A Big Waste Of Time: Style For Styles Sake

Rating: 4/10 (14 January 2020)

I take no pleasure in stating 1917 is a huge wasted opportunity. The selling point for Sam Mendes' (director of American Beauty & Skyfall) new film is that it's a war film shot to look like one continuous take. Bold move for a genre of cinema that requires loads of characters, huge action set pieces and usually many locations. So how can this be pulled off effectively? Well , in this case not very well it seems.
The trouble with 1917 is it all feels too clean and staged. I understand that they were trying to go for one continuous visceral experience with two troopers tasked with crossing enemy territory to send a message of stopping an assault from British forces entering a German enemy trap (A race against time literally) but it never felt tense when everything felt set-up. And this is all due to the premise of the film. Why sacrifice tension and dread of troopers in the trenches for some silly gimmick that is going to limit authenticity? Single take shots are the cool kid on the block for sure. A film that carries one in their film is immediately looked upon favourly because yes, they can be quite impressive. See films like Children of Men, Rope, Season one of True Detective, Boogie Nights or Atonement for such good examples. However, you have to know where to use it. It can be a miraculous style of getting across tension or nearing dread or a character's journey in a moment. However, it has limitations which makes making a film purely running on this shot troublesome. So many times did they have resort to cheap blackouts or tricks to continue the single take over a couple of days in a 2 hour film. Kind of hard to produce entertainment when you are literally trying to produce the slowness of time and get to different locations and have different looks in your scene (the burning church scene was clearly done to turn the audience away from the same cloudy skies and muddy fields).
I can say with great confidence that only two moments in this film benefited from the single take
approach (The start of the town scene with the sniper and the intense run to find the Colonel in the trenches). For that, I tip my hat to Roger Deakins and everyone involved in those scenes. Everything else however, felt so staged and empty. Almost like looking at a war memorial set piece at a museum. Case in point, there is a scene early on where the troops sent on the mission are going through their trenches to exit unto enemy territory where there's obviously a take going around showing the fear and falling morale of the battalion. A moment should invoke this incoming dread and fear of death. Instead, it all looks glossy and the camera never really smartly focuses on any of the troopers faces. It just sort of hovers overhead, enough to be in the trenches but far away fron the troops to cut off real intimacy Imagine doing a shot like in the classic WW1 movie Paths of Glory where the camera goes slowly down the trenches as all the soldiers look on and you just hear the sound of explosions as the music. Which is another thing 1917 buggers up on.
Scenes can work without music. They don't continuously have to spell out incoming dread. It just seemed like a really lazy way of saying oh jeez this scene is intense. Oh look at me. It's all in one take and oh the fear in these soldiers and of time running out is palpable. Be more adventurous with your music choices and use. So many sequences could've carried across dread more if all we heard was soldiers trudging feet in the mud or explosions going off. Just another amateur move.
If you can tell, I found 1917 to be a massive disappointment. Not that's it's intentions were not bold or interesting, but it just didn't work. If you are selling your film on a specific style, then use it well. Use it so it actually provides tension and dread. It was not here. Look, it's a war that needs to be remembered and my hate for this film does not discount the hard work and sacrifice these men had on the battlefield. They are heroes and not the worst film will take that away. Its just a shame that such a film couldn't have been done better with just a normal, more focussed approach instead of falling for a stylistic trick.