Gripping, immersive and powerful: 1917 reviewed

Sam Mendes’s 1917 is the first world war drama that this week won the Golden Globe for best film and also best director and there is no arguing with that, ha ha. In fact there has been plenty of arguing with that. Some critics say that it feels like a videogame. ‘Turns one of the most catastrophic episodes in modern times into an exercise in preening showmanship,’ says the New York Times. I don’t know what film they were watching. True, 1917 is formulaic — it’s your archetypal man-on-a-mission story — but it is also gripping, immersive and powerful. It isn’t the closest you will get to experiencing the Great War, as there is nothing to beat Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, but it’s as near as damn it. (Or so you imagine.)

1917 is written by Mendes along with Krysty Wilson-Cairns and is based in part on the conversations he had when he was a boy with his paternal grandfather, Alfred Mendes, a veteran. It tracks two young soldiers who are given the near-impossible task of traversing the Western Front and delivering a message to the British troops who are about to walk into a German ambush. With cinematography by Roger Deakins, it is edited to look like one continuous shot — this is the ‘preening showmanship’, even though Alfred Hitchcock was having a go in 1948 (Rope) and it has been employed many times since — and is billed as happening in ‘real time’, which is odd as day becomes night and then day again on screen while the film is only two hours long. I’m still scratching my head about this.

The opening sequence introduces us to Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay) who are in the trenches in northern France when they’re hauled in front of their general (Colin Firth) and told that, as communications are down, they must race across no-man’s land and find the British battalion that is planning a dawn attack to warn them that they are walking into a trap.