A technical achievement, but a glamorisation of WWI

Rating: 6/10 (27 January 2020)

You have to admire the technical achievement and the art direction. It really looks like the actors are moving through endless trenches and battlefields. Some of it must have been CGI-ed, though you can't tell what. You soon forget you're watching "one shot". Of course it isn't one shot. It's just made to look like it.
What lets the film down is an implausible, paper-thin storyline (the upper echelons of the British military were inept, but even they wouldn't have sent only two soldiers to relay a vital message calling off a doomed advance) that unavoidably glamorises WWI. It's as if the film-makers were still in James Bond fantasy land, and were primarily concerned with one question: what's exciting? Ooh, I know! A bunker collapsing! A plane crashing right on to the main characters! A chase through a ruined town spookily lit by swinging flares! A fall into a raging river! A ridiculous run along the front line just as the soldiers are going over the top, making such a thing more difficult to negotiate than the trenches themselves. Realistic this film is not. At least with a movie like Saving Private Ryan the action sequences were in service of an interesting plot that had some basis in fact. Here they're just shoved in for no good reason.
To me, it's a shame. There must be a million actual, real-life WWI stories that haven't been told on film. Why didn't Sam Mendes tell one of them instead of going for this fiction?