Now streaming on Showtime, 1917 was the conservative pick to clean up during last year’s Oscar race — and we all know the progressive one, Parasite, …
Now streaming on Showtime,1917 was the conservative pick to clean up during last year’s Oscar race — and we all know the progressive one, Parasite, stole its thunder (deservingly so, I might add). But that isn’t to say Sam Mendes’ lithe and visceral World War I action film isn’t worthy of appraisal. Famously, the movie was photographed and edited (with a little digital trickery) so it looks like two really long shots. But does the story here match the technical achievement? The Gist: April,1917. The British army is dug in at the Western Front. The Germans seem to have retreated from the area, but General Erinmore (Colin Firth) knows better. He enlists Lance Corporals Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) to deliver a message calling off the next morning’s planned attack — it’s an ambush, and the British battalion is outnumbered. Why these guys? Maybe they’re tough as nails, maybe they’re sharp of mind, but Blake’s brother is among the endangered men. Consider him motivated. They set off. They don’t even get a halfway-decent meal first. They fight their way through clumps of soldiers in a maze of narrow trenches. They venture into no man’s land, around dead horses teeming with flies and through tangles of barbed wire and across muddy craters. To the vacated German trenches, into an underground barracks. Rats, everywhere. A photo taped to a bedpost — people in it. Is their son, sibling, grandson dead? A tripwire. Careful. But keep moving.
