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| Scene from 1917 (2019) |
Over the past 100 years, there hasn't been a filmmaker that understood the immersive, claustrophobic experience of being placed into trench warfare quite like director Sam Mendes. Audiences have likely spent hours inside these narrow rows of safety, but not quite like 1917. A masterclass in the film could be taught in the first 10 minutes of this film, showing the navigation of two soldiers through these endless, winding passages as they pass around soldiers on their way to combat. What starts at ground level slowly drops the audience further into the trenches until all peripherals are surrounded by soldiers and dirt. Even with this, there is a sense of geography that could be followed. It's a story through action, and one that slowly unveils details in casual asides, presenting a vision of World War I that is sparing in the conventional plot in favor of an immersive experience.
Part of that immersive experience is owed to Mendes' desire to shoot the entire film in the gimmicky long take. The audience is a third party to Lance Corporals Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George Mackay), experiencing the same winding paths that they do as they deliver a message from base to a distant party, walking through no man's land and various other obstacles in a quest to prevent further war. It's one thing if that was the story, but Mendes insists on presenting constant obstacles on some of the most breathtaking set designs of the century, once again slowly placing the viewer into a world so large that they too will become exhausted by the time that Blake and Schofield have walked miles through an eerie quietness, still fearing the gunfire of enemy soldiers. It's easily among the best WWI movies in that it recreates the harrowing experience better than any comparable film, and it does so with a visual accomplishment that's even more of a bragging right. For what 1917 lacks in great storytelling, it makes up for in overall scale and atmosphere.
