My friend and I, after seeing 1917, were musing on comparable war films. I tend to inexplicably prefer the genre, and even I had trouble recalling other WWI movies. I guess there's War Horse, and of course All Quiet on the Western Front; later I remembered A Farewell to Arms and Kubrick's Paths of Glory. But there aren't a lot, especially when compared to the perennial WWII, Vietnam, and Iraq war movies. As we considered why, we came up with two solid answers: first, Americans weren't nearly as involved in that war (Wilson was determined to remain neutral until the Lusitania sank, and US troops were deployed in only the last year of the four-year conflict), and it was a particularly brutal fight.
The brutality and isolation of WWI take central focus in Sam Mendes's vision of trench warfare, which he and cinematographer Roger Deakins capture in two individual, almost unbroken shots. At least, so it's meant to appear, as Hitchcock and Inarritu have notably done before. Initially, I expected that this single-shot approach would prove the unbelievable technical achievements of these artists; it does. Then I suspected that this technique would pull us into the story with immersive and devastating results; it does. Finally, I realized that this feature was not so much a technical gimmick as it was a theatrical and artistic expression of integrity. This is one of the rare stories in which the expense of time is in fact deadly -- the tagline of some ads reads "Time is the enemy" -- and so as the bloody fighting increases in intensity, so does the thematic anxiety we feel as we watch.
The German army has withdrawn from a section of the Western Front. The British and French soldiers are on a watchful rest, but only just. Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay), two young soldiers, are woken and ordered to travel to another battalion, across enemy lines, to prevent their attack. The German retreat is a ruse, and the British attack will result in thousands of their own casualties, including Blake's brother (Richard Madden). Blake and Schofield embark, first exiting their own trench to immediately see, probably for the first time, the horrific hell on earth that is the recently deserted battlefield. Making their way through the muddy, bloody no-man's land and into the deserted German trenches is a nail-biting exercise in tension. And it's just the first step.
Because of the immediacy and immersion of the film, it often feels like a sort of arthouse video game, where you play a character picking his way across various battlefields, including tunnels, trenches, rivers, forests, fields, abandoned towns. The journey and action are punctuated by terrifying open-world dangers, especially gunfire that tends to erupt when least expected from shooters we never see. Occasional reprieves take the form of lengthy bits of exposition-heavy dialogue, either between the two young men or various commanding officers, including Colin Firth, Andrew Scott, Mark Strong, and Benedict Cumberbatch. The centerpiece, though, is a masterwork of light, sound, speed, and acting as Schofield sprints through a ruined town with Germans hunting him in the dark. Flares flying overhead turn the battlefront into a nightmarish ghost-town where shadows move and nothing is as it seems.
In what quickly becomes a sort of odyssey through war-torn northern France, the two young men are forced to deal with booby traps, enemy soldiers, friendly fire, dehydration, airplane attacks, rats, barbed wire, tunnel collapses, and hundreds of dead bodies. Not long after they initially enter no-man's land, Schofield cuts his hand on barbed wire and then, spooked and hiding, accidentally plunges his hand into a festering corpse's bowels. It's disgusting, and he'll probably lose that hand within a week, but it's just the beginning of the horrors to come. The action is relatively slow-paced, but so much detail and emotion is built into every minute that you still feel like things are flying along. In fact, lengthy sections feel not unlike Apocalypse Now in that, despite our protagonists' best efforts to find and deliver information, the battlefield is strewn with soldiers who have effectively lost their minds. Nobody knows where the command is, where the front is, who is a threat and who is a friend, or even how to function as a normal person. Madness is the cost these men pay to serve in war, if not their limbs or lives.
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