Unbelievably Predictable - Triumph of Impulsive - Emo Characters - More Like 2019 than 1917!

Rating: 2/10 (2 April 2020)

How was movie not panned right out of jump street? Mendez forces dramatic, impulsive, and out of place behaviors on his characters that casts any semblance of verisimilitude into the trash heap! Why couldn't he have developed the story with characters that bore some kind of resemblance to how actual 1917 era British army infantry soldiers would have carried themselves? We're supposed to believe that Blake - selected for smarts, and practical map reading, all the while driven to save his brother, would have cast that all aside when he pulled the German pilot from the crash only to then drop his guard whilst the burned, bone fractured, German pilot managed to get the drop on him?
An aside, is anti-German bias so powerful in 2019, that Mendes had to depict the same badly injured German pilot just rescued from a fiery death by Blake, as being so stupid, callous, and evil, that he would have forsaken every gut instinct in him to provoke the very men who saved him from fire, but instead stab the very man who pulled him out of the fire only to then be predictably shot by the other soldier?
Next, Schofield Encounters other British soldiers while he attempts to save or at least be present while his dead friend lies on the ground yet nobody - not least the British officer or any of the soldiers, nor later on Blake's own brother - ever asks about the circumstances of his dying? Hullo! A British officer comes upon Schofield holding the freshly stabbed Blake but has zero curiosity as to how that would've occurred followig after a German plane crash?
Schofield's character then can't can't have any consistency as Mendes dramatically depicts him like Hamlet on stage in that town scene with the fires where Schofield forgets he's even on a battlefield watching as the German soldier run towards him, yet he freezes in a bizarre upright stance as if shrieking to the audience "I'm actually a pacifist how did I get here?" It's all Hollywood or Pinewood as he strangely escapes from being hit by under the glaring lights of illumination flares, with so many Germans firing at him. OK "scenejump" to the basement where he morphs again but with unbelievable dramatic pause into a dude version of mother Theresa helping the Belgian or French lady and her baby - oblivious to his entire mission. After the strange waterfall jump on otherwise flat terrain around Arrass, and subsequently wandering into a group of soldiers listening to a perfectly sung hymn, we're now supposed to accept that Scofield again morphs this time into a passive bot wasting hours leaning up against a tree but not sleeping!
At this point it's all copycat Saving Private Ryan and some other movies where the protagonist leaps into his apex mission moment but stupidly selects the very words that best self-obstruct his own mission. Instead of "Urgent dispatch from General Elsinore", it's "stop this attack, stop this attack" in an homage to future woke scolds. Oh my gosh when will this movie ever end!
PS Cinematography was superb!