1917

1917 anchors the audience with seamless camera work to offer the most exhilarating immersion of war. With a runtime just under 2 hours, this film speeds through spectacular action at lightning speed, pumping your adrenaline till the very end.

The story is a simple premise that starts as soon as the characters are shown on screen: The 2nd Battalion is about to charge into a trap tomorrow at dawn, and the main characters have to make their way through enemy lines in order to get there in time—and for personal matters, one of the main characters has a brother in that battalion. A straight forward storyline with an increasing intensity of its tunnel vision, the tension boils under director Sam Mendes’ focused vision. The camera literally does not stray away from the story; it is locked in on the action non-stop. The entire film is made to look like one take, and this execution is flawlessly performed by today’s best cinematographer, Roger Deakins. He is the genius behind films like Blade Runner 2049 and Skyfall. Both of these filmmakers know how to get inside the audience’s heads and pull out the individual emotions they need to maximize the story’s entertainment. With 1917, they did this all through the breathtaking camerawork.

Although the character development is few and far between, it cumulates to build up the scope of the war. The extras especially bring so much variety in terms of attitude towards their lives as they are being driven to the front lines. The two main characters, Blake and Schofield, are mainly fleshed out through their reactions and fear. Blake offers a lot of three-dimensional banter with Schofield that makes him feel human, and Schofield’s past of being in combat and how he treats his military honor offers the other side of the war mentality. Again, the story is the real main focus in terms of the action and screen time. So much of the film has to spend its time building up the setting and conflict that the characters cannot breathe or rest, they have to keep moving. On the other hand, though, most parts of Schofield would not be realized without the camerawork. Mendes wrote his script knowing that the characters would never have the spotlight, which means they stay in the shadows on purpose, only showing their face to let you know that they truly are there on purpose.

One nitpick I have with Roger Deakins and Sam Mendes’ choice to have a minute-for-minute film is that the end goal feels very close to where the characters start. The trip, according to Blake’s map readings, is supposed to take 8 hours, but in the film it takes 2. That significantly makes the conflict smaller than it is supposed to. For most films, the editing warrants the fact that time in cinema is heavily stretched/shortened and manipulated, but Sam Mendes directly states every minute in this film is a minute in the story. The film breezes by with great action set pieces, but after all the detours the two soldiers have to take, the ticking clock seems pointless as the end goal appears to be a few miles away.

Overall, Roger Deakins raises this war film to the highest level; its story is strong, but without the cinematography it would have been forgotten overtime. With that in mind, Sam Mendes offers a new classic because he dedicated so much technical achievement to his story. It is a powerful experience as it unfolds on screen, even though the conflict seems minuscule in comparison to other war films. The scale of the combat and the amount of detail picked up in each frame snowballs to the very end, and the amount of character shown through small banter with the soldiers feels human and truly inspired by real soldiers. With They Shall Not Grow Old and now 1917, cinema has been fully utilized to keep WWI in our history.

Story Rating: 8/10

Character Rating: 8/10