The Cost of War in 1917 - A Spoiler-Free Review

Is it possible to make a war movie that does not, accidentally or not, glorify war?

With how limited the camera is, framing becomes an essential tool of storytelling, and Deakins uses it to perfection.

I’ve seen a lot of war movies. I grew up watching World War 2 classics with my Dad like The Great Escape and A Bridge Too Far. A lot of these movies were fun and featured daring heroics; Steve McQueen trying to jump the German border with a motorcycle, James Garner hotwiring a plane to escape. Yet, at their core, a lot of these movies inherently challenge the glorification of war. The Great Escape is an absolute tragedy, with most of the action of the film being rendered moot by the conclusion, and much of the cast dying in the process. Steve McQueen’s character Hilts ends, once again, in the POW camp. Everything is cyclical and things only get worse over time. Yet, as a kid, I don’t know how much of that stuck out to me. I definitely registered it as a tragic, almost three-hour epic, but I can’t recall if I came back to it time after time for its tragedy, or for its “great valour, and great deeds that were not wholly in vain” (a quote from C.S. Lewis, very much not in reference to The Great Escape, but it seems apt). The movie ends in tragedy but on a note of proud resistance. The score of the movie is filled with triumphant strings and heroic music. The colour palette is bright and cheery. That seems to me to be a trend with the war movies of that era, to focus on the heroism in spite of great violence. With this lens, the violence becomes perhaps desensitized in light of the heroics. War is bad, but heroism still exists, and the existence of heroism is enough to combat the evil in the world, even if the acts of heroism are rendered inert.

Geography, too, becomes a useful tool in breaking up the movie when there are no strict cuts.

I’m waxing lyrically about all of this because of that question at the top of the page. It was a conversation that came up in conversation with a few friends, and I keep mulling it over in relation to 1917. Certainly, there are a great number of anti-war movies, stretching even prior to World War 2 with classics like All Quiet on the Western Front. I can’t profess to have watched all of them, and I am entirely sure that many of them offer no hope of glory in war. I’m not strictly interested in detailing all of that, that’s a whole conversation unto itself with a lot more research than I want for this review. I simply raise the question because it seems particularly relevant to this movie. War movies are not the dime-a-dozen affair that they were when I was growing up. After the double hit of Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, a movie with the bright colours and soaring strings of The Great Escape would seem uncomfortably out of place. Many a film emphasizes the disastrous effects of war. Saving Private Ryan became famous for its opening twenty minutes, showing in detail the gore and horror of the D-Day landings. But some have criticized the rest of the movie of being a more typical Spielberg flick, with heroic characters who have exciting dynamics. There is still a lot of severity and horror, but it is placed against moving sacrifices and exciting gunfights. Hacksaw Ridge got even more flack for this, celebrating the pacifism of Desmond Doss but also (at least, to some) reveling in the battle scenes that surround him. Don’t get me wrong, I love all of these movies, but that question still hangs overhead. In modern popular media, do war movies implicitly celebrate war as often as they critique it? The lit major in me thinks to Plato's Republic, where Socrates argues that poetry (and, in our context, fiction as a whole) must not portray soldiers as afraid of death, as it would dissuade future generations from charging senselessly into war. I'd like to hope that our modern view of war is more developed than Plato's and that we are able to acknowledge the cost that warfare has on the individual. A movie about war ought to recognize that cost, lest we promote that same unthinking approach to war.

The slow pans settle the audience more into the terror of trekking across No Man's Land than any other movie I've seen.

Enter 1917, Sam Mendes’ latest directorial hit. It features relative unknowns George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman as two soldiers who are called upon to deliver a message up the lines of World War One trenches to call off an attack that is sure to be suicidal. Should they fail, 1600 men will die, including one of the two men’s brother. In a lot of wars, it’s a very familiar story – with one notable twist. Mendes and brilliant cinematographer Roger Deakins have shot and edited the movie to look as if it was filmed in one, singular shot. I’ve seen a few people criticize this as more of a gimmick than anything else, which is absolutely shocking to me. The fact is, no movie has quite drawn me in and forced me to look up close at war like 1917 did. The single-shot effect pulls you directly into the perspective of these two young men, and gives a newfound terror to what may be familiar sights. If other movies run the risk of desensitizing the violence of war, 1917 is a movie that might actually re-sensitize us. Many a movie has taken a trip through the horror of World War One’s ‘No Man’s Land,’ but none are as vividly harrowing as in this movie. The single-shot direction forces the audience to take in everything, there is no comfort in cutting away. In addition, 1917 plays more like a war suspense movie than an action movie. Where a movie like Saving Private Ryan would be interspersed with exciting war scenes, 1917 is filled with unbearable tension. The few sequences of action are less interruptions to that tension as much as they are intensifications of it. The chosen mode of filming also allows us to directly experience emotion alongside the protagonists. We witness them cope with the terrors they witness – or more accurately, we witness them often having to stuff down their emotions in order to progress with the task at hand. We palpably feel the growing weight of war along with the protagonists. Again, there is no relief to be found in cutting away. Far from a simple gimmick, the single-shot narrative reveals the dehumanizing horror of war in a way that more conventional movies simply could not.

These aren't particularly complex characters, but the movie lets you infer and invest a lot from well-crafted imagery, and fantastically subtle performances.

Similarly, I’ve seen people accuse this movie of being ‘too simple,’ of ‘not really having a plot.’ I think Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk received a similar degree of criticism, which is appropriate because both movies are doing similar things. Dunkirk is very much an experiential movie; Nolan intentionally limits characterization in order to demonstrate a sort of universality of experience. Dunkirk is less of a ‘story’ so much as it is a day in the life of a series of individuals at the battle of Dunkirk. So, too, 1917 is less about some heroic pair of men saving lives, as much as it is a tour of the horrors of World War One. Through these characters, we witness all the blood and mud and vanity of the war. The latter is especially important. Without spoiling the movie, towards the end Mendes gives us a disconcerting image of some of the leadership in the war. The overall sense we get is that the ‘heroism’ of our protagonists may easily be invalidated the next day; in the grand scheme of things, war simply goes on, dictated by careless generals and politics, and the men laying down their lives are just caught in the middle. This theme is particularly prevalent through the first World War, a war that was a totally unnecessary one. You can’t divide it into binary ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ like you often can in World War Two. It was a war of politics and politicians, far removed from the men on the front lines. 1917 shows us how these front-line men suffer at the hands of such politics. Rather than reveling in the action of war, the action is portrayed as harrowing and dehumanizing. The protagonists have to respond to emotional hardship by repressing and ignoring their emotions. War takes a heavy strain on those who do the fighting, and that fighting is so often rendered irrelevant by the powers that be.

Deakins' lighting through this scene is downright haunting, like something out of hell itself.

I was really affected by 1917, and I wasn’t the only one. I went to watch the movie with four grown men, and the end of the picture had all of us bawling, and then sitting in quiet, stoic contemplation as the credits rolled. No one moved for a long time. More than most movies, 1917 emphasizes just how draining and pointless war often is. Such a movie seems particularly relevant here at the dawn of 2020, with the leadership of the United States staring down a new possible war. I fear to an extent that we're at a similar point culturally to where we were at before the first World War; a time when people had forgotten the effect that war had, and where naive citizens were eager to gloriously fight for their country again. 1917 reminds us the cost of such a political war – the dehumanization of those involved. Even while it shows the desensitizing of those fighting, it re-sensitizes the audience and emphasizes just how much it saps away at the soldier’s humanity. The rare moments where the tension is released are, constantly, moments where that integral humanity is celebrated – and they are always moments where the protagonists are distracted from the mission. The task at hand detracts from the heart of who they are. 1917 does not glorify war; war is never treated as a landscape of heroism and glorious sacrifice. Rather, 1917 is a modern criticism of everything that war stands for.

From the trailers, I expected this scene to be a good feat of cinematography. I wasn't ready for how emotionally invested and torn it was going to leave me.

This all goes without mentioning the impeccable acting of MacKay and Chapman, creating characters that are intrinsically relatable through very little dialogue. And while I’ve talked a lot about the effect of the single-shot structure, I haven’t mentioned the beautiful and harrowing cinematography of Roger Deakins, creating some scenes that are nightmarish in their imagery. Alexandre Desplat’s score ties the entire movie together, effortlessly carrying any moment that may fall without the ability to cut between characters. I could write an entirely separate essay on the subtlety of casting all the major names of the movie as generals who only appear in a scene or two – surely mirroring the sort of awe the average soldier must have in standing in the presence of such recognizable figures. All in all, 1917 is a very solid movie. Haunting, harrowing, and more emotional than one would expect. It’s one of those features that I think everyone ought to experience, at least once.

Cats, Little Women, 1917. What a week. The Rise of Skywalker discussion will come eventually, I promise. After that, there might be a lull on here. I’m not really expecting anything huge for a month or so, though I may try to work in some discussion threads. I know I wanted to do a ‘Sequel Trilogy’ rewritten project in the style of Belated Media’s ‘What if the Prequel Trilogy was good?’ but after Rise of Skywalker, I don’t even know what that would look like. Maybe I’ll talk about The Mandalorian or The Witcher? I don’t know, if you have anything you’d like to see, feel free to comment or message me.