1917 – Cheap Thoughts

It’s easy for a film’s USP to be seen as a gimmick because more often than not they’re…well, gimmicky, and don’t tend to serve a greater purpose than conventional storytelling methods. 1917 is not one of those films. For anyone unaware, 1917 takes place during World War 1 as two soldiers Lance Corporals Schofield & Blake are tasked with travelling across No Man’s Land and into enemy territory in order to deliver a message to call off an attack that would result in the deaths of hundreds of soldiers.

The “gimmick” in this case being that the entire film is shot to appear as one continuous take, and as I stated it’s easy for this sort of thing to come across as just a marketing ploy to impress people with vague spectacle lacking in purpose. Instead what Director Sam Mendes and DoP Roger Deakins have achieved is a great example of consistent tension and identifiable characters. Never breaking away means there are no breaks in the action, no stylistic signals to indicate a change in tone between the character’s downtime and an action scene. As an audience member you are always on alert, that constant sense of dread present throughout the entirety of the film, very much like the main characters who serve to fulfil the secondary purpose of the style.

Never leaving the characters and experiencing this story in real time along with them strengthens the connection between character and viewer, every break, every struggle, every fight, every emotion that’s felt by them is felt by us, it’s one of the better examples of empathetic storytelling of the past several years, and it carries on all the way throughout the climax when they are just so exhausted and so desperate to achieve their goals with the clock ticking down and with Thomas Newman’s excellent score emphasising the moment you are in the heart and mind of the character, the person who has already risked everything and now nothing is going to stop them, no matter the cost.

None of this is to disregard the technical achievement that is 1917, it is incredibly impressive that this was ever pulled off, even if half the time you are distracted by trying to find the cheats, where the clever cuts are that made this all possible, and I’m sure that alone would be enough to make it impressive, but it would also be hollow. The more impressive part is that they used this technique to emphasize the characters and the drama, to put us in their point of view and combining it with a simple enough premise that this concoction of basic plot, engrossing characters and complex technique makes this film stand out as one of the better war films out there when it’s a genre stuffed to the brim with competition and filmmakers have to challenge themselves to make something that stands out.

-Danny