1917. (15.)
Directed by Sam Mendes.
Starring George Mackay, Dean-Charles Chapman, Mark Strong, Andrew Scott, Richard Madden, Benedict Cumberbatch and Colin Firth. 119 mins
This study of the Russian Revolution suffers somewhat from concentrating entirely on a day of World War I conflict in France. Calling a film that isn't about the Russian Revolution 1917 is perverse. It's like making a film called 1066, about the massacre of Granada that happened that year. Anyway, 1917 is a First World War film, a straightforward war film, that is like greatest hits compilation. There's nothing new in it, but it plays all the hits and plays them very well in a seamless mixtape package.
The immediate inspiration would appear to be Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk. Like that it plays games with the time frame. Its tale of two soldiers (Mackay, Chapman) sent on a perilous mission across No Man's Land to try and avert a suicidal attack by another battalion, is rendered in a series of very long takes that are edited to look like it is happening in a kind of compressed real-time. It's just like Birdman, but in a war.
The film doesn't try too hard to hide its mechanics (every time the camera passes behind a tree or closes in on someone's back that's a cut) which is just as well as audiences will soon realise that events aren't being shown in real-time. The technique is telling you that this is a minute-by-minute account but the events are spread out over a much longer time frame than its 119 minutes. This gives the film an unrelenting onward propulsion but it detracts from the realism and lessens our identification with the characters and their predicaments.
There's a star-studded support cast but it is the locations that we connect with. The transitions from one arena of conflict to another are enormously powerful. There is a moment where a character looks back at a farmyard where something devastating has happened and in the shot we experience ourselves moving away from this place, never to return. The character has been changed in a fundamental way but already the events are becoming memories and as viewers I think we may take this moment to think back to the events prior to that and how that farmyard had appeared to us as we approached it from the opposite side.
The transition are also important because the film needs to go at quite a clip to get to a variety of locations for its big set pieces. Working with master cinematographer Roger Deakin, director Mendes conjures up at least three breathtaking sequences. One in a derelict French town at night as overhead flares cause the shadows to rotate 360 degrees is remarkable, a bold trumping of similar scenes in Full Metal Jacket.
As a technical feat it is enormously impressive (though possibly no more so than say Inarritu's The Revenant), something most movie fans are going to want to experience in the cinema, on the big screen, but it is ultimately just another war film and another WW1 war film. In Dunkirk, the technical virtuosity put us inside the conflict, but here it often leaves us distanced.
Directed by Sam Mendes.
Starring George Mackay, Dean-Charles Chapman, Mark Strong, Andrew Scott, Richard Madden, Benedict Cumberbatch and Colin Firth. 119 mins
This study of the Russian Revolution suffers somewhat from concentrating entirely on a day of World War I conflict in France. Calling a film that isn't about the Russian Revolution 1917 is perverse. It's like making a film called 1066, about the massacre of Granada that happened that year. Anyway, 1917 is a First World War film, a straightforward war film, that is like greatest hits compilation. There's nothing new in it, but it plays all the hits and plays them very well in a seamless mixtape package.
The immediate inspiration would appear to be Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk. Like that it plays games with the time frame. Its tale of two soldiers (Mackay, Chapman) sent on a perilous mission across No Man's Land to try and avert a suicidal attack by another battalion, is rendered in a series of very long takes that are edited to look like it is happening in a kind of compressed real-time. It's just like Birdman, but in a war.
The film doesn't try too hard to hide its mechanics (every time the camera passes behind a tree or closes in on someone's back that's a cut) which is just as well as audiences will soon realise that events aren't being shown in real-time. The technique is telling you that this is a minute-by-minute account but the events are spread out over a much longer time frame than its 119 minutes. This gives the film an unrelenting onward propulsion but it detracts from the realism and lessens our identification with the characters and their predicaments.
There's a star-studded support cast but it is the locations that we connect with. The transitions from one arena of conflict to another are enormously powerful. There is a moment where a character looks back at a farmyard where something devastating has happened and in the shot we experience ourselves moving away from this place, never to return. The character has been changed in a fundamental way but already the events are becoming memories and as viewers I think we may take this moment to think back to the events prior to that and how that farmyard had appeared to us as we approached it from the opposite side.
The transition are also important because the film needs to go at quite a clip to get to a variety of locations for its big set pieces. Working with master cinematographer Roger Deakin, director Mendes conjures up at least three breathtaking sequences. One in a derelict French town at night as overhead flares cause the shadows to rotate 360 degrees is remarkable, a bold trumping of similar scenes in Full Metal Jacket.
As a technical feat it is enormously impressive (though possibly no more so than say Inarritu's The Revenant), something most movie fans are going to want to experience in the cinema, on the big screen, but it is ultimately just another war film and another WW1 war film. In Dunkirk, the technical virtuosity put us inside the conflict, but here it often leaves us distanced.
