1917

For a bunch of reasons, I rarely go to the movie theater, and so only saw one of this year's Oscar-nominated movies, 1917. Now that the Oscars have come and gone, but while the movie is still in theaters, it's a good time to mention it again.

Dean-Charles Chapman plays Lance Corporal Blake, a British soldier in the north of France in April 1917. This is the era of trench warfare, with all the horror that implies, but as the movie opens Blake is resting a bit behind the lines. His commanding officer approaches him and tells him to pick one of the soldiers in the battalion, and the two are to go meet Gen. Erinmore (Colin Firth). Blake picks his best friend, fellow Lance Corpora Schofield (George MacKay).

The two men don't know what they're about to be in for, and in some ways it might be better if they didn't. Erinmore informs them that several miles away, Col. Mackenzie's (Benedict Cumberbatch) regiment is about to make an advance on the German lines. But they're really walking into a trap, which would cost the British some 1600 soldiers. And Erinmore can't get word to Mackenzie not to attack because the field telephones are down. So Erinmore needs two special couriers to deliver a letter by hand to Mackenzie. Of course, this means traversing several miles of no-man's-land, with a very high likelihood of attacks by the Germans. Oh, and to make the stakes higher, LCpl. Blake's brother is in Mackenzie's regiment.

The two corporals don't have much choice but to set out, and the mission is immediately dangerous as the retreating Germans have booby-trapped some of their trenches. Schofield wasn't exactly thrilled about getting picked in the first place, and he's really not thrilled now. But it's a life and death struggle as the two men make their way forward to Mackenzie's position. Not only that, but it's harrowing in that there are all of the horrors of war.

To make matters worse, there's some dogfighting overhead that results in a German plane being downed and burning. And the German pilot stabs Blake, forcing Schofield to try to finish the dangerous journey all by himself.

1917 is a fairly simple tale, but one told quite well. You've probably heard of the conceit that the movie was filmed to look like one long take, and that for some people it can be distracting. For the most part, I didn't find it particularly distracting, although I did find myself thinking of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. Hitchcock, of course, had intended to film the movie as one long take, but realized that there were points when the projectionists had to change reels that the illusion would be broken. So Hitchcock inserted hard cuts at those points in the film. I think 1917 would have benefited from similar cuts at certain points where the angle of motion changes. (Now that we're in digital, director Sam Mendes wouldn't have had to worry about changes of reels, of course.)

The one other area where I had a problem, but others might not, was with the CGI effects. TCM just reaired Battleground the other day, the late 1940s MGM movie about the Battle of the Bulge, and it's fairly obvious that most of it is on the backlot. And yet, while in some ways the CGI is more realistic-looking, to me it also has the effect of looking quite sterile and antiseptic, as if there's something about it that's not quite right in a way I can't place but can with backlot movies. (I had this feeling even more when I saw the trailer to Call of the Wild before 1917.)

Still, 1917 is quite the technical and storytelling achievement, save for one scene of a Frenchwoman and a baby in an otherwise abandoned village that really grated on me. How did everybody but her escape, and why was she oh so conveniently switching from English to French just when Schofield needed to be confused? It's one of those coincidences that movies often need to work, but here it just bugged me.

1917 isn't on DVD or Blu-ray yet, but Amazon seems to list it on Prime Video and it's still definitely in theaters; at least, I looked up my local theater's website and they have three showings of it tomorrow.