1917 review: a farewell to wars

Rating: 9/10 (29 January 2020)

I was more than intrigued to learn that Sam Mendes was making a historical title, 1917, about WWI. After all, regardless of his wonderful touch on interpersonal war such as Road to Revolution and many others, Mendes isn't notorious for a grasp over an epic of any real, bloody war. When I set my feet into the cinema, my doubts are simultaneously holding me back. I don't want the figure of the director, talented and dedicated, to be ruined by a movie that doesn't match his talents.
Fortunately, Mendes is clever enough to make both his old audience and new viewers ecstatic. The movie is about a soldier who is responsible for delivering a message that can stop a massacre of 1600 men. He has to traverse the fronts, dodge the bullets, and survive himself at the most dangerous area man can ever imagine. The appliance of single long shot and on-foot cameraman, a signature of Mendes-made, carefully tracks the character alongside the destined adventure. In a manner, Mendes is generous enough to allow the audience, with breath held, to follow every step the soldier takes.
No doubts, Mendes names the title with four digits, 1917. It not only denotes the year in which the plot takes place but also marks the most devastating and hopeless moment of WWI. For three years straight, European powers have been struggling with an internal conflict, which may eventually jeopardize the whole of human civilization. As a result, millions of innocent young men are drafted and sacrificed; women ignored and exploited, dedicating to a holy purpose that gradually makes less sense.
Even though it merely costs less than 24 hours for the plot to develop fully, 1917 is well articulated. Almost none of the length is wasted, killing the motive of the audience to pee in the middle. Mendes also deploys his talent to narrate a seemingly boring story; in the movie, important details are so nicely concealed that their existence won't bother the progression of the main thread. For example, it all together takes the audience three wild guesses to figure out the function of a tiny metal box carried by the soldier, until he takes it from his inside pocket at the very end.
Mendes still owns the movie, despite the uncommon story it employs. As most of Mendes's stories, the plot itself can't even substantially constitute an event in history books; instead, reflect a trivial day of an ordinary soldier. However, all the trivial elements demonstrate the absurdity of war: the perpetual peace lies in the graveyard of all the sacrificed.
Actually, I have to brave myself to the cinema for the sake of witnessing the turnout of Mendes endeavor. When I hit the road, the panic for Coronavirus is spreading across the globe, causing a lockdown of cinema in many places in Asia. I, indeed, beg for the stroke of luck, which I may gain more easily than my Chinese counterpart, considering the rather limited size of the crowd in Europe. Awkwardly, the reality goes against my mind. The cinema is almost full of audience, regardless of the four recent virus cases confirmed in Bayern.
In the epidemics, as same as various wars, we can find a state of mind juxtaposing determination and panics that gradually normalizes itself. By targeting the security of life, the epidemic is seriously causing all sorts of unconventional warfare that may eventually echo Hobbes's theme, "everyone against everyone," while people, on the other hand, are accustomed to internalizing fear to understand the unnormal. Emergent measures can be assumed to make the country into a warzone: cities under siege, road cut down, people locked up at home, while any attempt to counter back these efforts can be deemed as inappropriate, unacceptable, or even traitorous.
I have no intention of questioning the state of emergency as the justification for all precaution efforts; after all, the sentiments that people have under the threat of global epidemics are also haunting me (sometimes more than I can suffer). Notwithstanding, it needs to be admitted that all of us, under threat, is troubled by a psychological condition that makes rumors, suspicions and baseless allegations convenient.
After all, in the midst of an atrocious, brutal war, what we are expecting is something different, something other than the enmity in human nature, which may declare the farewell to wars, once and for all.