"1917": An Extremely Honorable Look At The Horror That Was World War I

Rating: 10/10 (13 January 2020)

It was the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand at the hands of Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 that set off World War I. When all was said and done, four years and six and a half months later, on November 11, 1918, as many as fifteen million people, civilians and soldiers alike lay dead on the continent of Europe.
It remains one of the most misunderstood conflicts in human history's sadly long (and getting longer by the minute) series of wars. But it's a war that hasn't necessarily gotten as much attention from Hollywood as, say, World War II, Vietnam, or the wars America has fought since September 11, 2001. The best films about what Woodrow Wilson once called "The War To End All Wars" have been Lewis Milestone's 1930 classic ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, and Stanley Kubrick's 1957 magnum opus PATHS OF GLORY. One can now add director Sam Mendes' "1917" to that rather short list.
In this movie, shot in one huge long flowing take lasting 119 minutes or so, young British actors Drew-Charles Chapman and George MacKay portray two British soldiers assigned to what could best be called a suicide mission. They have to deliver a message to a British force deep inside enemy territory to call off an attack against a supposedly retreating German battalion, which their commanders have labeled to be a deadly trap. Indeed, this deadly trap, if the Brits fall into it, will result in the loss of 1600 soldiers, including Chapman's own brother (Richard Madden). And in that time, a bond of brotherhood will develop between these two soldiers as they make their long trek across a wide swath of no-man's land, full of body-filled trenches, tripwires, German snipers, and all other manner of the horrors of war the likes of which humanity had never seen before.
Mendes, whose directing credits prior to "1917" included the 1999 Oscar-winning AMERICAN BEAUTY, 2002's ROAD TO PERDITION, and the 2012 James Bond offering SKYFALL, both directed and co-scripted "1917", inspired by the stories his grandfather told him about this brutal part of human history, a war that proved most devastating to Mendes' native England, not only in the numbers of Brits who were killed, but also in the manner in which more than a few of them died; this was the first known instance, and by no means the last, of chemical weapons being used in military conflict. And while Mendes' film does not feature any uses of chemical weaponry like mustard gas in its story, the director nevertheless shows a great deal of the brutality and inhumanity of this war, and how Chapman and MacKay keep their humanity about them in a situation in which bloody death is a constant thing. That he was able to do this in one long single take from start to finish is indeed an incredible achievement; it is a technical marvel. But Chapman's and MacKay's performances as the young soldiers offer up the importance of how innocence is always the first thing that gets destroyed in war, helping make "1917" a masterpiece that goes beyond just the "one-take" technical brilliance.
Mendes is particularly good in the opening section of the film, creating the long flowing shots in the trenches, ones that are, whether wittingly or not, a nod to what Kubrick had done with brilliance in PATHS OF GLORY; and the avant-garde score by Thomas Newman (AMERICAN BEAUTY; BRIDGE OF SPIES) captures both the horror and the humanity of the situation at hand. While Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch, both great actors on their own, do have roles in here, the focus remains on Chapman and MacKay throughout, ensuring that "1917" does for World War I what both ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT and PATHS OF GLORY had done before it: find a spark of decency in one of humanity's darkest times.