1917 (Dir. Sam Mendes, 1h 59m)

 
Few films capture the true chaos of war. Apocalypse Now, Platoon,  Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan. Sam Mendes' 1917, in which two British Tommys race against time to stop a suicidal attack on German lines, undoubtedly joins that pantheon, not only in its stark depiction of the violence and chaos of war through which our protagonists trek and fight, but in Mendes and veteran cinematographer, Roger Deakins' hands, and in their ambition behind the camera, and the seemingly unbroken single shot that makes up this odyssey across enemy lines, so 1917 becomes a stunning tour-de-force of narrative, performance and visual storytelling.

To call 1917 unflinching is, if anything, an understatement. Not only does Deakins' lens never step away from our protagonists, Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), as they make their painstaking way across the gutted and blasted landscape of World War I's battlefields, showing all the blood, death, and carnage of the mechanised warfare of the trenches, the bombed out buildings, and the utterly desolate landscape of No Man's Land, it, simply put, never leaves Schofield and Blake, period. For the film's entire two hour runtime, but for a single cut as one of them loses consciousness after a tense firefight, the film seemingly never cuts, in one extraordinary continual shot, the camera holding on either Schofield or Blake, either at close quarters, or as tiny speck of humanity against the wreckage of Northern France.

The effect is extraordinary. The single-shot film (or indeed, the film edited to appear as a single shot) is a relatively new medium, but whilst films like Russian Ark (2002) and Victoria (2015), are spectacular, they are either small scale, or intricately acted pieces, bordering on the theatrical. 1917 is an altogether different beast, and a remarkable one, shot almost entirely on location, except for a taut scene in the German trenches, and another in which Schofield comes face to face with one of the innocents caught between the Germans and the British. It is utterly and jawdroppingly seamless, Deakins' long-takes a perfect ballet of camera and actors-in some case, the camera being transferred between various shooting styles to follow both of the soldier, as well as having to contend with the changing elements, explosions, gunfights and scores of extras to tell its story.

Yet, despite this central conceit in how this film can visually appear, full of moments where the pure kinetic energy of the film pulls us on from setpiece to setpiece, Deakins' characteristic skill of spectacularly framed and often beautiful shots is present and correct here, visually evoking works such as the war paintings of Singer Sargeant and Nash, but also art created by the soldiers at the front, on both sides, whilst Mendes' narrative is just as capable of taking its protagonists through the unspoiled French countryside, in two particularly evocative moments, as it is of showing the distant flames of war, in a world lit only by fire and destruction, whilst one of the duo's escape, lit by flares and

Yet, against this highly stagemanaged orchestration of scenes, against Deakins' painterly landscape comes impressively verité performances-MacKay and Chapman are our vantage point, our window upon the world of mud and blood and death, and through them, the film ricochets between tense action pieces, in which the camera practically clings to either of the young soldiers, including one incredibly tense scene in which they have to escape a collapsing set of german tunnels with one of the duo blinded with dust, the gallows humour of the trenches, as they pick their way through the shell-blasted landscapes-including a ghoulish story about a fellow soldier's issues with rats, and moments of either stark beauty or horror, as the bodystrewn no mans land gives way to the rare beauty of cherry blossom and the closest the film gets to being, simply, anti-war. Both MacKay and Chapman are, simply put, sublime performances, as their ordeal-and with its cinematic structure, we are there every step of the way with them-slowly takes its toll, leaving them a shell of their former selves.

Certainly, with its basis in one of Mendes' own relatives, to whom the film is dedicated, the film cannot be anything but anti-war-the unflinching depiction of the stark horrors of conflict, of the poor French woman that is caught up in the middle of the conflict, of the countless injured and dead that litter the battlefields and the sickbays and trenches and fields and rivers of France. But Mendes is making a film about more than war and its effects, but on the entire mentality that led to such loss of life, of that generation lost to oiling the machines of either side. Compared to the often faceless formless adversary of other war movies, Mendes makes each encounter where we meet the enemy face to face stark, violent and harrowing, not through the cruelty of the German soldiers, but because they are, like our protagonists, young men, and each of their deaths is brutal, shocking and utterly unnecessary. No film has ever captured the sense of that generation lost, in such great a number, nor, in bleak and stark sense, the futility of much of the war, in so perfect and universal a sense

1917 thus, is not only a technical and artistic triumph, placing one of cinema's great cinematographers, and indeed one of its great directors of the last twenty-five years, as utterly dedicated to this extraordinary piece of cinema, this headlong dash into the chaos of the Western front, in order to save the lives of men like our two protagonists, men with families, wives, children, heedless, or perhaps despite of the danger. Against the great raw canvas of war, Deakins and Mendes, after all, tell the most personal of tales, of a man sent to save his brother, and rarely has any war story been told at both scales with such unblinking and unflinching veracity to the horrors of the trenches. 1917 is nothing short of a masterpiece.

Rating: Must See [Personal Recommendation]