About absurdity and courage.

Rating: 9/10 (17 April 2020)

After reading "1917," I thought of a lot of things. Because of the exchange and work, I have more opportunities to stop and go in the UK. From Oxford with its colleges to bath with its tourists, to the streets and corners of London, from Edinburgh with its elegance to inverness with its desolation, one does not have to look far to see monuments, statues or parks commemorating the first world war -- more than 43, 000, I am told.
From the summer of 1914 to the winter of 1918, more than 900,000 young britons died in foreign wars. Nobles and plebs, college students and apprentices, volunteers and draftees, however different their identities and life experiences, all ended up as strings of Arabic numerals and English letters on a stone. This is absurd, but even more so is the war.
The first is the lack of meaning. The so-called world war is the avarice of the Allies, the ambition of the Allies no side, a brush fire, Europe bombed. Being a soldier may be cannon fodder, but in the end you have to aim for something. When Europe's bones have withered, except for the United States and Japan two white-eyed wolves, who did not see a successful war. "Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism", but what millions of europeans paid to die for it seems neither empire nor capital. The last four emperors lost their empire, many capitalists lost their wealth, and countless workers lost their homes. This is ridiculous.
Then there is the lack of baseline. All wars are inhuman, but in the past man was still like a master of war. From the beginning of the war, people became slaves to the war. To shape the humanism of modern Europe is to turn people into ground rats and jam them into trenches, spending the whole day in darkness with the opposite side. The reason brought about by the enlightenment is to stuff the meat grinder with all kinds of materials that command people to become regular. The two industrial revolutions were marked by more powerful machines, more powerful artillery, more insidious mines and chemical weapons of endless variety: mustard gas, chlorine gas, phosphorescence, benzyl bromide... This is ridiculous.
So it's easy to see why there are so many great war movies about world war ii and so few about world war I. In world war ii, the United States saved the world, the Soviet union won the respect, Britain and France continued the war, the Chinese shaped the concept of a modern nation with their flesh and blood, countless small countries gained their independence, jews found their homes, Germany and Japan ushered in a transformation... Soldiers dying in battle, either with the will to fight against the axis of evil, or with the conviction to create a new world, no matter how low, have the consciousness to die for the sake of the imperial movement or national glory, these are the highlights that can be made into a movie. And the young men who died absurdly for absurd ends in the first world war? A bunch of dead ghosts?
But the monuments to the first world war, all over Britain, seemed to tell me otherwise. When I walked the western front with corporal scofield on the days and nights of "1917" with Roger dickins' long shot to the end, I was more convinced that it wasn't.
When Blake pulls him to the task of delivering the letter, he immediately questions the danger. He worries about walking through no man's land during the day and complains about why his comrades take him with them. Unlike Blake, he doesn't have a brother to save, and he hates war. His skill was not good, his brain was not brilliant, and being in a foreign country had left him black and blue from repeated misadventures. This character setting, combined with the shooting technique of the film's long shot, gave me a strong sense of substitution, as if I was sent to the front, the extraordinary play is almost so. But then I began to doubt their own willpower, the movie atmosphere is tense, I and the corporal's perspective is the same, do not know where the danger is hidden, ghost territory like no man's land, the sniper in the ruins, in the dark in close combat, burning streets in the chase... I suspect I may have had a nervous breakdown at some point.
But in order to complete his comrades' instructions and save more compatriots, corporal scofield finally chose to go forward. In the ruins, the ruins, the swamps, the rivers, the trenches, the bayonets, the artillery, he knew he had to give the letter to a fellow named captain Mackenzie to stop the attack. This was his task, and the whole point of his existence in that day and night. He shouted to his comrades to push the truck, braved bullets alone to cross the broken bridge, fought desperately with poor marksman and the enemy in the attic, strangled the enemy clumsily in the dark, and ran in a panic, swam across the river of corpses, squeezed through the trenches, and ran to the front... I even felt like I was watching forrest gump, but corporal scofield, by this time, had really changed from the beginning of the film, and he had acquired a courage that was not his own but that he had to carry.
At the end of the movie, he completes the task, even though the task itself is absurd. First, as McKinsey put it, they sent soldiers today to stop the offensive, and soon one or two more to tell us to charge at dawn that the only way this war could end was if "the last man died." Second, the corporal may have saved 1,600 lives in Devon in the spring, but in the following summer more than 300,000 British soldiers would die on the western front, probably everyone he saved and himself, while the Allies' front would have advanced by a few miles. Second, almost everyone except the commander in chief would question whether such a dangerous mission could be carried out by just two soldiers. However, in the age of lack of communication technology, the meaning of these big soldiers is to "send a message to the chief". The lives of one or two people are probably worth only so much.
I think the director was aware of this absurdity, and there are many scenes in the film that show the cruelty and even the nothingness of the war. What impressed me most was the same white cherry blossoms as Blake's hometown. The water glistened blue, and at the end of its petals, there were pale, mutilated bodies covered with bubbles. In this sense, I think the director's failure to arrange the mission (such as arriving at the front where everyone is already charging) is probably more shocking.
If war is the continuation of creatures' plunder of living space and resources in the nature, and the ultimate destiny that human beings, as a kind of creatures, cannot escape, then the various values that human beings have practiced by burning life in the war are the unique proof of human species. "Tragedy is the destruction of the valuable things of life to people to see", the war itself is a tragedy, and even in a meaningless war like the first world war, even if the two soldiers finally gained nothing, I still see the crown of thorns of the human spirit in their heads, that is, the courage that is huge to have exceeded individual life. The lions face the flock and go away in silence; And in the face of the devil of war, even more terrible than the devil of the absurd fate of death, there may still be "I go" consciousness.
The monuments of England, like the innumerable nameless war memorials, graves, and tombs of mankind through all ages, are affectionate tributes, silent indictments, and indomitable cries against fate.