Immersion in Hell

Rating: 10/10 (25 January 2020)

Every now and then a war movie comes around that does everything it can to place the audience in the reality of the topic, even if the actual plot is a little bit hokey. Saving Private Ryan famously did this, especially for the Omaha Beach landing sequence.
1917 does it again for the Western Front of World War 1, in a way I can't remember ever seeing before. It's probably the most accurate depiction of WW1 since the original All Quiet on the Western Front. The attention to detail as the two main characters make their way through the story is incredible, and reminds me of some of the most horrific stories I've read of the war- of soldiers finding themselves laying in mud surrounded by the bodyparts of their mates (and enemies), or of a buddy getting so stuck in the mud in a dangerous place that nobody could rescue him, and he slowly goes insane as he starves to death and is eventually shot out of pity. This last one doesn't happen in the movie, but you could certainly imagine how it could.
The way the movie is filmed, famously as a single sequence/shot with only one or two real cuts, makes it extremely immersive. That, plus the attention to detail, turns the film from a typical war movie into more of a horror story. You are seeing the action from the characters' eyes, and it is impossible to know what is coming next. The tension and suspense are as thick as Passchendaele mud.
What a great film. It is a masterpiece.