To make a good story great, 1917, is one hell of a war film. It doesn’t come any cleaner as war pictures go. Getting to the plot with no lead in is a WWI movie involving two Lance Corporals Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) who set out pony express style via foot to hand deliver an all important life saving message that could impact 1600 soldiers.
With field communications out of service the only hope of saving the soldiers including Blake’s own brother is for the two corporals to make the trecherous journey. The Brits are being fooled to unknowingly march right into hell on the Western Front as they believe the Germans are set to retreat. It’s a race against time across unadorned land where corpses lay in multitudes and entangled in barbwire, rats are abundant and dead horses lay rotting. All this while evading the enemy who are shooting at any moving target. That’s war though.
What makes this film spectacular is director Sam Mendes (Skyfall) shooting the entire film using single shot filming that has been only experimented with movies such as “Gravity” and “The Revenant”. A single shot or one shot camera is filmed in one long take by a single camera and given the difficulty of the excercise the camera and actors have to be perfectly in sync and, as in this film, daylight was everything. Even when the sun was shaded it’s crunch time before the shot is lost. The camera work in this film was hooked and unhooked on wires and then reattached to a vehicle for fast movements.
Cinematographer Roger Deakins moves us right along through the trenches as if you were part of the action. He follows every movement of the characters’ journey and where they go, we are right there. Mendes has the most incredible hard hitting war movie to hit theaters in years and Universal has a strong Oscar contender. A lot of credit goes to co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns as the story belongs to her. The film opens everywhere Friday, January 10, 2020. It also stars Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Benedick Cumberbatch and Andrew Scott. *****
