Good not Great

Rating: 6/10 (15 February 2020)

1917 captured the beauty of the French landscape and showed how war could transform beauty into a snarl of death, ugliness and destruction.
Special effects, editing and costumes were well done yet acting lacked a certain degree of engagement and I had the experience I'd been watching actors instead of people, especially the Germans who had virtually no depth whatsoever, generically depicted as being stupid, evil and incompetent.
Other reviewers had compared 1917 to WW1's answer to Saving Private Ryan. Nothing could be further from the truth. Saving Private Ryan portrayed depth of story, multifaceted characters, nuance and humor, and it was a film that operated simultaneously on multiple levels, whereas 1917 possessed none of these qualities. With war movies like Ryan, Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now I left the theater jolted into an altered state; the savagery of war left left me with a gaping hole and it required time to heal. WIth 1917 the echo of war ceased when the projector switched off.