to choose for oneself where to point the camera, though such decisions are better left to Deakins.

The day is April 6, 1917. German forces have retreated from the position they were holding in northern France, although they’re not “on the ropes” or nearly ready to surrender, as some of their British rivals mistakenly believe. The Fritzes have fallen back to meet up with reinforcements, hoping to lure the Allies into a trap, and two British battalions are about to fall for it, ready to send their men to certain death the following morning. With communication channels cut and no way of contacting those outfits, the British commanding general (Colin Firth, one of several stars cast as officers, each appearing only briefly, à la George Clooney and John Travolta in Terrence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line”) sends two lance corporals, Blake and Schofield, across the French countryside to deliver the warning and call off the attack.

Given the importance of the message, it seems odd that two unproven foot soldiers should be chosen for the task, although Blake has a personal stake in seeing the mission through: His older sibling is among the first wave of troops to be dispatched in the morning. When we meet him in the film’s final minutes, the elder Blake comes across as the more conventional hero: tall, handsome, covered in blood and mud and the scars of battle. By comparison, his kid brother looks soft and altogether too young to be enlisted, as does best friend Schofield. In MacKay’s case, that’s a reflection of his performance — his character seems aptly intimidated by the mission.

Thomas Newman’s score ticks nervously through the first act, which takes place in the trenches, as the camera pushes behind Blake and Schofield through crowds of soldiers — alternating between following over their shoulders and hustling backward so we can study their faces — to track these two foolhardy volunteers to the front line. At times, the camera can make us feel like a third character along for the ride, and we the audience share in their anxiety. Seventeen minutes in, they hoist themselves up to the surface, and we hold our breath as the camera lifts alongside them, taking in the surreal wasteland so few of their comrades live to see, with its half-decayed horse corpses and monstrous rats.

As if the aboveground trek weren’t daunting enough — a Homeric micro-odyssey that unfolds in real time against awesome outdoor sets — it gets more intimidating still when they reach the newly vacated German trench. No matter how much we know about WWI going in, Mendes and Deakins’ visual design meticulously withholds and reveals vital information about the surroundings, such that stepping into darkened spaces requires nearly as much nerve from us as it does the characters. At times, the camera lags a split-second behind, subliminally agonizing as we sense Blake and Schofield suddenly exposed to something beyond our vision. At others, we see what’s coming before they do, as when a distant aerial dogfight ends with one of the biplanes crashing almost directly into the camera.

During moments like these, it’s easy to forget the single-shot gimmick, although the conceit comes at a price: Traditional editing allows filmmakers to tighten and manipulate time for dramatic effect, whereas here, Mendes and editor Lee Smith (whose job involves hiding the splices) must commit to the pace that was captured on set. “1917” drags in places, and though a bit of quiet introspection is welcome in a war movie, Mendes and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns fill these with forgettable stories: A scene involving a cherry orchard chopped down by the Germans during their retreat serves as a good example, pairing the surreal imagery with banal observations about the different varieties of cherry trees.

The script feels most exciting when other characters are involved, especially after a shocking off-camera setback threatens the mission. Things pick up about midway through when we cross a group of soldiers led by Mark Strong, who take us as far as the bombed-out French village of Écoust, where a scuffle with a German sniper knocks Schofield unconscious. It’s here that the film’s only discernible cut occurs, during a long subjective blackout that drastically shortens the amount of time left to finish his mission. Later that night, as we stumble out into a vision of hell, and Newman’s score swells to full orchestra as flares illuminate the godforsaken ruins.

(Note: the next paragraph contains spoilers.) There’s still quite a distance to travel to reach the battalions at Croisilles Wood, where Schofield arrives as the raid is underway — which explains the iconic sight, so central to the film’s marketing, of MacKay running perpendicular to a swarm of charging soldiers as bombs erupt around him. That shot (or “segment,” in light of the film’s long-take aesthetic) is outrageous and exhilarating, an act of last-minute desperation by a character who’s proved far more sensible about his own safety until now. It also serves as a metaphor for the entire mission, whose heroic dimension has been revealed gradually over time: While the British forces’ attention were focused elsewhere, Blake and Schofield set out in an entirely different direction, exposing themselves to danger.

Perhaps its Mendes’ theatrical side that can’t resist the temptation to bring “1917” full circle, back to a viewpoint that rhymes, ironically, with the film’s opening frame. That intellectually driven choice underscores what a different filmmaker he is from Spielberg or Nolan, with Mendes looking to imprint some kind of poetic sensibility on the technical accomplishment we’ve just witnessed. Astonishing as the filmmaking can be at times, it’s Mendes’ attention to character, more than the technique, that makes “1917” one of 2019’s most impressive cinematic achievements.

Reviewed at Arclight Cinemas, Hollywood, Nov. 21, 2019. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 119 MIN.

• Production: A Universal Pictures release of a DreamWorks Pictures, Reliance Entertainment presentation, in association with New Republic Pictures, of a Neal Street Prods., Amblin Partners production. Producers: Sam Mendes, Pippa Harris, Jayne-Ann Tenggren, Callum McDougall, Brian Oliver.
• Crew: Director: Sam Mendes. Screenplay: Sam Mendes, Krysty Wilson-Cairns. Camera (color, widescreen): Roger Deakins. Editor: Lee Smith: Music: Thomas Newman.
• With: George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman, Mark Strong , Andrew Scott, Richard Madden, Claire Duburcq, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch. (English, French, German dialogue)

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Summary At the height of the First World War, two young British soldiers, Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) are given a seemingly impossible mission. In a race against time, they must cross enemy territory and deliver a message that will stop a deadly attack on hundreds of soldiers—Blake’s own brother among them.

Directed By : Sam Mendes

Written By : Krysty Wilson-Cairns, Sam Mendes

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Unique WWI epic has brutal war violence, smoking.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

War is hell. Camaraderie and loyalty can help moti

Blake and Schofield demonstrate incredible courage

Horrors of war are on full display from a first-pe

Masturbation joke.

Strong language throughout, including "bastards,"

One character drinks from flask. Smoking.

Parents need to know that 1917 is an outstanding World War I drama that makes viewers feel like they're experiencing what it might really have been like to be in the trenches on the front lines. Director Sam Mendes wrote the screenplay based on the stories his grandfather told him about being a runner in the…

Positive Messages

War is hell. Camaraderie and loyalty can help motivate people in dire circumstances. You can make headway in the worst situation if you persevere and focus on your goal. Themes include compassion and courage.

Positive Role Models

Blake and Schofield demonstrate incredible courage for the greater good, as well as compassion for others -- including the enemy. Schofield perseveres on his mission, even after being given the opportunity to seek a safer situation.

Violence & Scariness

Horrors of war are on full display from a first-person viewpoint, including being shot at, feeling the fear of the enemy nearby, getting bombed. Climbing over human carcasses, walking past dead animals. A couple of instances of men killing enemies face to face. Many bloody, gory injuries, including missing limbs, men writhing in pain. A soldier unintentionally puts his wounded hand in the open guts of a dead horse when he lands in a bomb crater. Characters are visibly in substantial peril throughout; tons of tension.

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Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language throughout, including "bastards," "piss off," "s--t," several uses of "f--k."

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Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

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Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that 1917 is an outstanding World War I drama that makes viewers feel like they're experiencing what it might really have been like to be in the trenches on the front lines. Director Sam Mendes wrote the screenplay based on the stories his grandfather told him about being a runner in the British Army. The camera follows the young soldiers in one long tracking shot, making it feel like you're right in the action. Consequently, it all feels very real, and tension runs extremely high. Battle violence is graphically realistic, including shootings, strangling, stabbing, bombings, etc. Wounded soldiers are bloody, missing limbs, and crying in pain. Soldiers smoke (accurate for the era), drink, and use strong language ("f--k," "s--t"). Benedict Cumberbatch and Colin Firth make cameo appearances alongside stars George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman . To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 46 parent reviews

Great movie!

What's the story.

During World War I, it's 1917, and British soldiers Schofield ( George MacKay ) and Blake ( Dean-Charles Chapman ) are selected to deliver an urgent message to a nearby battalion. In their high-stakes effort to save 1,600 lives, the runners must themselves survive the journey through enemy territory.

Is It Any Good?

About 15 minutes in to this movie, it dawns on you that this is something uniquely brilliant; by the end, it's clear that Sam Mendes has made one of the best films of 2019. That's largely because of the innovative cinematography: The entire film is one long tracking shot. Of course, there are edits, as imperceptible to viewers as they might be. And, honestly, whether or when the film stopped rolling isn't the point -- it's the effect. As the camera follows the two British runners trying to get across a German-occupied battlefield to deliver their urgent message, it moves around them -- in front, behind, next to, sometimes around a rock or a slightly different route but keeping the soldiers in view. It creates the video game-like feeling that you're the third runner on the mission. The first-person viewpoint transforms the experience of watching 1917 into something intimate, just short of interactive. Cinematographers aren't often household names, but Roger Deakins might just become one thanks to this Herculean accomplishment.

Given that the film is essentially a one-direction journey in which the camera rarely stops rolling, the production design is a real feat. Smoke and mirrors can't possibly exist: We follow Blake and Schofield through a looooooong trench, a maze of a barracks, and French countryside that's ravaged from the wages of war. The actors are all superb, but MacKay will rip your heart out as a low-ranking officer who's resentful of his assignment but rises to see his mission through, no matter the potential sacrifice. Teens may be reluctant to see a movie about World War I, but 1917 could be a game changer: It's hard to imagine anyone won't appreciate its originality, heart, and grit.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about World War I. How was it different from other wars? How have you seen it depicted in the media before? How does 1917 's portrayal of it compare?

Did you find the movie's violence realistic? How does the impact of this kind of violence compare to what you might see in a horror or superhero movie? Why do you think the filmmakers chose to show the violence in this way?

Why do you think the filmmakers chose their unusual camera technique? How did it change your experience as a viewer? Do you think it was effective?

How do the characters demonstrate compassion ? In the heat of war, is compassion a luxury, or a necessity? How do you think Blake should have interacted with the pilot?

Talk about examples of teamwork in the film. Why is it important in the film, and why is it an important skill in real life?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 25, 2019
• On DVD or streaming : March 24, 2020
• Cast : George MacKay , Dean-Charles Chapman , Benedict Cumberbatch
• Director : Sam Mendes
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Great Boy Role Models , History
• Character Strengths : Compassion , Courage , Perseverance
• Run time : 110 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : violence, some disturbing images, and language
• Awards : BAFTA , Golden Globe
• Last updated : March 30, 2024

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1917 review – Sam Mendes’s unblinking vision of the hell of war

Mendes’s first world war drama, filmed to appear as one continuous take, plunges the viewer into the trenches alongside two young British soldiers to breathless effect

F or the opening of his 2015 Bond movie Spectre , director Sam Mendes (who won an Oscar for his first feature, American Beauty ) mounted a memorable sequence set amid Mexico City’s day of the dead festival. In what appears to be a single continuous shot, the camera tracks a masked figure through crowded streets, into a hotel lobby, up an elevator, out of a window, and over the rooftops to a deadly assignation. It’s an audacious, attention-grabbing curtain-raiser widely hailed as the film’s strongest asset.

For his latest movie – an awards-garlanded first world war drama that has already won best picture honours at the Golden Globes – Mendes has returned to the lure of the “one-shot” format, this time stretching it out to feature length. Like Hitchcock’s Rope or Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman , 1917 uses several takes and set-ups, seamlessly conjoined to give the appearance of a continuous cinematic POV, albeit with periodic ellipses. The result is a populist, immersive drama that leads the viewer through the trenches and battlefields of northern France, as two young British soldiers attempt to make their way through enemy lines on 6 April 1917.

George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman are perfectly cast as Schofield and Blake, the lance corporals enlisted to venture into enemy territory with a message for fellow troops poised to launch a potentially catastrophic assault. The Germans have made a “strategic withdrawal”, suggesting that they are on the run. In fact they’re lying in wait, armed and ready to repel the planned British push. Together, these young soldiers must reach their comrades and halt the attack – a race against time and insurmountable odds.

With meticulous attention to detail (plaudits to production designer Dennis Gassner) and astonishingly fluid cinematography by Roger Deakins that shifts from ground level to God’s-eye view, Mendes puts his audience right there in the middle of the unfolding chaos. There’s a real sense of epic scale as the action moves breathlessly from one hellish environment to the next, effectively capturing our reluctant heroes’ sense of anxiety and discovery as they stumble into each new unchartered terrain. This is nail-biting stuff, interspersed with genuine shocks and surprises. Whether it’s a tripwire moment that provokes an audible gasp, a distant dogfight segueing into up-close-and-personal horror, or a single gunshot that made me jump out of my seat during an otherwise near-silent sequence, there’s no doubting the film’s theatrical impact.

Yet for all the steel-trap visceral efficiency, it’s the more low-key moments that really pack a punch – those moments when we’re confronted with the simple human cost of war. As with Peter Jackson’s monumentally moving documentary They Shall Not Grow Old , 1917 works best when showing us the boyish face of this conflict; the pitiable plight of a young generation, old or lost before their time. It’s a quality perfectly captured by MacKay’s endlessly watchable eyes, which manage simultaneously to project ravaged innocence and world-weary exhaustion – fatalism and hope.

“Hope is a dangerous thing,” says Benedict Cumberbatch’s Colonel MacKenzie, just one of a number of small roles filled by high-profile actors happy to play second fiddle. It’s a line that mirrors the central refrain from The Shawshank Redemption , another humanist movie tinged with horror that seems to haunt Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns’ script. There are evocations, too, of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan , not only in the unflinching depiction of battlefield violence, but also in a plot device that sets soldiers searching for a brother in a desperate quest for redemption. In one of its more surreal (or perhaps transcendent) sequences, wherein a purgatorial night-time underworld is illuminated in a yellow phosphorescent haze, I was unexpectedly reminded of a dream scene from Waltz With Bashir , in which young men rise from the water, like ghosts walking among the living.

Throughout this Homeric odyssey, Thomas Newman’s pulsing score ratchets up the tension, travelling “up the down trench”, through the body-strewn carnage of no man’s land (a forest of wood and wire, bone and blood) and into the eerie environs of deserted farmhouses and bombed-out churches. Occasionally, we hear echoes of the rising crescendo of Hans Zimmer’s Dunkirk score; elsewhere, Newman’s cues are full of piercing melancholia mingled with distant threat.

In a film in which music plays such a crucial role, it’s significant that perhaps the most powerful scene is an interlude of song. Emerging from a river after a baptismal episode of death and rebirth, we find ourselves in a wood where a young man sings The Wayfaring Stranger. It’s an interlude that brings the characters and audiences together in silence, communally experiencing that still-small voice of calm that lies at the heart of so many great war movies.

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‘1917’ Review: War Is Hell, One Shot at a Time

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

In the first shot of this groundbreaking World War I film, two young British soldiers — lance corporals Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) — are caught napping in a field. It’s the last time they, or we in the audience, will be able to catch a breath. For the next two hours, director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins will stalk these young men in what seems like one continuous take, tagging along as they charge through enemy territory on a mission to save lives. Their orders from General Erinmore (Colin Firth) are crystal clear: They must make their way across booby-trapped, corpse-strewn terrain in France to hand-deliver a message to Col. Mackenzie ( Benedict Cumberbatch ), commander of the Second Battalion. It contains orders to call off a planned advance against the German army, falsely assumed to be on the ropes. Turns out it’s a trap that could result in the slaughter of more than 1,600 British soldiers, including Blake’s brother ( Bodyguard star Richard Madden). With communications down, the only hope rests with two boys who can barely shave.

And they’re off, over two days in April 1917, choking on tension that never lets up. Mendes, who won an Oscar for his 1999 debut film, American Beauty, and has been performing award-winning wonders on stage with The Ferryman and The Lehman Trilogy, is testing himself. About that single take — it’s impossible, of course. Filmmakers from Alejandro G. Iñárritu in Birdman and Alexander Sokurov in Russian Ark have also faked it before. But Mendes, in ardent and artful tandem with editor Lee Smith ( Dunkirk ) and Deakins, his creative partner on Skyfall, Revolutionary Road and Jarhead, creates a visionary miracle. Any fears you might have going in that technical trickery is usually short for “gimmick” are instantly allayed by the film’s palpable sense of intimacy.

For the screenplay that Mendes wrote with Krysty Wilson-Cairns ( Penny Dreadful ), he didn’t consult the history books so much as the stories told to him by his grandfather, Alfred Mendes, a messenger on the Belgian front to whom 1917 is dedicated. You can see the influence of other films about the period, notably Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory and Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, a documentary that restored actual WWI footage to startling life. But Mendes follows his own muse in juxtaposing terror with surprising tenderness, as when a German biplane plummets from the sky and Blake and Schofield try to rescue the enemy pilot. Images of war vie with such moments as Schofield’s encounter with a woman and an orphan baby in the bombed-out village of Écoust, where a skirmish with a German sniper knocks Schofield out cold, creating a brief break in the film’s real-time momentum.

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Still, the director makes sure the actors aren’t upstaged by the pyrotechnics. Mark Strong ( Kingsman ) and Andrew Scott (the hot priest on Fleabag ) register strongly as British officers encountered along the way. But the real soul of 1917 can be found in it two lead actors. Chapman (Tommen Baratheon on Game of Thrones ) displays the fighting spirit of youth as Blake blunders into heroism. And MacKay (the eldest son of Viggo Mortensen in Captain Fantastic ) nails every nuance in an astounding performance. Whether running past soldiers storming the battlefield or getting stopped in his tracks by a voice singing the haunting “Wayfaring Stranger,” Schofield stays determined to complete his mission. And the burning intensity of MacKay’s face, reflecting the ferocity and futility of war, leaves an indelible mark. His fervor, coupled with the creative passion that Mendes infuses in every frame, makes 1917 impossible to shake.

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Review: Sam Mendes’ World War I drama ‘1917’ is a technical triumph — and a half-successful experiment

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Sometime after nightfall in “1917,” a gravely virtuosic dispatch from the front lines of World War I, a British soldier, Lance Cpl. Schofield (George MacKay), makes his way through a darkened building amid the ruins of a bombed-out French village. There, in a shadowy room illuminated by overhead flares and rattled by distant explosions, he stumbles on a frightened young woman (Claire Duburcq) in hiding.

They communicate in gestures and whispers. She sees that he’s wounded and tenderly touches his bloodied head; he winces in pain but gratefully accepts. There’s a surreal, even ghostly feel to this encounter, a fleeting moment of consolation in a place suffused with death. For the audience, it’s a delicate interlude in a dark, violent story; for Schofield, it offers respite but no escape from a hell on earth that has raged for three years and shows little sign of abating.

The movie’s simple title and taut time frame — it unfolds over two consecutive days in April 1917 — serve as a grim reminder to the audience that the war will rage on for more than a year. But for the most part, English director Sam Mendes (who wrote the script with Krysty Wilson-Cairns) avoids granting us any knowledge not already possessed by his characters. His aim is to convey, with immersive realism and real-time immediacy, the experience of two men on an overnight mission — one that may look small in the war’s grander context but, like many such missions, serves a crucial purpose.

Inspired by stories that Mendes heard from his grandfather, Alfred Mendes, a veteran of the war’s Belgian front, “1917” follows Schofield and Lance Cpl. Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), young men stationed in northern France. Blake is the louder and livelier of the two, a raconteur with a poetic streak who rhapsodizes longingly about his family’s cherry orchard. Schofield is quieter, more withdrawn and disillusioned. The traumas of the Battle of the Somme are still fresh, leaving him with awful memories and a medal he neither wears nor talks about.

Further horrors and tests of bravery await. The ticktock-thriller plot is set in motion by a general (Colin Firth) who instructs Schofield and Blake to travel on foot over miles of bloodied, bombed-out terrain to deliver a warning to the Second Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment, which is planning an imminent attack on fleeing German forces. But what appears to be an enemy retreat is actually a brilliant tactical calculation; the battalion’s 1,600 troops, who include Blake’s brother, are walking into a skillfully orchestrated trap.

And a skillfully orchestrated trap seems as fitting a way as any to think of “1917,” in which the rawness and brutality of the Great War have been largely tamed into aesthetic submission. The movie is a powerfully incongruous hybrid: a soldier’s lament and a formalist’s delight. Reuniting with the great cinematographer Roger Deakins, his collaborator on “Skyfall,” “Revolutionary Road” and “Jarhead,” Mendes has constructed “1917” so as to simulate the appearance of one unbroken take — a long, sinuous tracking shot sustained without any visible cuts. (The clever peekaboo editing is by Lee Smith, who also cut Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk,” a war epic as fragmented as this one is seamless.)

The result is a two-hour tightrope walk that keeps us intently focused on these men and their mission, never allowing us to look away even when we’d like to. By the time Blake and Schofield receive their marching orders, the camera has already followed them through several hundred yards’ worth of trenches. Mendes fills the widescreen frame with deft pointillist flourishes; he’s fond of pulling back and letting the background come into focus, giving us just enough time to register the sight of other soldiers — working, playing and bickering in their filthy uniforms and steel helmets — before whisking us on to the next episode.

The camera will remain alongside Blake and Schofield as they venture out of the ditches and across a no man’s land etched with craters and barbed wire. (The scorched-earth production design is by Dennis Gassner.) Inch by grisly inch, they make their way through a gnarled labyrinth of deserted fortifications and sun-bleached human skeletons lying embedded and forgotten in the craggy terrain, all bearing silent witness to a war seemingly without end.

In these moments, “1917” casts aside the chaotic grammar of the combat picture and takes on the hushed eloquence of a post-apocalyptic horror movie. Rarely have two men seemed so utterly alone: Here there are only the remnants of battle, a few skittering rats and the stench of mass death. The overall effect of Mendes’ blocking and camerawork, staggeringly complicated though it must have been to pull off, is disarmingly spare and simple. His technique weaves an undeniable spell, sometimes deepened and sometimes broken by a Thomas Newman score that veers from low, ominous drones to majestic orchestral surges.

Mendes is good at building tension within the frame, even as his gently drifting, weightless camera conveys the oddly pleasurable feeling of a guided tour. He has a talent for luring his protagonists, and the audience, into an eerie calm, only to jolt us with a showman’s sense of cunning. There are at least two moments when the movie brutally ambushes its characters — once with a circling fighter plane that winks at “North by Northwest,” and later with a devastatingly swift attack that takes place, perversely, when the camera isn’t looking.

I realize that nearly everything I have written has characterized “1917” in terms of its visual choreography, which undersells the actors — MacKay and Chapman are both heartrendingly good — but also speaks to the limitations of Mendes’ formal conceit. He is one of many filmmakers, from Max Ophüls and Andrei Tarkovsky to Alfonso Cuarón, who have embraced the tracking shot, in which time itself is given weight and physicality by the unified movement of the camera. A few movies have stretched the technique to feature-length, like Alexander Sokurov’s “Russian Ark” (2002) and Sebastian Schipper’s “Victoria” (2015), both notably executed the hard way, with no postproduction trickery.

By contrast, movies like Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Birdman” and now “1917” create their visual continuity using techniques that would have been unimaginable in the predigital era. One of the distractions of Mendes’ movie is that you may spend a lot of time looking for those hidden edits, those moments when the camera effectively “blinks.” (It’s like a higher-tech version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 one-take wonder, “Rope.”) It’s a fun game, but it also gets at the paradox of so much extended long-take cinema: A device meant to be seamless and immersive can’t help but keep drawing your attention to its own impeccable craftsmanship.

Perhaps it’s because Schofield and Blake are making their way through Gallic terrain, but “1917” at times brought to mind the words of two French-born filmmakers who were themselves once fellow travelers. “There’s no such thing as an antiwar film” is a quote often attributed to François Truffaut, and it was Jean-Luc Godard who said, “Film is truth 24 times per second, and every cut is a lie.”

Intentionally or not, “1917” feels like an attempted rejoinder to both those famous declarations. Genuinely uninterested in glorifying the spectacle of war, Mendes deploys technological trickery in pursuit of a new kind of cinematic truth.

I think he half succeeds. There are times when the nonstop visual momentum lends “1917” the feel of a virtual-reality installation, and others when the simulation of raw immediacy slips to reveal the calculated construct underneath. Mendes’ films have had a weakness for overly pristine surfaces — in evidence since his Oscar-winning debut feature, “American Beauty” — and his coolly detached, slightly bloodless aestheticism makes for an odd but fascinating fit with the war movie, a genre that often encourages filmmakers to unleash a full-blown sensory assault.

“1917,” by contrast, keeps its composure, giving you the distance to process its assiduously doled-out horrors; it only occasionally achieves gut-level impact, but it also doesn’t try to bludgeon you in submission. If Mendes has not made an antiwar movie in the unattainable Truffautian sense, he has nonetheless rendered a thoughtful, clear-eyed argument for the futility and endlessness of armed conflict, a message that reverberates well beyond these particular front lines into the present.

At one point, a wise captain (Mark Strong) tells Schofield that even if he makes it to his destination, his attempt to call off the attack may be in vain: “Some men just want the fight.” He is one of several peripheral characters — played by actors including Firth, Andrew Scott, Benedict Cumberbatch and an especially good Richard Madden — who show up to offer a few often-cynical words of counsel before sending them on their way.

Their famous faces may pull you briefly out of the movie, but seeing each one is pleasurable all the same — and instructive. Taken together, they suggest that “1917” might be best approached not as a work of strict realism but as a knowing hybrid of authenticity and artifice. It’s worth recalling that Mendes is a longtime theater director, which may explain some of the movie’s more brazenly operatic gestures: In one stunning nighttime scene, Deakins’ camera rises over those fire-lit ruins, transforming a disaster zone into a stage as Newman’s score rises in a mighty crescendo. It may be a grandiose flourish, but you can’t deny it makes for a startlingly literal theater of war.

Rating: R, for violence, some disturbing images and language Running time: 2 hours Playing: Opens Dec. 25 in general release

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1917 (2019)

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The War Film 1917 Is One of the Year’s Mightiest Technical Achievements

By Richard Lawson

Director Sam Mendes’s last war film was the 2005 mood piece Jarhead , about American troops during Desert Storm going a bit mad as they wait, and wait, and wait to see combat. No such empty tedium is enjoyed by the war boys of 1917 (out December 25), Mendes’s relentless WWI film about a frantic two-man mission to avert a strategic disaster.

Based partly on stories Mendes was told by his war vet grandfather, 1917 is the first time Mendes has a writing credit on one of his films, sharing billing with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, a screenwriter and history buff who worked with Mendes to shape his nascent ambition into what it is now. While there are moments of poignant writerly grace to be found in 1917 , the main attraction—if you can call it that—is the film’s suspense-filled race through the hell of war. It’s a dazzling technical achievement, offering much of Mendes’s typical aesthetic splendor, but reined in perhaps just before the horror is drowned in too much lushness.

It’s April 1917 in the flatlands of France, and two young British soldiers— Dean-Charles Chapman’s Blake and George MacKay’s Schofield—are roused from a rare and uneasy rest in a flower-dotted meadow. They awake to an urgent mandate: an attack planned by another battalion, camped somewhere across enemy-occupied territory, is set to fall into a German trap. It’s up to Blake and Schofield, then, to deliver the vital order to halt the charge. To do so, they must scramble through an expanse of mud and ruin, running against the clock, unsure where enemies might lie.

There’s a bit of Saving Private Ryan ’s DNA in 1917 , the way it similarly employs a single-motive pursuit as a means to explore various facets of a roiling vastness. But Mendes has given his film tighter constraints than the sweep of Steven Spielberg ’s World War II film. He stages 1917 in two sections that are made to look like a pair of long, unbroken shots unfolding in real-time. Of course, 1917 wasn’t actually filmed without cuts, much as the same-styled Birdman wasn’t actually one continuous scene. Mendes and his editor Lee Smith stitch things together rather seamlessly, though, the camera smoothly tracking along—in the narrow canyons of trenches, through fetid water, into bombed-out homes—as the two young men make their way, inch by agonizing inch, toward their goal.

It’s a staggering piece of filmmaking, admirable both for its complexity and its control. 1917 is a harrowing survival-adventure film, and yet Mendes doesn’t make super-humans of his two main characters. They are often almost impossibly lucky, yes, but there are no action-movie heroics to be found in the film. Which makes the whole thing that much more gripping; we can imagine almost any scared soul doing all this desperate maneuvering.

The particular strain of overwrought patriotism that all too easily infects war films is mostly fended off by 1917 . It doesn’t much matter which side these boys are on, really, just that they carry with them the almost holy potential to save hundreds of lives. Reducing a world war to such focused terms removes a great deal of the of-the-day politics, making plain how little any of that matters in the immediate struggle to keep oneself, and others, alive. That’s where 1917 , finds its sorrowful ribbon of sentiment, in its images of two barely post-adolescents caught in the crush of something larger, but not greater, than themselves. The war’s indifference to their survival is also keenly, bitterly felt.

The two lead actors communicate that palpable smallness well. Chapman is all naïve, baby-faced determination while MacKay is his graver, more haunted elder. Schofield has seen battle before and knows there is no real glory to be found in it. Yet he follows Blake into the abyss anyway, out of intimate duty to his friend in arms, a doleful sense of purpose that MacKay, a rising actor who seems poised to break big, wears convincingly in his quiet but forceful performance. Some bigger names appear in bit roles, fan-favorite actors like Benedict Cumberbatch and Chapman’s fellow Game of Thrones -er Richard Madden. These cameos are needless, almost garish, distractions, pops of flash that are too glaring against the solemn gray of the film.

By Chris Murphy

By Greer Sinclair

The real stars here are, of course, Mendes’s technical flourishes, emboldened by Roger Deakins’s stately cinematography and Thomas Newman’s score, which lilts and swells to match—and, in a few interesting instances, curiously offset—the falling and rising action. Striking sequences abound in 1917 —a dark chase lit by the bursts of aerial flares; a nerve-jangling tear through a collapsing German tunnel—though it still maintains a sense of modesty. Mendes’s countryman Christopher Nolan recently mounted his own world-war epic, 2017’s exactingly precise Dunkirk . While that film is a towering spectacle of how’d-he-do-that filmmaking, there is something chilly, dispassionate in its boggling execution. 1917 manages more feeling; it’s never quite a tearjerker, but it insists a crucial pathos into its language.

On the American side of things, our last notable big war movie (sorry, Midway ) was Mel Gibson’s utterly grueling Hacksaw Ridge , a 2016 orgy of gore frenzied with bloodthirsty mania. 1917 avoids that prurient indulgence. We definitely see what this awful war has done to human bodies, the remains of people strewn across the battlefield like all the other debris. But Mendes doesn’t delight in the carnage. He keeps a trained gaze on the bare and terrible fact of the setting rather than veering toward operas, either of gruesomeness or bombastic valor.

One might argue that a movie like 1917 needn’t exist, really. Haven’t we had enough fictional documentation of these terrible conflicts? Aren’t they all by now just preening feats of strength meant to further prove the mettle of talented directors, in the process inadvertently (or not) propping up politically useful narratives about the nobility of war? I’m certainly sympathetic to those arguments, and am not entirely sure what Gorgeous War Movies—as opposed to ones more unadorned, less fastidious about their aesthetic graces—accomplish on a deeper, more sociological level. Beyond their capacity for somberly honoring the dead while still offering those deaths to be used as bolstering for contemporary military-industrial devotion, anyway.

In its reasoned scale, at least, Mendes’s film waves few flags of triumph. It’s a movie about stopping something rather than winning it. Which, in careful complement to its prestige war-movie heft, gives 1917 a delicate, mournful air of humanity that so many other films of its kind snuff out with grandiosity.

1917 is a rattling wonder of form, an audacious undertaking that nonetheless bobbles or cheats on a few occasions. The one major cut in its real-time conceit serves a few plot purposes, I suppose. But really it mostly affords Mendes and Deakins the opportunity to work with a different palette—the chiaroscuro of nighttime combat—for a while. Which, yes, is the prerogative of artists making their thing. A tinge of cynicism does creep in through that crack in the movie’s structure, though. No matter the time of day, no matter the painterly slant of light, what was experienced by so many people 100 years ago likely rarely, if ever, seemed beautiful. It often does in 1917 . To modern moviegoers’ benefit, I‘ll admit. But also, just maybe, to true history’s vague disservice.

Richard Lawson

Chief critic.

By David Canfield

Screen Rant

1917 review: sam mendes' wwi epic is a better thriller than drama.

1917 is well-acted and an undeniable technical achievement, yet its real-time storytelling is both the film's greatest strength and biggest problem.

It would've been easy for 1917 to feel like a gimmick film. Sam Mendes' WWI epic (which was loosely based on a story Mendes' paternal grandfather told him about his time in the war) was shot and edited to look like it was captured in a single take, similar to the Best Picture Oscar winner Birdman and other one-shot movies before it. To their credit, Mendes and his legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins rarely call attention away from whatever's happening onscreen with their camerawork - which is not to say their approach is completely effective, either.  1917 is well-acted and an undeniable technical achievement, yet its real-time storytelling is both the film's greatest strength and biggest problem.

The movie picks up on April 6, 1917, in northern France. With WWI raging on around them, young British soldiers Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) are tasked with an urgent mission that will require them to cross into enemy territory recently vacated by the German army. Their top commander, General Erinmore (Colin Firth), believes this retreat is actually strategic and the Germans are laying a trap for a British battalion of 1,600 men, Blake's brother among them. With the British army's phone lines disabled, Blake and Schofield must brave a treacherous journey by foot and reach the battalion by the next morning, in order to warn them about the Germans' intended ambush before time runs out.

Related:  Krysty Wilson-Cairns NYCC Interview: 1917

For the most part, 1917 succeeds in pulling audiences into the headspace of its protagonists and using its single take structure to capture the psychological experience of being in a combat zone where death could come for you in the blink of an eye. Fueled by Thomas Newman's anxiously dramatic score (which channels Hans Zimmer's music from Dunkirk a little too much at times), the film imbues every second of Blake and Schofield's odyssey with a sense of urgency, in a way that a more traditional filmmaking style wouldn't have been able to. There are a few occasions when it's obvious where a pair of extended takes were welded together in post-production, but otherwise Mendes, Deakins, and editor Lee Smith do a seamless job of creating the illusion that everything was photographed in a continuous take. And as one would expect, the environments of 1917 are gorgeously lit, whether they're empty trenches horrifically strewn with corpses and barbed wire, or bombed-out buildings reduced to rubble by the war.

However, by the time the film enters its second half, the flaws in its design begin to stand out more clearly. As much as 1917 expresses the terrible senselessness and mindless destruction of the first World War visually, the way its camera lingers on the carnage left from major battles and the air of disillusionment among the British forces suggests it also wants to say something deeper about not only the psychological effects of warfare, but how WWI was a time of great change in terms of technology and Europe's class system. Yet, because 1917 has to maintain a constant sense of forward momentum, the quieter and more reflective scenes from Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns' screenplay never have quite enough room to breathe and properly sink in. Not helping matters, 1917 has to rely on some big plot contrivances in order to maintain its relentless pace as it stretches on. At its worst, this can make the movie feel like an open-world video game where Blake and Schofield are avatars for players who must complete a sequence of tasks in order to make it to the next cutscene.

Naturally, it's the performances that save  1917 from being a triumph of style over substance. Chapman and MacKay do an excellent job of portraying two ordinary soldiers who are suddenly dropped into extraordinary (and utterly terrifying) circumstances, but navigate them with all the courage, compassion, and determination they can muster, even when they falter. Mendes' choice to have most of the supporting characters played by big talents like Firth, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch, Richard Madden, and the Hot Priest himself, Andrew Scott, similarly pays off, allowing them to make an impression with very limited screen time. The interactions between Blake, Schofield, and the people they encounter on their desperate trek tell their own story about the importance of small deeds and acts of kindness in the face of terrible times. It's just too bad this ends up being overshadowed by the thrill ride elements of the film.

Mendes has a background in both film and stage theater, so one can understand why 1917 's one-shot aesthetic - a technique that combines elements of both mediums - appealed to him. The resulting movie is a mostly successful experiment, but also one that demonstrates the limits of this filmmaking style and why noticeable edits are important for a film that clearly wants to be more than a polished and visceral thriller about the horrors of war. 1917 is worth checking out on a big screen for its visuals alone (Deakins' next Oscar nomination is all but assured), even though its immersive cinematography can, indeed, have the unintended side effect of making the movie seem like a video game at times. Still, there's a beating heart beneath the machinery that prevents it from being a hollow experience.

NEXT: Watch the Official Trailer for 1917

1917  is now playing in U.S. theaters nationwide. It is 119 minutes long and is rated R for violence, some disturbing images, and language.

Key Release Dates

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• DVD & Streaming
• Drama , War

Content Caution

In Theaters

• December 25, 2019
• Dean-Charles Chapman as Blake; George MacKay as Schofield; Colin Firth as General Erinmore; Benedict Cumberbatch as Colonel Mackenzie; Mark Strong; Andrew Scott as Lieutenant Leslie

Home Release Date

• March 10, 2020

Distributor

• Universal Pictures

Movie Review

“Pick a man, grab your kit.”

Lance Cpl. Blake obeyed, just like a soldier should. He struggled to his feet and grabbed Lance Cpl. Schofield by the shoulder.

A dangerous mission? Perhaps. But as soldiers in the Great War, sitting was dangerous, too. As was sleeping. Eating. Breathing. Millions had already died in the war by then—by that warm, April day in 1917. Millions more might die before it ended. Blake and Schofield had seen their share of friends fall in this “war to end all wars.” But a mission involving just the two of them couldn’t be that bad, could it? Maybe they’d just be sent to find food, or to take a message through the labyrinthine maze of trenches. “Something fun,” Blake would say later.

But when Blake saw the general, he knew this was no mere food run. Generals, when they come to the trenches, don’t bring “fun.” They bring blood.

General Erinmore announces that the Germans, for now, are gone. They’ve pulled out of their own formidible trenches and retreated about nine miles back. Two battallions of British soldiers, led by the battle-hardened Col. Mackenzie, have pursued the enemy and are now preparing to attack. The German retreat, Mackenzie believes, means the enemy is just about out of fight. One last push might break the German lines and bring the interminable conflagration to, finally, a close.

But Mackenzie is wrong.

Erinmore has seen the reconnaisance photos. He’s seen what the Germans are retreating to : the massive web of trenches and fortifications known to the Germans as the Hindenburg Line, the strongest series of entrenchments the world has ever seen. The trenches themselves are lined three deep, with bends and angles forming murderous approaches. Artillery bristles in back, able to literally tear apart anything that’s in range.

To throw 1,600 men against this—it isn’t war. It’s butchery.

And Blake’s older brother is part of the planned attack, set for tomorrow morning.

Erinmore gives Blake and Schofield a grave assignment: Cover the nine miles between here and Mackenzie—through no-man’s land and scorched earth and still-held German territory. And they’ll need to do it alone.

Pick a man , the sergeant said. Grab a kit . For Blake, it’s all well and good. This mission is personal: He has to save his brother. But for Schofield … well, why couldn’t Blake have picked another man?

Positive Elements

Schofield is not pleased about being sent on this near-suicide mission. But when Blake tells Schofield that he can go back to the relative safety of the trenches if he wants, Schofield literally soldiers on.

They both push through unimaginably horrific circumstances as they go. Both men sacrifice a great deal on their adventure—and sacrifice for each other, too. Blake seems particularly kind-hearted. He saves Schofield’s life, for one thing—pulling him free of rubble caused by an explosion. The blast nearly blinds Schofield with dust, and when Schofield uses most of his water to clear his eyes, Blake volunteers his water, too. Blake tells funny stories to lighten the mood and tries to do what he can to encourage Schofield. And Blake isn’t just kind to Schofield: He does his best to save even an enemy pilot, too.

They help others along the way, too, and those others sometimes return the favor. One of our main soldiers gives food and sustenance to a young woman and a little baby hiding in the ruins of a French town. She treats his wounds briefly and begs him to stay, but he insists he must go on.

Spiritual Elements

General Erinmore quotes Rudyard Kipling in explaining why he’s sending just Blake and Schofield on this dangerous mission: “Down to Gehenna, or up to the Throne/He travels the fastest who travels alone.”

We see signs of devotion amongst the British soldiers: Some of the names they’ve given various trench “streets” have spiritual names (one is labeled “Church Avenue”, for instance), and a soldier sings the classic folk/gospel song “The Wayfaring Stranger”. The lyrics speak of the singer’s pain-salving journey to heaven, returning to loved ones long dead and God’s redeemed. “I’m only going over Jordan,” the singer intones. “I’m only going over home.” We see war-torn churches and hear church bells. One town fountain is seen in silhouette, aping the shape of a cross.

Less piously, a British lieutenant gives Blake and Schofield sardonic last rites as they prepare to sprint across the battle-scarred no-man’s land—sprinkling and splashing liquor over them in imitation of holy water.

Sexual Content

Blake and Schofield make a joking reference to masturbation. When one of them is tended to by a kindhearted young woman, she touches his face tenderly: While certainly not sexual, there’s a certain sensuality in the gesture—a longing that perhaps both of them have for not just love, but home and safety. We see pictures of soldiers’ loved ones.

Violent Content

World War II claimed more casualties, but World War I is perhaps unequaled in its horrific brutality. 1917 takes us into that horror and doesn’t let us out of it for two hours.

Blake and Schofield’s trip across no-man’s land—the space between the original British and German trenches—is only a precursor, but a telling one. They sprint past dead, decaying horses (a lieutenant advises them to just follow the “stench” to navigate their way if it gets dark). Dead bodies lie everywhere, too—sometimes half-submerged in water-logged shell craters, sometimes hanging from the ever-present barbed wire. That same wire tears up Schofield’s hand—an injury made significantly more horrific when Blake later bumps into him and sends Schofield’s hand into a rotting corpse, well past the wrist.

We see plenty of other signs of war throughout. Dead, unburied bodies are found everywhere in various stages of decay, it seems. Dozens form some of the flotsam naturally damming up a river, their faces white and bodies bloated. (Viewers see dead dogs and rats, too.)

We don’t just see dead people, though. We see people die. One man is apparently choked to death (though in the shadows). Another is stabbed and bleeds out. Several others are shot or fall victim to explosions. Shots are fired repeatedly at fleeing men. One man nearly drowns. A guy nearly dies after a tripwire is triggered: He’s pulled from the rubble, not breathing at all. (He does recover, though.) A man is dragged from a burning aircraft, legs on fire. Several soldiers—perhaps dozens—lie mangled in a frontline medic center. Some have arms or legs torn off, leaving bloody stumps with bones clearly visible. One has a section of his calf blown away, it seems. Blood is everywhere, and bandages are sometimes alarmingly scarce.

One combatant suggests that the war will not end until there’s just one last man standing, and sometimes that seems to hit uncomfortably close to the mark.

Blake relates a story about how one of his and Schofield’s trench-mates lost an ear to a rat.

Crude or Profane Language

The f-word is used more than a dozen times, and the British profanity “bloody” is used more than 20. We also hear lots of uses of the word “b–tard,” along with other profanities, including the s-word (at least three times), “b–ch,” “h—,” “b–ger,” “p-ss” and “b–locks.” We hear God’s name misused at least four times, and abuses of Jesus’ name about eight times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

When Blake asks Schofield what happened to a medal that he’d won for an earlier engagement, Schofield admits that he traded it for a bottle of wine. “I was thirsty,” he explains. Several others drink liquor: Schofield is given a flask by some soldiers. Several smoke cigarettes, too, and someone puffs a pipe.

Other Negative Elements

We see an apparently drunken soldier from a distance vomit in what’s left of a town street, and later he blearily staggers about a building ruin.

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

So said Britain’s great Winston Churchill, who experienced his own political hades during World War I. He presided over a couple of catastrophic disasters in what was to be one of history’s most catastrophic wars. Anywhere from 9 to 11 million military personnel died in the conflict. Tack on civilian deaths, and the count just about doubles.

We don’t see all those dead bodies in 1917. But we see enough. More than enough.

1917 is filmed through one apparent camera in one apparent take (cuts are artfully hidden here and there, making the film appear almost seamless). The camera follows Blake and Schofield through trenches, war-torn landscapes, skeletonized towns and scenes that seemed ripped right from medieval depictions of hell. Director Sam Mendes wants us to be fellow travelers, not just observers. He wants us to see the carnage in a way that feels urgent and raw and real. He almost forces us to feel the viscous blood on our fingers.

It’s a terrible, awful trek that our two soldiers make—one that we appreciate (and loathe) all the more for making it with them. This story, indeed, feels like hell sometimes.

But they keep going.

Sam Mendes’ camerawork and storytelling both magnify the horrors of war and humanize those in it. While Blake and Schofield dominate the story, their sparse interactions with their fellow soldiers and civilians are illuminating and sometimes even encouraging—with people offering kindness and care in the middle of the worst possible conditions.

The world Schofield and Blake find themselves in is a cruel one, and hungry. But in its face, they show courage and sacrifice. By living so vicariously through them, we find just a hint of beauty in all that brutality—a touch of inspiration to go with the tang of all that blood.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Movie Review: 1917 (2019)

• Dan Gunderman
• Movie Reviews
• --> January 29, 2020

1917 is director Sam Mendes’ first film since 2015’s 007 picture, “ Spectre ,” and no doubt reaches the pantheon of respected war films. A Best Picture contender at this year’s Academy Awards, the film is a visual masterpiece, aided by the lens of 15-time Oscar nominee Roger Deakins, strong direction and an uncompromising look at No Man’s Land from the trenches of World War I.

The awards darling is perhaps most notable for its expansive look at the frontline, shifting young soldiers from claustrophobic muddy pits to yards of coiled barbed wire, abandoned lengths of enemy territory, a seemingly peaceful country home, a fiery village, corpse-laden waters and much more. These settings alone take center stage as relative newcomer George MacKay (“ Ophelia ”) teams up with “Game of Thrones” alum Dean-Charles Chapman to deliver a pivotal message to the Second Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment, which is just hours away from stepping into a German-laid trap.

The end credits of Mendes’ project say he drew inspiration from his grandfather and the tales that have been passed along to his generation. This is clear, as Mendes opts for emotion and character-building, versus a focus on overall conflict and perhaps trite storytelling. Sure, those moments where brave British soldiers plunge “over the top” are exquisite — and, if done right, this is true of any World War I film. Yet, where 1917 sets itself apart is in its careful attention to detail and an anecdotal take on events of the Western Front; for Will Schofield’s (MacKay) experience weaving into and between disparate German units would be far different than other lance corporals, officers, and others.

This principle seems to align with “The Lord of the Rings” helmer, Peter Jackson’s, 2019 documentary, “ They Shall Not Grow Old ,” which also traced the emotional status of young soldiers on the front — in lieu of political turbulence and military strategy. Most soldiers were unaware of the latest political schemes — instead simply cast into the “meat grinder” that was the attrition-fueled Great War. These films, along with another recent project, “Journey’s End,” certainly add depth to the conflict’s ever-growing oeuvre. Similar to 1917 , Saul Dibb’s “Journey’s End” retraces the footsteps of a young soldier and his shrinking unit. Both films are a masterclass in visual arts and the minutiae and emotional tug-of-war of these global campaigns.

More specifically, 1917 and its impressive ensemble begins with Colin Firth’s (“ Kingsman: The Golden Circle ”) General Erinmore summoning Schofield and Chapman’s Lance Corporal Tom Blake for a top-secret mission to pull back the Devons’ Second Battalion before they are torn apart by a strategically relocated German front. With field telephone lines cut, there is only one way to access the regiment, led by Colonel Mackenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch, “ Avengers: Endgame ”): A hand-delivered message. Erinmore taps Blake and Schofield for the daring mission.

The duo quickly traverse the British line for the best exit point — the top of a trench that just nights before spilled immeasurable British blood — and set off with their weapons, a flare gun and official postage from the General. What Schofield and Blake subsequently see is nearly indescribable, from drowned allies, dead animals, abandoned properties, mountains of artillery shells and a downed enemy fighter pilot. Following a swift and harsh tragedy, Schofield becomes doggedly determined to reach the front and prevent the loss of 1,600-plus lives. He’ll encounter sporadic German fighters, incredibly muddy trails, a mobile British unit and a kind French woman and orphan, holed up below ground with just a fire and German leftovers for sustenance. The question is: Will he defy odds and reach Mackenzie, along with the other Blake brother (another “Game of Thrones” alum, Richard Madden)?

Mendes and Deakins made another bold artistic choice, to boot: Presenting the film as one long take, devoid of choppy cuts, flashbacks, etc. The result is mesmerizing, allowing for immense character growth and “proximity” to these living, breathing fighters of the Lost Generation. Deakins, no doubt, is worthy of his latest Oscar nomination. His filmmaking prowess on 1917 and Mendes’ narrative vision will make the work something long studied by film students and scholars alike.

However, at times, the film appears to skew a bit too far toward Schofield’s perspective, but the bold point of view choice ultimately pays dividends, showing that the action is more about a heroic act that can go largely unnoticed in an enormous and wretched campaign that took around 20 million lives.

Suffice to say, viewers will see Mendes and Deakins take the Oscar stage; but beyond its run at the box office, 1917 will stand as a powerful testament to the brutality and pointlessness of warfare for decades to come. In fact, it is — where it rightly belongs — likely on many critics’ shortlist of top war films, rivaling the likes of “Saving Private Ryan,” “Apocalypse Now,” “ Dunkirk ” and “The Thin Red Line.”

Tagged: England , message , military , soldier , trap , WWI

Dan is an author, film critic and media professional. He is a former staff writer for the N.Y. Daily News, where he served as a film/TV reviewer with a "Top Critic" designation on Rotten Tomatoes. His debut historical fiction novel, "Synod," was published by an independent press in Jan. 2018, receiving praise among indie book reviewers. His research interests include English, military and political history.

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1917 Is a Visual Feat and a Bad Movie

Sam Mendes’s war drama is designed to look like it was shot in two long takes. But this technical accomplishment is wasted on a soulless film.

Hollywood has long excelled at mining beauty from war . Some of moviemaking’s most indelible images have come from dramatizations of battle, from the early Oscar winner All Quiet on the Western Front to Christopher Nolan’s 2017 blockbuster, Dunkirk . Taking any situation, such as the horrifying trench combat of the First World War, and turning it into cinema will smooth away some of the crueler realities, no matter the director’s intent. Sam Mendes’s 1917 is a particularly beautiful war film, a technical feat that turns a somber mission into a burnished action thriller, one designed to look like it was shot in two hour-long single takes.

It obviously wasn’t—Mendes and his director of photography, the venerable Roger Deakins, have harnessed breakthroughs in moviemaking tech to create these faux long shots, similar to those in the Oscar-winning film Birdman . 1917 is presented in two shots, one that takes place during the day and one after the sun has gone down. The camera follows Lance Corporals William Schofield (George MacKay) and Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) as they dash across no-man’s-land in northern France to warn British troops about an enemy trap. The extended takes seem to exist to crank up the tension of their mission, forcing the story to progress in real time and conveying the feeling of a ticking clock. Mendes and Deakins’s visual achievement here is undeniable.

Yet mere minutes into the film, the gimmick begins to chafe. As the two boys are summoned into a briefing with their stiff-upper-lip leader, General Erinmore (Colin Firth), the camera dutifully hovers behind them as they walk through the trenches. After they receive their orders and head into battle, figuring out how Mendes will keep the action from cutting becomes a kind of photographic guessing game for the audience. I don’t consider myself a curmudgeon about CGI-assisted long takes; Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men and Gravity used them to great effect, and though the themes of Birdman left me cold, the camerawork largely delighted me.

In those cases, though, the lack of cutting ramped up the tension. 1917 attempts to do the same, to put the viewer in the headspace of a soldier who might be fired on at any moment. But the technique had the opposite effect for me. I could think only of the camera, which itself becomes a character, probing the haunting, bombed-out towns and wasteland battlefields that Schofield and Blake tromp through. There is no sense of real danger, because the mission has to continue, if only to keep this impressive long shot going. Any time there’s a larger, more cataclysmic set piece, our heroes look like tiny chess pieces on a much bigger board, bystanders who move around exploding mortars and whizzing bullets to produce the most stunning tableaux possible.

Some of my favorite war films could be called gorgeous, including Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line , with its poetic lushness, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now , with its epic bloviations. Steven Spielberg, Hollywood’s greatest master of camera blocking, has made movies about both world wars ( War Horse and Saving Private Ryan ) featuring thrill-ride battle sequences that don’t skimp on the brutality. But those films are all grounded by characters and themes, while 1917 has to largely strip those elements away in service of its grand stunt.

Schofield and Blake are stoic protagonists, and though MacKay does particularly well shouldering the burden of having the action constantly centered on him, there isn’t a lot of depth to either soldier. Better-known actors such as Firth, Andrew Scott, Mark Strong, and Benedict Cumberbatch stop by for brief cameos that each have more life. But since the mission demands that our heroes press on, those all-stars depart just as quickly, unable to keep up with the camera. Scott, in particular, makes a huge impression early on as a trench commander dripping with cynicism; his character’s backstory seems far more interesting than Schofield and Blake’s trek, but there’s no time to delve into it.

The simplicity of the mission, necessitated by the visual conceit, is double-edged. All Schofield and Blake have to do is give a warning to British troops and halt their attack before it begins, lest they fall into a German trap. They’re risking their life to stop further progress, and every character they meet comments on the cruel sense of stasis that defines the conflict. The script, by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, keeps hinting at the ultimate futility of the First World War, during which millions of men heaved themselves out of trenches and toward certain death for the sake of a few miles of territory. Though 1917 tries to communicate that nightmarish reality, its long-take trickery ends up feeling similarly pointless.

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Americans Have Enjoyed Imagining Civil War for a Long, Long Time

The “what if we had a big ol’ fight” genre is back, this time on the big screen..

The year is 1849. Martin Van Buren has just been sworn in for his fourth term as president. Every state from the Carolinas on south secedes from the Union. The U.S. Army occupies Richmond to keep Virginia from joining them. Separatists take to the western mountains and organize a guerrilla campaign. In Washington, Van Buren assumes dictatorial powers, hangs traitors on a whim. The sons of the Old Dominion have to choose between the Union they have been raised to admire and the state they deeply adore.

An intriguing alternate history? Not quite. The novel in which this story appears flashed forward in time, not back. Well, actually, it did both: Published in 1836 but with a date on the title page of 1856, as if remembering a war that had already occurred, The Partisan Leader: A Tale of the Future didn’t so much relate a different version of the Civil War as prophesy its coming, missing the eventual start date by only a dozen years.

That makes it the little-known granddaddy of a whole subgenre of American literature (and now film): blood-drenched imaginings of what it would be like to witness the crackup of the country. Americans have always been at once horrified and titillated by the prospect of these states becoming disunited. If the U.S. is an “imagined community,” as the anthropologist Benedict Anderson described the modern nation-state, one of the things its citizens most love to imagine is its violent undoing.

Lately, even more so than usual, a profound sense of decline and disintegration has come to define the national mood. How obvious, then, even inevitable, to pair this primordial form of American catastrophism with the evidently deathless genre of big-budget disaster movies. Americans fighting Americans, the country falling apart, the breakdown of civic order—what could be more popcorn-worthy than that?

As a genre, disunion fantasy fiction has often showcased bad politics and even worse art. The hypothetical scenarios of such works tend to be hilariously implausible, the authors’ intentions murky at best—or, sometimes, clearly mercenary. Even in this context, however, Alex Garland’s much-ballyhooed Civil War stands out for its eagerness to exploit popular fears of mass political violence without offering any meaningful reflection on the underlying factors that have led to it. Experience it in IMAX! the promotional poster urges, in a tone that sits uncomfortably with the director’s claim that he made the film as a warning of what could occur if we are not careful. If the past is any guide, such macabre depictions of what Edmund Wilson called “ patriotic gore ” may only accustom us to the likelihood that it will.

Obsessing about a potential future civil war was a favorite activity of Americans in the years before they ventured into the fields to murder one another en masse. As the crisis over slavery deepened, a bumper crop of new novels depicted a Southern breakaway movement and a bloody conflict with the North. The books’ authors tended not to deplore the possibility but to welcome it. They wanted readers to envision, from the safety of their armchairs, what the destruction of the nation would look like—and to help bring it on.

The Partisan Leader , though published under a pseudonym, was widely known to be the work of a Virginian named Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, a son of the slavocracy who taught at the College of William and Mary and landed sooner than most Southerners on the conclusion that secession offered the only guarantee for the continuation of Southern institutions—slavery above all. As early as 1820, Tucker swore never to rest until he saw the Union “shattered into pieces.” A professor of law at William and Mary for nearly 20 years, Tucker trained a generation of Southern leaders in how to think about the Constitution. Later, his students would lead their states out of the Union, just as Tucker had hoped.

But Tucker’s ambitions as an educator went beyond formal instruction. Turning to fiction and using the novels of Walter Scott as a model, he wanted to help Southerners imagine how the breakup of the Union might happen, and to show where their loyalties should lie if it did.

Duff Green, a prominent Washington publisher and close ally of South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun, printed 2,000 copies of the book in two volumes. The Southern Literary Messenger, an influential periodical then edited by Edgar Allan Poe (who corresponded with Tucker and sought advice from him), praised the artistry and plausibility of the novel, as well as its argument for Southern resistance to federal tyranny: “The reader rises from the perusal of the book with solemn impressions of the probable truth of all the writer’s speculations; and he naturally asks himself, by what means the evils he has seen depicted may be prevented.” Northern journals ignored the scandalous work, and booksellers refused to stock it, but The Partisan Leader found new relevance a quarter century later, with the secession of the seven southernmost states. In 1861 a New York publisher reprinted the book with the title A Key to the Disunion Conspiracy . The novel seemed to have predicted the future. Events were following Tucker’s script.

Seizing on Tucker’s prescient vision, other writers saw a market for similar works, only now they added elaborately detailed portrayals of interstate violence—the CGI of the time. In 1859 John Beauchamp Jones, a successful Maryland novelist (also once praised by Poe), published Wild Southern Scenes: A Tale of Disunion! And Border War! Thirteen Southern states abandon Congress, then send an army to occupy New York City and abduct free Black people and bring them back as slaves. A villainous Northern general proclaims himself “Lord Protector of the United States,” invades the South, and wields the guillotine to gruesome effect. Great Britain leaps into the fray, keen to take advantage of the chaos and reclaim its lost colonies. North and South join together to expel the foreign foe. The Constitution is restored.

A New York–based businessmen’s magazine found the book full of “ingenuity and invention” and hoped it would “have the effect of opening the eyes of the more conservative to the terrible results that will follow from the sectional madness and folly now disturbing the country.” By contrast, Edmund Ruffin, an eccentric, long-maned agricultural reformer from Virginia and a passionate advocate of Southern separatism, thought Jones’ book “very foolish”—especially its feel-good ending—and decided he could do better. The result, Anticipations of the Future (1860), was both impressively timely and remarkably unhinged.

The novel, serialized in a pro-secession South Carolina newspaper, then packaged as a book by a top Southern publisher, took the form of fictional dispatches by a correspondent to an English newspaper about a crisis following the Lower South’s secession from the Union. To suppress the rebellion, the president of the United States, New York’s William Seward, sends an army into Virginia, prompting the rest of the slave states to leave. A gruesome fight ensues, climaxing with the wholesale slaughter of mixed-race Northern armies, described by Ruffin in gory detail. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison is hanged, his corpse defiled by vultures. Meanwhile, the Western states secede and join the rebellion. Northern cities go up in smoke, leaving “many thousands of charred and partly consumed skeletons.”

Writing these scenes, Ruffin confided to his diary, was “alike amusing to my mind, & … conducive to immediate pleasure.”

Only about 400 readers bothered to pick up Ruffin’s overwrought novel, much to the author’s chagrin. That might have been because the future he anticipated was already becoming a reality. In the novel, South Carolina seizes Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor—just where the actual fighting would begin only months after the publication of Ruffin’s book, when the 67-year-old author, a volunteer with the militia, was himself given the high honor of firing one of the first shots in the war he had fantasized about with such pleasure.

The unfathomable devastation that ensued, leaving three-quarters of a million dead, hundreds of thousands more wounded in body and mind, and much of the South a smoldering ruin, took the fun out of imagining what a nation-rending conflict would look like. The genre disappeared for a time. Ruffin shot himself in the head after the surrender at Appomattox. The reality of Southern secession hadn’t matched up to the turgid fantasies of his fiction.

In the decades after the Civil War, expectations of national division over slavery were replaced by fears that mass immigration would undermine American unity. In 1880 Canadian-born San Francisco lawyer and journalist Pierton W. Dooner published Last Days of the Republic , which depicted a Chinese army overthrowing the Pacific states, then marching east all the way to Washington: “The very name of the United States of America was thus blotted from the record of nations and peoples.”

Perhaps one of the strangest disunion-fantasy novels ever published was Imperium in Imperio (1899), by Sutton E. Griggs, a 27-year-old preacher and son of formerly enslaved parents. The novel revolves around a secret government⁠ of, by, and for Black Americans⁠, based in a bunker beneath a Texas college. Devoted to racial progress and fighting discrimination, the Imperium recruits a rising generation of ambitious, educated Black men who have grown frustrated at being denied the most basic rights and privileges of citizenship. “They grew to hate a flag that would float in an undisturbed manner over such a condition of affairs,” Griggs writes. “They began to abuse and execrate a national government that would not protect them against color prejudice, but on the contrary actually practiced it itself.”

After a black postmaster is lynched in South Carolina⁠—an event that really happened , a year before Griggs published his novel⁠—the Imperium decides to take Austin and declare war on the United States. “Thus,” the president of the Imperium proclaims, “will the Negro have an empire of his own.”

The turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s, breeding a new wave of concern about national failure and societal collapse, led to another boomlet in fictional depictions of the United States’ cracking up. The Texas-Israeli War: 1999 , written by sci-fi authors Jake Saunders and the late Howard Waldrop at the peak of the 1973 oil crisis, depicted the reestablishment of the independent Lone Star Republic in a world torn apart by biological and chemical warfare. After Texans kidnap the American president, mercenaries from the Jewish State attempt to rescue him. On Wings of Song (1979), by Thomas Disch, portrayed an America destroyed by economic inequality and culture war, divided between a liberal “Babylon” on the coasts and a semiautonomous conservative region, “Columbia,” in the heartland, populated by “undergoders”—an astute depiction of the rural-urban divide that would only worsen in the coming years. In Margaret Atwood’s now-canonical The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), a turn to religious fundamentalism brings a second civil war and the rise of a theocratic, women-enslaving dictatorship.

A few novels rejected dystopian warnings in favor of, like the antebellum Southern writers, actually proposing disunion as an improvement on the status quo—a stance shared by authors of vastly different political stripes. Ecotopia , a 1975 novel by the environmentalist Ernest Callenbach, imagined the establishment of a separatist West Coast republic whose residents live in dynamic, sustainable harmony with one another and with nature, while far on the other side of the political divide, William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries (1978) records the events of the “Great Revolution of 1991–1999,” in which Black people, Jews, and other non-Aryans are slaughtered and white “race traitors” hanged from lampposts. Seizing nuclear bombs from a military base, a shadowy group called the Order starts an atomic civil war with the federal government.

It can hardly be a good thing that the antebellum era’s obsession with concocting increasingly bloody disunion scenarios has reappeared with fresh vigor in recent years. There have been too many next-civil-war books to count, and most, true to the form, have been absolute garbage—maudlin, contrived, clichéd.

But not all. In Ben H. Winters’ Underground Airlines (2016), set in a 21 st -century United States where slavery remains legal in four states and the titular rescue network helps “Persons Bound to Labor” escape to Canada, the alt-history is only a provocative premise for airing matters relevant in both its fictional world and our real one: What compromises hold a country together, and when are those not worth the cost? Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) shows a country split apart at the end of this century over an attempt to ban fossil fuels. El Akkad at once lays out a clever, thought-provoking scenario—more stable Middle Eastern powers intervene as the U.S. often has in the civil wars of other nations—and delves into complexities of identity, loyalty, and the human cost of civil conflict. Christopher Brown’s harrowing Tropic of Kansas (2017) paints a harrowing picture of a nation in the grip of authoritarianism and ecological collapse and celebrates the relentless pursuit of justice in the face of overwhelming odds.

And now we have director Alex Garland’s new film, with a title as bland as the movie itself. Like so much in our culture right now, Civil War isn’t nearly weighty enough to bear the load of discourse that’s been based on it. Focused on the ethical dilemmas and psychological torments involved in war photography—which, OK?—the movie takes advantage of our dark fascination with the possibility of political polarization leading to constitutional crisis and political violence, while refusing to actually explore those themes.

For all the ear-splitting explosions and hair-raising exchanges of gunfire across a variety of modern American landscapes—and, yes, the IMAX experience is intense—the film seems to be conscious of its own essentially pornographic nature. There is something cheap and unseemly in the way the camera lingers on a pile of human bodies, or the Lincoln Memorial blown to smithereens. Just as Southern secessionist Edmund Ruffin found writing gory scenes of executions and massacres “conducive to immediate pleasure,” Joel, one of the war photographers in Civil War (played by Wagner Moura), looks out on a night sky filled with arcing mortar shells and grunts, “This gunfire is getting me so fucking hard!”

The viewer is meant to be implicated, and we are. But instead of any profounder meditations on why mass slaughter both attracts and sickens us—for even Joel is eventually reduced to a puddle of tears—the film offers 90 more minutes of picturesque wreckage, bone-chilling executions, and, finally, the eagerly panted-after “money shot” (a phrase one of the journalists actually uses as the film’s climactic scene unfolds). At least Ruffin had an excuse for pleasing himself by turning his fantasies of American carnage into art: He wanted to bring it about. Garland claims he wants his film to do the opposite, but it’s strange, then, that not a single line or moment even implicitly alludes to what if anything could have been done to keep things from reaching such a breaking point.

In interviews, the filmmaker has claimed , “It’s a film about the product of polarization and division.” But if we are to understand that the president (played by Nick Offerman), who appears only fleetingly in the movie, has turned “fascistic,” as Garland explains —claiming a third term, abolishing the FBI, bombing American citizens—why is it bad that insurgents have risen up to overthrow him? If it’s not bad, how can the movie be described, as lead actress Kirsten Dunst has put it , as “anti-war”?

This deeply unserious film is not interested in probing those tensions, or, more to the point, its creator is too scared of alienating half the public by addressing them. It’s neither pedantic nor partisan to object to such explosive material being used to such shallow ends. Far from deterring the violence it depicts, Civil War may well convince some content-addled moviegoers that it sure would be something to see.