All worries that Sam Mendes’ 1917 will just be a copycat period war epic based in real time à la Dunkirk vanish with the opening shot: two lance corporals Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman, aka Tommen in Game of Thrones) and Schofield (George MacKay) rush down a narrow WWI trench with an assignment from General Erinmore (Colin Firth). They must deliver a message to the commander of the 2nd Devons unit and call off tomorrow’s attack on the German Hindenburg line, because it’s a trap. The corporals will need to cross several miles of No Man’s Land on foot, avoiding barbed wire, booby traps, snipers and roving fighter planes. Some 1,600 men — including Blake’s brother — will die in an ambush if they fail.
Like Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, the clock is ticking fast — it’s even 1917’s tagline (“Time is the enemy”) — and Thomas Newman also employs the Shepard tone that Hans Zimmer did in Dunkirk to signal the intensity and compression of time.
War has become a gripping subject for British directors lately. In the case of Mendes, his script, co-written with Kristy Wilson-Cairns, relies on stories told by his grandfather, a British lance corporal who was gassed in WWI. It kind of makes you wonder: why did Mendes keep making movies like Revolutionary Road and Spectre when he knew he had something like this in his pocket all along? Better late than never, we guess.
Because, Oscar hype or not, in 1917 Mendes pulls off both a technical stunt and a breathtaking emotional punch with his two leads, a series of well-placed cameos, and some seriously immersive and mobile camerawork from Roger Deakins.
You don’t need to understand the camera specs to be completely drawn in by 1917’s propulsive story. But if you liked Deakins’ and Mendes’ one-take opening shot in Mexico City for 007’s Spectre, this is that in spades: a series of breathless episodes connected by long tracking shots — through trenches, bombed-out farmhouses, razed villages and cascading along rivers.
It’s so gripping, in fact, that 1917 can feel at times like a theme-park ride — “Indiana Jones and the Never-ending Trench,” maybe and this calls into question how much of our reaction is purely technical. The jaw drops as Blake and Schofield try to escape a collapsing farmhouse cellar after a scurrying rat sets off a trip-wire explosion; or when they’re fleeing a shot-down German biplane that’s threatening to crash straight into them.
With its bravura one takes and episodic plot, 1917 more closely tracks Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, but it shares with Dunkirk an almost surreal attention to detail: whereas Nolan cast his leads into intimate, claustrophobic spaces to highlight those details the lapping waters, the flames, the bullet holes in the hull of a beached ship Mendes lays them out in a Hieronymus Bosch tableau of horrors: Blake and Schofield head over the trench into the front line, armed with rifles, a map, and very little else, and immediately encounter tangles of barbed wire, burned-out farms, horse carcasses abuzz with flies, and rats, rats, rats. Mendes shows us how hell on earth looks, as the retreating Germans lay waste to the rural French countryside. It’s a choreography of corpses — blackened bodies, rotting rictuses, bloated river deaths, tortured faces emerging from the mud that bring Schofield and Blake on their way to the town of Écoust (actually filmed at Salisbury Plain in southwestern England, close to Stonehenge) where they can relay their message to stop British troops from charging into certain death.
Mendes, working from his grandfather’s memories, allows us to take occasional breathers along the way. Chapman and MacKay hold the film together, but it’s a series of timely cameos that punctuate the unrelenting action. Firth, of course, is a solid presence; and Mark Strong turns up as a wise captain who urges the two corporals to deliver their message with witnesses present, because “Some people just like to fight to the death”; then there’s a memorable bit with war-weary Lieutenant Leslie (Andrew Scott, who, in a hilarious nod to his role as The Priest in Fleabag, offers benediction to the soldiers with a wave of his whisky flask). There’s also Richard Madden, joining fellow Game of Thrones veteran Chapman, and Benedict Cumberbatch as a ruthless commander who sees only one end to the war: “Last man standing.”
Schofield — with his clear blue eyes set to “perpetually bugging out” possesses a determination that’s a little hard to fathom at times; he was resentful at being dragged into the mission by Blake in the first place, after all. But Mendes credits it to a sense of sacrifice that’s no longer in vogue: “In a sense, the movie is about how we no longer truly understand what sacrifice means, to sacrifice everything for something larger than yourself.”
The two-hour epic actually covers only a small topographic area, but that was the reality of WWI: a series of battles fought to secure mere inches of land from the enemy. No wonder nations vowed that it would never happen again until WWII, that is.
Amid all this futility and horror, there are moments of beauty thank God including the otherworldly, almost hallucinatory vision of a bombed-out town lit up by tracer explosions at night; the sight of cherry blossoms adrift on a river that also features floating bodies; or the simple clarity of an Irish tenor singing a folk song on the morning before a battle, as the other soldiers sit rapt, lost in private thoughts.
This respite is good because, though 1917 achieves a stunning feat balancing adrenaline-rushing action with emotional moments that resonate the camera trickery can sometimes feel like a stunt. Not surprising, since Deakins has shot half a dozen films for the Coen Brothers, no strangers to self-conscious camera antics, including Hudsucker Proxy, Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski. There was a moment when Schofield seems to encounter the same German soldier again and again, popping up and chasing him through a razed French town with a rifle, that made me think of Raising Arizona, and Nicolas Cage’s late-night escape from a revolver-wielding convenience store clerk. All the whipsaw movement can feel a little gimmicky, as impressive as it is. But ultimately, 1917 is a war tapestry that resonates, even longer than the riveting camera tricks that Mendes and Deakins serve up.
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1917 opens Wednesday, Feb. 5. Rated PG by the MTRCB. Connect with hashtag #1917Movie and tag @uipmoviesph.