1917 Review: One Day of Beautiful, but Hollow Pain

I saw 1917 last night completely by accident. My grandpa wanted to go to the movies, so we went to see Knives Out (a movie I had already seen and loved). Unfortunately by the time we got there the theater was near full, so my grandpa decided to buy tickets for 1917 instead. I don’t watch a lot of war movies, and I often am not able to watch movies that are nominated for Best Picture in theaters unless I go with other people who are interested in them. I had also heard a lot of conflicting opinions on the film, so I was cautiously optimistic to step out of my element and see what I thought about the film for myself.

Before I discuss the film in detail, I would like to provide a warning for anyone who easily gets headaches from visual media. This movie is filmed in a way that gives it the appearance of being one continuous take, and as a result the camera is almost always moving and panning. There are many times where, in order to position the camera in a certain shot composition, they use a very fast and often blurry panning shot. This is not uncommon in movies, but when the movie is doing it consistently, the result can cause severe headaches. I don’t fault the movie for this, and you probably will only be affected by this if you are a headache person like myself, but it is very important to take this into account if you plan to watch the movie. If you want to watch it and suffer from headaches, I recommend waiting for it to come out on DVD and watching it on a smaller screen in a brightly lit room to mitigate the effects.

That being said, from here on out I’m going to be discussing the entire movie, so be warned of spoilers if you wish to go in completely blind.

1917 is not a true story. The characters are fictional, and the exact story told in the film didn’t happen. However, the film is inspired by the stories of the director’s grandfather, Alfred Mendes, that he would tell about his experiences in the war running messages across No Man’s Land. I’d imagine that telling a story about your family member from memory would be incredibly frustrating, because you’d always have to worry about not having every piece of the puzzle, and if you’re telling the story right. So instead, 1917 doesn’t focus on its story. The premise feels like a framework to showcase what it was like during World War One, focusing more on a series of events and setpieces rather than one cohesive narrative.

Thanks to how the movie is shot, it feels like events often blur together, and I believe that this was done intentionally. One moment the main character’s best friend is dying after being stabbed by a man he was trying to help, and the next moment the main character is sitting in a truck listening to a group of men make funny impressions of their superiors. It gives the impression that the events of the film and WWI as a whole, while devastating to us now, felt commonplace for the soldiers in the war. This is a story about the Lost Generation, who were faced with a war that felt never-ending and left a feeling of emptiness and desensitization. This movie captures that well, and when the main character ends the movie resting on a tree in a field similarly to how the movie began, you really got the sense that after a while he’ll get up and the cycle will start again.

I think that while this is the movie’s greatest strength, it also leads to one of its pitfalls. There are a lot of dead bodies in this movie. I think it’s safe to say that I saw more dead bodies in 1917 than any other film I’ve seen combined. This makes sense given the setting, but the movie has a habit of focusing on them a lot in order to try to convey the more harrowing nature of the war. There’s one scene where the main character is trying to climb out of a river that many people have drowned in, and he has to climb over the bodies to get out. Many of them are bloated with their tongues sticking out, and it’s incredibly uncomfortable. This might have been more impactful if it was more isolated, but there are many scenes that focus on corpses, like a scene early on where there are two dead horses on the ground in different stages of decomposition and the camera focuses on both and the swarms of flies for a long stretch of time. This does create the feeling of desensitization the soldiers felt, but I believe that it does a disservice to the movie because it leads to a feeling of detachment by the end.

This is harder when the movie doesn’t focus on a story and relies instead on its events. Dialogue is sparse, especially after the death of the friend. Worse is that the friend dies relatively early on into the movie, and he’s the one who the movie initially paints as the main character. He is the one whose brother is going to die if the message isn’t received, and the other soldier comes along because he really had no idea what he was getting himself into. The friendship dynamic was one of the strongest parts of the film, but it is cut off incredibly quickly. From there, the motivations of the new main character don’t feel as impactful. He makes a point of needing to write his friend’s final words to the mother, but that’s something he could accomplish by going back to his trench. It’s not that there is a lack of motivation, but it feels much weaker than what is set up at the beginning of the movie. His death doesn’t even feel like it has an impact until the very end, and that further contributes to the feeling of desensitization. They say in the movie that it is best not to dwell on it, but because they don’t dwell on it, it only ends up feeling hollow.

It cannot be denied the level of craftmanship that went into how the movie looks and feels, and while the cinematography gave me a headache, it still is masterful and achieves what it wants to achieve. I wouldn’t be surprised if you wanted to see the movie for that alone. There are many scenes that are just beautiful. My favorite is the scene during the nighttime when the main character is traveling through this town that has been bombed, and the only illumination is a fire off in the distance and a continuous stream of flares. It’s wonderful and creates a great unease that is leveled off into a quiet moment with him and a woman that was able to survive underground. This level of warmth was welcome, and I appreciated the characters interacting and connecting through the language barrier. I wish there had been more scenes like it, although perhaps the point was that these moments were rare during the war.

As a whole, 1917 accomplishes what it sets out to achieve, but it leads to an experience that can feel underwhelming if the visuals don’t knock your socks off. I feel that they can and should be commended, and it should also be commended how they properly convey the atmosphere of the war. However, when conveying World War One, that atmosphere can often lead to disconnection that can make the grandiose adventure still feel underwhelming.