Every year at Universal Studios for Halloween they introduce a bunch of new maze attractions. They're usually focused on random horror or something in pop culture. They did a maze based on The Walking Dead where you had to walk through a post-apocalyptic wasteland while zombies pop out. This year they had a frozen tundra maze with a Yetti where you have to walk around a Yukon gold mining set. The first half hour of the new Sam Mendes' film, 1917, is like if they did a WWI maze. You have to walk through trenches, across a muddy, desolate field filled with corpses and dead horses, weave through barbed wire, escape through cavernous, dark, subterranean tunnels. The reason the movie feels like this is because the film is in real time and, through motion picture magic, is just one shot. The camera seemingly never cuts and so you're travelling through these trenches and across this barbed wired landscape like you're really there. And that's the gimmick. A one-shot, real-time, World War I movie. And these days, with the endless plethora of war movies, TV shows, games, and books, you kind of need a gimmick to stand out.
I've always complained about the saturation of WWII "entertainment." It sometimes seems like Hollywood often has no ideas anymore so they throw out Hitler and Nazi's and voila, movie made. I also can't really complain, as I read two WWII books this year, Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, and thought that one of the year's best films was the Hitler comedy, Jo-Jo Rabbit. But I have often wondered why they make so many WWII movies and TV shows and never touch WWI. I'm not entirely even sure what happened in WWI. Do they even bother to teach it in school? There's no compelling Hitler villain, no nuclear bombings, no greatest generation victory. So perhaps 1917 will change that. Or not. While it is a WWI film, it's an "in the trenches" affair, meaning you get to see and feel what it was like on the ground without any kind of obtrusive, outside interference like politics or history. You're literally thrown into a trench and off to the races for two hours without barely a breath. Which means that this is mere entertainment. Which is good and bad.
The most famous one-shot film is probably Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, although it's been tried numerous times. I remember that lame Johnny Depp movie Nick of Time did it, and Mr. Robot did it in an episode in their third season that included an office building attack. The last interesting movie that tried it was Victoria, from Germany, which had the audacity to actually film the entire thing in real time (it even featured a bank robbery...which isn't as good as it sounds). 1917 does, unfortunately, deliver a one-shot film in real time but gives us a trick in the middle. The trick ultimately ruins the gimmick and cheats the audience. The reason for this is obvious; director Sam Mendes wanted to showcase sequences at night and during the day and couldn't do that in two hours if it takes place in real time. I don't mind the cheat, as the visually cool night sequence uses shadows, the lights of flare guns, and the light of a church on fire to induce great dramatic effect. And that's basically what's good and what the purpose of the film is, ultimately. It's an attempt to get our pulse racing, to heave us into this world at the lowly, teenage soldier boy, grunt's level. To experience war how it was. And for the most part, the film succeeds.
The basic story of 1917 is quite simple. Two British soldiers are tasked with travelling by themselves to warn another infantry about a surprise attack. The problem is they have to travel miles across dangerous territory in the middle of war torn France to do it. This premise reminded me of the movie Cold Mountain, which was a take on The Odyssey. Traveling alone, constantly threatened, across a country broken by war while getting into various adventures at every turn, meeting new friends and villains along the way, never thinking you'll get to your ultimate destination but doing anything to get there. It certainly helps if you care about the protagonist, and at least early on you do, as George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman, who play the two soldiers, do a good enough job playing off each other as just two dudes stuck together in war and making the best of it. Mendes mentioned that he didn't want to cast stars in the main roles as you'd obviously know who would die if there was a major movie star cast. Mendes probably should have taken that advice for all of the roles, as it's unfortunately jarring when Benedict Cumberbatch shows up as an officer and it takes you out of the movie. But that's a minor misstep, and obviously the movie was expensive to make so they need some names. And while the movie is good not great, it only has a few flaws. The one glaring one is the sequence featuring the cute, young, French lass that practically falls in love with one of the soldiers two seconds after meeting him. Ugh. I suppose they thought they needed a slow, peaceful, somewhat happy scene amidst the carnage but having a bombed out city just happen to have a pretty, French girl show up out of nowhere to be kind is ludicrous. And while the film attempts to be realistic in the real-time, one-shot, horrors of war right in your face, right now, right here, really happened, feel it type of way, it doesn't exactly help that one of the soldiers practically becomes Superman by the end by being shot at a dozen times and living, running and avoiding multiple bombs going off around him, somehow not drowning in a river, somehow not being killed by a plane, tunnel collapse, etc., etc., etc. I guess if you really did make a movie about the realistic side of war it'd be the most boring thing ever filmed, so Hollywood has to pizzazz it up.
Sam Mendes, who also co-wrote the film with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, is pretty much the perfect fit for a film like 1917. It's sort of an art house film and sort of a typical, big budget, entertainment picture and he's been straddling that line all of his career. He of course made it big twenty years ago with American Beauty, and the last we saw of him in the movie world he was directing two James Bond flicks that were entertaining but not particularly memorable. He directed two good shows that made it to Broadway in the last few years that I saw, The Ferryman and the Alan Cumming Cabaret return. And 1917 is pretty much the opposite of a meaty, wordy Broadway show. 1917 doesn't really have any great characters or story. It's all sumptuous visuals and it looks gorgeous (Roger Deakins, director of photography, should win the Oscar). The big money shot, which features one of the soldiers running across a field avoiding bombs, looks impressive in the trailer but the obvious, fake, special f/x mar it on screen in the final, longer version. But there are numerous other, wonderful, impressive, stylish as hell scenes filled with high tension that are worth the price of admission. The sequence with the crashing plane heading right at the soldiers is awe-inspiring. And the best sequence involves the soldiers running for their life in a subterranean, German tunnel. The use of shadows and light is excellent. The picture is beautiful to look at. Few squabbles aside, it's one of the better films of the year. Another war picture to entertain us. I suppose that's never going to change. ***
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