Other than a few nitpicks, this is a great WWI soon to be epic

Rating: 9/10 (28 January 2020)

At first, I wasn't all that buzzed to see this movie; continuous one-take movies weren't really my thing. But then the more I thought about it, if any genre of film fit the found footage genre it'd have to war movies. Getting inside the mind of a soldier in the middle of the war and experiencing what they're experiencing is a great way to help us appreciate what real life soldiers do for us, and understand what they've gone through.
The story focuses on two soldiers, Lance and Will, who are giving a mission to deliver a message over enemy lines in order to stop a deadly trap that will wipe out 1,600 British troops.
Both Dean-Charles Chapman (Lance) and George MacKay (Will) do a great job in this movie. I've known MacKay was an amazing actor since his roles in Captain Fantastic and Pride. And Chapman has certainly come a long way since his role as Tommen Baratheon in Game of Thrones. Not once in their interactions was I checking my watch, and you believe their concern for one another. Their reaction to seeing and being near dead, rotting bodies above the trenches were just great, exactly how the real life soldiers saw and felt.
Director Sam Mendes is a master at directing, and its amazing to know this is his first continuous-shot movie. The costumes, the sets, the atmosphere are all great.
My nitpicks are few as well. My first nitpick is something that happens around half way through the movie, when Will is hiding in a cellar below the ruins of a city, and he meets a French girl, and Will only speaks English and can somehow understand French, and the French girl can't speak English, but can somehow understand it. It's a nitpick that I've seen in a lot of movies, and it sorta puts it to shame when you know Christoph Waltz learned Italian to prepare for his role as Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds. My other nitpick is some of the marketing material, specifically (spoilers) at the end of the movie when Will is running through the field to get to the army commander with the message; I already saw it in the trailer, and after the opening trench scene ended I knew one or both of them would make it to the end anyway, so some of the tension disappeared at that point.
It was also nice seeing Colin Firth, Andrew Scott, Benedict Cumberbatch, Richard Madden in this movie too. I'd even say this movie gave me more than Saving Private Ryan did. 9 out of 10, definitely give it a see while it's out in cinemas.