'1917'

1917 is a heart-racing, want-to-stop-looking-but-can’t tour of a place you would never want to go in real life even if you could. It takes you somewhere that all of us should feel duty-bound to understand and feel in a visceral way for at least a few hours every so often. Put another way, it is the kind of thing best experienced as a film - the kind of thing that only a film, done well, can really deliver.

Director Sam Mendes quite literally plunges his audience in to the trenches of the Western Front years in to the devastation, death, and destruction of the First World War. You don’t have to be much of a student of history to know how bad it was to be there. But Mendes’ story - one he co-wrote with Krysty Wilson-Cairns and based off of a story fragment relayed to him by his grandfather, a World War I veteran - along with his decision to shoot the film in the style of single, continuous take sets the viewer on a path they can not avoid or escape.

I am not writing in metaphors here. The film opens with two British messengers, Blake (Dean Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay), awoken from slumber in a gray-green grassy field and told to go get their new orders. They amble along a sandy path at a shallow grade, and somehow - despite the gradual slope - they are suddenly in a muddy, brown-gray trench. It is damp and miserable and crowded with bodies, and this isn’t even really where the action is. Rotting clapboards hold the raw earth at bay. Blake and Schofield haven’t covered much distance, but all signs of the natural world seem to have vanished.

This is jarring and frustrating in a good way. You want - yearn even - for the camera to pan up and out, to relieve some of this sudden claustrophobia created by the trench and by the way the protagonists are being tracked in every frame. If the camera would just tilt up there would be more oxygen. But it rarely does, and so you feel you are slowly suffocating. What few letups there are don’t last long - there is rest and green to be had in pockets, but even that initial relief comes with a wave of foreboding and dread right after. It doesn’t fully dissipate until the film’s conclusion.

“1917 accomplishes an essential aim of film - it puts you in another person’s shoes and lets you experience viscerally what they (or someone like them) has.”

Blake and Schofield are tasked with delivering orders to call off on attack. They are to set out at once on their own and find a stranded unit of British forces walking in to a German trap miles away. The stakes are elevated further by the fact that Blake’s brother is among the men facing certain doom if they do not reach their comrades in time.

And so begins the unrelenting tour of the horrors of a World War I battlefield. It’s a not-so-greatest hits collection of locales. There is barbed-wire tangled No Man’s Land and an abandoned German trench run with tripwire. There is a farmhouse somehow still standing and a bombed out town. There is a dogfight above and spent shells and massive craters below.

If not for the thrust of the story and the unrelenting pace and style with which it is told, this might feel cheap and exploitative - as if Mendes is trying to deliver a history lesson shrouded in the trappings of a standard war film. But you never have a moment to linger on the notion that he is checking a set of boxes. It’s all too thrilling and harrowing, and this is no standard war film.

1917 accomplishes an essential aim of film - it puts you in another person’s shoes and lets you experience viscerally what they (or someone like them) has. It’s not exactly perfect. The dialogue is often stilted and cliche, especially when it takes occasion to get a famous British actor on screen for a brief cameo. (There are many - Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Richard Madden, etc.) But especially in a film like this, the dialogue is somewhere well south of 50 percent of what matters.