1917

Title: 1917
Director: Sam Mendes
Writers: Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Cinematography: Roger Deakins

Shall we talk about the cinematography?

I think we have to. It’s all anyone seems to talk about regarding this movie, probably for the very good reason that it’s the main thing worth talking about.

So as you probably know, but I’ll repeat just in case you’ve been hit in the helmet by a ricocheting bullet and knocked out for the last three months, the gimmick with 1917 is the illusion that the events are happening in “real time” and is shot by one camera in a single “take,” a bit like the Kiefer Sutherland/Jack Bauer series “24” mixed with the showiness of the long shots from “Children of Men,” only stretched to 119 minutes. There are no cuts between close-ups of people in conversation, nor between wide, middle and close-up shots, every scene—with one obvious and glaring exception—flows seamlessly together.

It is a masterful achievement, and obviously took a lot of serious, meticulous planning and preparation to pull off. And by and large, it works, at least at the technical level. The camera pirouettes about men in narrow trenches and through the walls of farmhouses, down shattered lanes and across a field under artillery fire, without loosening its relentless focus on the leads (except that one, really thumpingly noticeable time it does, but shh). You as the viewer are stuck with these guys, just as they are stuck there, and the only way either of you gets out is to see it through to the end.

As a movie-making technique, it doesn’t work quite so well.

In behind-the-scenes featurettes, the filmmakers have said this is meant to be immersive, but let’s admit that no, it absolutely isn’t. This is film-making that draws attention to its own artifice. Look! See how clever we are! It very quickly becomes distracting—You should be down in the trenches with these two guys, but you’re not, you’re thinking about the cameraman, the logistics of the shot, you are constantly aware that you’re watching a movie, an artificial narrative, and spend more time thinking about how Mendes and Deacon were able to film the scene, rather than being engaged and emotionally invested in the action.

The artifice, in other words, prevents it from achieving the very effect it is designed to produce.

The script also contributes to this detached feeling in a couple of ways. First, things off-screen, out of the frame of the shot, seem to suddenly just appear or immediately vanish from existence when we pan away from them. A group of fellow British soldiers in a convoy of trucks materialize out of thin air behind a farmhouse (wouldn’t we have heard them?) When one of our heroes parts ways with these soldiers and is shot at by a sniper while crossing a bridge, the comrades he left not 10 seconds ago do nothing (why aren’t they shooting back?). We just never see them again.

Distances start to feel distorted. The initial scene where the two messengers cross no-man’s land is fantastic in an excruciating way, a nail-biting crawl, slither, crouch and scramble across a nightmare landscape of iron, steel, mud, shell craters and bloated bodies. However, once that is over though, the scenery changes come thick and fast. There’s a truck ride that includes two stops and barely lasts one conversation, but somehow transports us from a lonely farmhouse to the edge of a town. Later we jump into a river which immediately flows over a waterfall and just as quickly ends up lapping at the rear of the British lines.

Finally, the soundtrack is deafeningly intrusive. Just in case you weren’t sure a moment was meant to be tense or not, don’t worry, HERE COME A THOUSAND BLARING TRUMPETS TO REASSURE YOU THAT YES, THIS REALLY IS PRETTY DAMN TENSE RIGHT NOW I CAN TELL YOU. Combined with the evident artifice of the cinematography, all this serves to keep you at arm’s length from the story. Don’t worry, it’s just a movie, and here is a stream of constant reminders to that effect just in case you start to get too into it.

The story itself is bare-bones simple, and probably could have been shown just as effectively, if not moreso, with traditional filmmaking techniques.

If there’s a theme to the movie, it’s how utterly shit the life of a lowly lance corporal was in the year 1917 (and probably still is). Lance Corporals Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman, Game of Thrones’s Tommen) and Scofield (George MacKay) are picked by his NCO for the thankless and probably impossible job of sneaking across German-held territory to deliver orders to another unit, calling off an attack. There’s a perfunctory briefing by the General (Colin Firth), in which responsibility for saving the lives of 1,600 men is unceremoniously dumped on the two lads despite the cockup entirely originating from said General, who doesn’t actually giving them any useful advice about how they’re supposed to achieve this herculean task.

Nonetheless, the two gamely do their British best, moaning and bullshitting their way across no-man’s land, beset by booby traps and crashing airplanes and German snipers. The message is finally delivered in the very nick of time to a pissed off, irate Colonel (Benedict Cumberbatch) who tells Scofield thanks, points out he hasn’t actually saved anybody as this just means there will be a different attack the next day, and invites him to please fuck off.

There’s a vague arc about Scofield going from reluctant partner to fiercely determined to accomplish the mission, coupled with an early resentment of the people at home and ending with him staring longingly at family photos, but Blake and Scofield mostly get flattened by both the action and the juggernaut pace of the story, leaving little time for us to get to know either character. They’re lance corporals, nobodies, could be anybodies, and who they are isn’t really the point. They’re every soldier, and they just want to survive and go home.

Together with Chris Nolan’s “Dunkirk” then, we seem to be building up a new direction for war movies, moving away from tales of heroism and questions of morality or immorality, towards a tighter focus on the unheroic experiences of the individual soldier, whose goal is nothing more noble than To Not Get Killed. The enemy, if they appear at all, are just one more thing to be survived, and the only “victory” is survival.

In the end though “1917” ends up being far more about the craft of the story than about the narrative itself. It’s a good movie, an impressive accomplishment, but it’s all about its own impressiveness, not really about the two poor sods at the center of the story. Though you get the feeling the lance corporals probably used to being overlooked until it’s time to do something nasty.