1917. Directed by Sam Mendes. Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Pretty much everyone agrees that Sam Mendes’ new war epic, 1917, is good. Even very, very good. He’s already bagged the DGA Award for direction, which means his Hollywood peers have given the film their stamp of approval and it’s a favorite to clean up as the Oscars. But is it a masterpiece, a game-changer on the same level as say Saving Private Ryan? I don’t think so, and here’s why.
The movie is composed of two very ambitious single-shot sequences. It follows a pair of British soldiers during World War I as they cross over No Man’s Land with orders to deliver an important message to a British commander deep in German territory. High-profile actors pop up for brief cameos along the way. The “real time” no cuts approach is meant to submerge us in the tense, horrific reality of war. It creates immediacy and tension and wows us with its technical mastery. It also, however, distracts from the story.
How does it distract? Well, because it imposes a constraint on the narrative as everything is happening in “real time.” So, if our protagonist gets inside a truck, for instance, you know that something is going to happen within the next few minutes that makes him have to get out of the truck because the movie can’t be 2 hours of guys sitting around in a truck. The single-shot approach as applied for this kind of story has some benefits, but also some obvious limitations. Because this story is an epic - it’s a journey, following the protagonists for nearly two hours as they endure terrible things in the name of senseless war. But there is only so much that can happen in one two-hour period of time, especially when the characters are on an epic, Odyssean journey.
From a narrative perspective, I think the film needed a little more time to breathe - there was a little too much packed into too little time, and so you could often kind of see things coming simply because the way it was shot forced the story to move in certain narrative ways. So while I think the movie is visually quite ambitious, and at times gorgeous to look at, and I think the “real time” approach achieved its goal of putting you right there with the characters as they experienced the horrors of war, I’m not sure if it was the best choice for a film like this.
Having said that, it is certainly a very good film. There is a night-time scene where the cascading glow from falling flares illuminates the screen with beautiful lilting shadows and light. There is another scene involving a line of soldiers going over the top and charging across the battlefield which is stunning to watch. And the unstoppable pace of the film as it moves from one gruesome set piece to the next is worth the price of admission.
But does it really hold up against other similar war epics like Saving Private Ryan (with which it basically shares a plot) or Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk? Again, not for me. I felt the constraint of the “real time” approach prevented 1917 from giving us any real insight into its characters or its philosophy or its themes other than war is hell and here’s a tense journey through a small piece of that hell. And with a film this ambitious, and vast that seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity.
