Two soldiers on a mission

Rating: 10/10 (9 May 2020)

This film is dedicated to the grandfather of the film's director and co-author, Sam Mendes (nominated for Oscars in both the director and original screenplay categories). The grandfather was a messenger for the British army in World War I and told Mendes many stories about the war. The two main characters, Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), are ordinary infantrymen, both lance corporals, who are given a mission by General Erinmore (Colin Firth) to deliver a message to Colonel Mackenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch) cancelling an attack that is doomed to failure. (The telephone lines are not operating.) They have to walk/run nine miles through contested terrain, and some of the individual scenes are quite horrific. The film set is over the days of April 6-7, 1917. The Germans have withdrawn to pre-prepared positions later known as the Hindenberg Line, and the British are pursuing them, not knowing that the Germans have prepared traps. One of the personal touches is that Blake's older brother (Richard Madden) is under Mackenzie's command.
The film's gimmick is that it was photographed in such a way that it appears to be just two continuous takes. The break occurs when one of the main characters is hit on the head during daylight, and it is dark when he wakes up. All the other cuts were cleverly disguised. Nonetheless, this puts the film in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope in which all the takes were exactly 12 minutes, a limitation caused by using traditional film, but the cuts were disguised to give the illusion that the action was continuous. This film was the well-deserved Oscar winner in the cinematography, visual effects, and sound mixing categories.