Visions of Hell

Rating: 7/10 (21 January 2020)

The strong point of this film: It's a stark reminder that Hell is on Earth and we humans are responsible for creating it. In that way, it is a successful and haunting movie.
Another, more neutral way of describing the movie would be as a WW1 battlefield landscape tour. We're taken around in all kinds of environments resulting from artillery shelling; from the trenches, bunkers, no man's land, artillery dumps, destroyed farmsteads, burning town ruins, and ongoing assault and what else. The amount of engagement with these surroundings, or even depth of characters, is however relatively limited.
There are two archetypes of "war movies": one type that tries to accurately portray military actions, and another that uses war as a backdrop for something else, such as psychological studies; 1917 belongs to this second category. Drawing comparisons, a similar recent movie is Dunkirk, but 1917 is far more low key with the threat often lurking in the background rather than asserting itself at every moment.
Ultimately, I had been wanting more of an active take on the subject matter, i.e. WW1 military history, and it seems I will have to wait longer.