1917 (2019) Is Slick and Relentless, But Unconvincing as a Study of War

Sam Mendes’ 1917 is a visually impressive yet inauthentic and inhuman war epic. That isn’t to say that 1917 is a terrible movie. Its technical accomplishment cannot be overlooked, and it is sometimes gripping to watch. But in spite of the filmmakers’ efforts at creating an immersive experience through the technical trick of suggesting the film is composed of only two long continuous shots—and the presumed enhancement of realism bound up in that artistic choice notwithstanding—I found 1917 to be glaringly unreal and devoid of deeper significance. To that end, 1917 is more a mirror of our time than a window onto a past war.

War, Cinema, and 1917

Perhaps I’m still viewing representations of the First World War in the light of Peter Jackson’s masterful, affecting documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson gathered, restored, and colourized archival footage shot during 1914–1918, and he lets those involved speak for themselves through old recordings. The servicemen who actually lived through the events describe experiences both extraordinary and mundane, horrible as well as kind. The colourized footage defamiliarizes images we commonly associate with World War I, bringing new attention to certain details and aspects of the war. For instance, I was struck by the uniformly terrible teeth of the soldiers, as they warmly smile in moments of levity, showing off for the novelty of the camera. The narrations captured in the documentary recall Erich Maria Remarque’s focus on mundane survival in his masterful German war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) (but which is subordinated to the incredible war scenes in the Oscar-winning 1930 American film version). In All Quiet on the Western Front and They Shall Not Grow Old, the soldiers are mostly just trying to live and get by, to find some food, stay warm, and get some rest. 

For 1917, Mendes gathers together imagery we, now removed over 100 years from the events of 1917, typically associate with the First World War. We are no longer dealing with the stuff of living memory. Mendes then assembles those familiar images all along the long, winding railway line of a nearly continuously moving camera. We see trenches, mud, barbed wire, blasted trees, rats, tunnels, a biplane dogfight overhead, a mad rush over the top. Although we see the hero, Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay), sleep at the start and end of the film, unless I missed it, we don’t see him eat, besides a snatch of bread before their journey and a few drinks of water and milk later on. I nearly shouted at the screen, “Stop and get some food before you go on a half-day mission!” But for some reason the importance of gathering supplies does not occur to the two soldiers, Schofield and Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), tasked with the mission to warn an advanced regiment that they are marching into a German trap. We never see Schofield relieve himself, which is surprising, considering we were following him the entire duration of the film, which is supposed to take place over roughly 24 hours. In contrast, the veterans in They Shall Not Grow Old describe the difficulty of shitting in muddy trenches. 

The cinematic inspiration for Mendes’ technical tour de force would be Paths of Glory (1957), in which Stanley Kubrick famously slides his camera dolly along the narrow trenches following Kirk Douglas, or seemingly sails the camera across no man’s land as troops rush over the top. 1917 begins with similar long camera movements through the trenches, before turning to other ways to utilize the camera and direct the flow of movement and image. 

The result in 1917 is impressive, relentless, and lifeless. Relentless in terms of how we are constantly prodded to be so impressed by it all. But the manner of the film, which keeps moving along and revealing a new set piece around each corner, starts to lose its novelty. It’s like one of those theme park rides, where you are confined to a little car, and now just around the corner there will be some horror in the haunted house: a dead face in the mud, rats, a booby trap, enemy soldiers. The film also requires that events and objects and people are drawn to the central protagonist in a way that feels unreal. This is best exemplified in a fighter plane crashing just into where the two soldiers were standing, which seems incredibly unlikely. 

There are other unreal moments, such as the pail of fresh milk left standing at just the right time, or the sergeant, played by usually-solid character actor Andrew Scott, who is supposed to be battle hardened and cynical, coming across as a 21st-century character actor playing a battle-hardened cynical sergeant in the movies. 

But two particular moments best encapsulate the unrealistic dimension of 1917. 

Early on, I was pulled out of the movie when the protagonist, who has been in the trenches and is a veteran of the Somme, looks in horror at a bloodied bandaged soldier in a stretcher who is carried along by him, and to which the camera turns to pause before getting back on track. The character’s reaction is simply not psychologically plausible. Surely he would be numb to such sights by now, men in stretchers being a common reality? Jackson’s soldiers describe getting used to the horrifying presence of dead bodies pressed into the mud walls around them in the trenches. In 1917, in contrast, a moment that is supposed to generate pathos and humanity comes across as inauthentic and implausible for ignoring the human capacity to become numb.

The opposite of the first moment’s inauthentic humanity, the second moment that struck me with its inauthenticity is an action of inhumanity: the German fighter pilot who bizarrely stabs the secondary protagonist to death. It’s surprising because they have just rescued the enemy pilot from a burning plane. Surely he would show them some gratitude? Or even if we are applying the logic of cold survival, why would the pilot think, as a burnt casualty, killing one of two opposing soldiers would benefit him? The logic of survival and when we feel the fear that inspires killing doesn’t make any sense as presented here; rather, the moment is simply narratively necessary as it causes the death that becomes central to the little quantity of human emotion the film rings out. 

Contrast the above scene with another memorable scene from Saving Private Ryan, in which a soldier (Private Stanley “Fish” Mellish, played by Adam Goldberg) has a knife fight and it ends with him slowly pressing the knife into his German opponent’s chest. The horror of that scene is that you can sense that, in other circumstances, neither man would want to stab the other, but they are now trapped in a deadly game in which they know only one is allowed to survive. So it’s a fight to the death. That’s one of the elements of war that rarely comes up in movies. The fact that it can actually be difficult to get people to kill other people if they haven’t been conditioned to do so. 

The whole two hours of 1917 never musters what seems like a real emotional response to the events it depicts. Some of the blame lies on the central performance, by George MacKay, which is purely reactive and bookishly emotive, never convincing the audience that Schofield is an actual veteran of war.

War as Levels to Complete

All this adds up to the feeling that 1917 is operating under artistic conventions best suited to a video game. Now, I recognize that describing a movie as a video game can be a critical shorthand for deriding a work. I don’t intend the comparison to mean that here. I mean the observation to be more neutral than pejorative. What I’m getting at is that Mendes’ overarching approach to the film defines the narrative’s objectives according to video game logic, and this is the cause of many of its limitations. 

The experience of 1917 reminded me of third-person shooter video games, which follow just behind the soldier protagonist we play, visually resembling many of the scenes in this movie. (Interestingly, the Medal of Honor and Call of Duty series were started on the heels of the success of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in 1998 and its revival of the WWI and II movie genres. So war movies and video games have an intertwined history here.) I especially thought the bombed out French city looked like just the kind of level we would get in such a game. 

Many aspects of the narrative, its scenes and characters’ actions and motivations, seemed governed by the goal-orientation that defines most video game narratives. In 1917, each scene is focused on a goal that must be completed in order to move onto the next. In level one, you have to make it to the bottom of the British trenches. Level two: find your way across no man’s land. Level three: get through the empty enemy trenches with a tunnel escape countdown at the end. Level four: the mystery of the empty farm. Level five: drive a truck across a muddy landscape with objects in the way. Level six: evade random soldiers in a burnt out city. Level seven: find the commander before it’s too late. The pail of milk that makes little sense narratively makes sense as an object to be gathered and used later on by helping the young woman who has rescued someone else’s child (even though it’s doubtful the baby could even live off cow’s milk).

The film is even content to obtain the goal rather than generate further dramatic conflict. Mark Strong’s officer plants the seed of what I thought would become a major conflict at the film’s climax: “Some men just want the fight.” So we expect that there might be some push back when the order to stand down finally arrives, and that maybe the colonel (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) launching the attack is war-mad. Instead, Cumberbatch is a good man who says, rather quickly, “alright, call it off.” You got there in time, so “mission accomplished.”

The film’s tagline was “Time is the enemy,” and it suggests the film’s view of the whole war: that somehow the war could have been stopped had someone just told them it was all for nothing at the right moment. In that sense, the film itself becomes an anti-war fantasy film, screaming stop in response to a great historical tragedy. But 1917 never achieves a deep anti-war significance, because it doesn’t really understand war, whether in the particular conflict of WWI or in general. You see that in the strange comment that the Germans have better food and trenches, reflecting stereotypes of German industry today rather than the facts of the war, in which Germany was stretched incredibly thin supporting its war effort (and as depicted in Remarque’s novel mentioned above). Paths of Glory is a better, and crueler, vision of the logic that sent thousands of young men to kill each other for little material gain or any real point.

The 21st-Century Long-Take Auteur

The ambitious and self-conscious nature of Mendes’ approach in 1917 builds on his work with cinematographers Roger Deakins (who has worked with Mendes five times, including for Skyfall and 1917) and Hoyte van Hoytema (particularly the opening long-take scene in 2015’s Spectre). However, Mendes’ approach also reflects competitive participation in what’s emerging as a kind of long-take-driven auteurist sub-genre, in which lauded directors show off in prestige films built around showy long and continuous takes. Notable examples are Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity (2013) and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015). Technically, 1917 is an impressive feat, although even the impact of the one long continuous shot has been blunted after the succession of fèted directors delivering similar “tour de forces” using variations on the same technique.

Each of the films mentioned above were widely praised upon release. My initial scepticism for each of them has only hardened into dislike over time. All four films confuse the synthetic experiential realness of a continuous shot for the experience of reality. I’m left wondering if montage might actually convey more about how humans subjectively experience reality. All four films also contain weird manipulations of time. Of course, all film is a manipulation of time, I know, but 1917 condenses a day into two hours, and presumes that a black-out cut in the middle can somehow fudge our awareness of time. But, while watching 1917, I noticed that nighttime in the burnt out city turns into daylight rather fast. Furthermore, the fact that these types of movies subordinate the narrative to the needs of the camera’s tricks means that they have to rely upon sentimental visual and narrative tropes to approximate depth of emotion and character. Perhaps coming to 1917 long after the awards rush is why I could say, is this it?

The same holds true for the film’s view of “The War to End All Wars.” 1917 can only seem incredibly real and immersive for generations far removed from the actual horrors of 1914–1918.

1917 (2019, UK/USA)

Directed by Sam Mendes; written by Sam Mendes & Krysty Wilson-Cairns; starring George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman, Mark Strong, Andrew Scott, Richard Madden, Claire Duburcq, Colin Firth, and Benedict Cumberbatch.

RELATED POSTS