Entertaining and stunning. But not flawless.

Rating: 5/10 (22 February 2020)

There has been set a lot about the cinematographic grandeur of this movie. Though nevertheless, 1917 could not really 'capture' me. Let me explain to you wihy, without going into details too much:
The movie to me felt like The Lord of the Rings: An unlikely hero goes with a friend on a quest to bring something valuable into the dark lands. A lot of the praised cinematics of this movie remind me a lot of Lotr as well. The wasteland, the forest with the chanting, the firelands and also Blake dying struck me a lot like Frodo (almost) dying.
Unlike Lotr there wasn't really a side story though. Going from point a to point b was kind of it. And it would not have been that hard if it were not for some highely unlikely events. Using the first World War as a scenery also felt somewhat random to me; there was hardly any context concerning the war. Germans are evil and shoot like stormtroopers, but didn't get any human charectaristics. This movie could have also been situated in the American Civil War or the Cold War near the Berlin wall; kind of everywhere where the protagonist has to beyond enemy lines without modern technology.
I do wonder what happened to the hero since he stuck his open wound hand in a dead man's body which would seem like a fatal infection waiting to happen back then.