Grueling two hours of trench warfare

Rating: 8/10 (23 January 2020)

Brilliantly shot, mostly at waist level, and cunningly edited to give the impression of a real-time sequence, 1917, like Spielberg's WARHORSE in 2011, presents as authentic impression of trench warfare as we are likely to see. Not just barbed wire and bomb craters, the two lance corporals crawl over rotting human corpses and dead horses to get to the German lines. There are a couple of overdone sequences which trip the movie into Indiana Jones territory, but mostly you do feel that this really is how it must have been for our grandfathers and great-grandfathers.
In the key roles Dean-Charles Chapman and George MacKay are totally "right" for the story and the period. Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch and Andrew Scott are shoehorned into cameos. It's a tough two hours to sit through, almost as grueling as a Holocaust story, and it rams home the message that - extraordinary heroism and sheer endurance apart - there was nothing Great about the Great War.