1917 - A Slight Misstep?

At the risk of sounding like a British politician, let me be clear: 1917 is an astonishing piece of filmmaking. It is also an excellent film. You might notice that the second adjective is slightly more tempered than the first. Why so? It has taken me a few days to come up with an answer.

It was a moment of tonal unevenness - slight but jolting - that caused me to furrow my brow, and feel, for just a second or two, that I was watching a different film. A James Bond film, no less. Of course, the film's director was at the rudder for two Bond films, and I enjoyed them immensely, particularly the nuanced and allusive Skyfall. This moment of tonal weakness occurs as the film's central hero Lance Corporal Will Schofield - played magnificently by George MacKay - leaps into the void and finds himself tumbling into the rapids of a swirling river. For the short duration of that thrilling, disorientating moment, the spell that this magnificent film had cast over me was temporarily broken.

Over the top!

Here is the the irony. I am sure there were moments like this in The First World War: acts of incredible daring, indeed, leaps into unfathomable darkness resulting in miraculous escape, that, even if we were to have witnessed them, would have seemed a few seconds later just as outrageous and unlikely. But this is a film that strives, not only towards the heroic and visceral, but also to an unflinching realism. This balancing act is precarious, and for just a moment the high-wire act wobbles.

To reiterate, this is an excellent film. Even to me, my quibble sounds churlish. I saw the film a few days ago in the cavernous amphitheatre that is the BFI IMAX. It almost overwhelmed me. The rumbling sound of explosions, the sharp, rap of bullets striking iron; the dizzying, literally nausea inducing use of Steadicam that pursued our two soldiers on their journey down crowded, claustrophobic trenches, often against the grain of squaddies returning from the front; and the ground-level camera work, right on top of the mud and barbed wire of No Man's Land.     

It's not as if Sam is shying away from reminding us that he's done a few Bond movies

Aspects have stayed with me. In a recent post on Dracula I relayed a comment about how rats are the actual stars of Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre. They are auditioning for awards again in this film. Gigantic and seemingly real, they scuttle along the trenches and across corpses with impunity. Mendes' methods of keeping the camera right at the heart of things, as if you are a fellow traveller on this suicidal mission, causes you to react in a much more physical way than usual. The rat and the tripwire moment had me lurching out of my seat.  

Visually it is stunning. The switch from daylight to darkness – brilliantly done – reveals the village of Écoust-Saint-Mein ablaze and hellish. It immediately brought to mind John Martin's apocalyptic masterpieces The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and Pandemonium. As in those painting, here was an air of hellish unreality. It looked like nowhere on Earth, but unlike the leap into the void moment, it worked.

John Martin, The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (1852)

I am almost loathe to describe my quibble as a quibble. Looking up, I even describe it as 'thrilling'. 1917 is deserving of all the praise it gets.  And do not listen one iota to those who compare the visuals and set pieces to those that you would find in a video game: it should go without saying that thousands of men careering headlong across No Man's Land towards their death was the ghastly reality of that war. I left the cinema overwhelmed and unsteady, drained and exhausted, and only recalled my bugbear the next day. Perhaps that is exactly how it should be.