Good enough.

Rating: 6/10 (13 January 2020)

I wanted more, simply put.
1917 was directed by the extremely talented Sam Mendes and stars George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman on a journey to deliver a message to stop a British attack before it starts.
Starting off with positives, it's immediately apparent that the work put into the set, costume, and sound design is among the best of the year, and Roger Deakins puts on a dazzling spectacle with his camera-work, making it look like the movie was shot in a single take (and in the titular year). But it's here where the movie begins to fall apart.
While the technical aspects are top notch, the story and writing are just decent. The characters have a severe lack of depth and in a two-hour movie, it doesn't work in the movie's favor. Some may compare this to Dunkirk, which is a film that I think is one of the best movies ever made, which may prompt the reader to question why I thought 1917 was just okay.
The pacing. That's the movie's biggest problem, unlike Dunkirk, which was almost entirely break-neck in its speed. While the pacing in 1917 is by no means bad, it isn't fast enough to justify spending so much time with characters that the audience doesn't have much reason to care for. Also there's a couple moments that made me question the intelligence of the two leads. Similarly, characters come and go throughout the movie, making criminal underuse of actors like Colin Firth and Andrew Scott.
I understand that most of war is downtime, but downtime in film isn't engaging, at least not without characters to care about or good dialogue to speak. Most of the movie is spent walking, this may be credited to the one-take method the movie is using, which begins to feel like a gimmick the more it goes on.
Overall, 1917 is an extremely competent piece of war cinema, but one that sacrifices dialogue and characters in lieu of a camera gimmick. While it's by no means a bad movie, I don't think it warrants the seemingly infinite praise it's receiving.
66/100