‘1917' is More Virtual-Reality Video Game and Less Cinema [Review]

“1917,” from “American Beauty “director Sam Mendes, wants to take the war movie genre and turn it into a ride. With the help of DP extraordinaire, Roger Deakins, the film essentially unfolds via a single, unbroken shot. However, unlike, say, Alexander Sokourov’s “Russian Ark,” this experiment from Deakins and Mendes manages to find ways to make invisible cuts. It’s the same artificial one-take experiment that was used in Hitchcock’s “Rope” and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s “Birdman.” However, the result here feels more gimmick than cinema, a sort of virtual reality video game, but devoid of a beating heart.

The premise of the film actually borrows heavily from Steven Spielberg’s landmark war movie, “Saving Private Ryan,” as it tackles a dangerous, but noble mission taken on by two British soldiers, Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay). These two young men are handed an urgent order by their general to travel a few miles across the battlefield and deliver a message to superior officers leading the charge on the other side. They need to relay the message that a retreat needs to happen — 1,600 men are about to walk into a deadly German ambush.

And so, our two protagonists walk into total no man’s land, through piles of rotting human corpses, endless barbed wires, underground tunnels, and neverending meadows. It’s meant to be a harrowing journey and Mendes makes sure we get that. Deakins’ camera never stops moving, as if a character in its own right, mimicking the influential cinema of Emmanuel Lubezki’s showy Steadicam. We do come into contact with moments of riveting power, especially a nighttime sprint through the ruins of a town, with massive flames creating fluorescent colors of blue and purple in the sky. But don’t discount “1917” for being an action movie, no, it actually has a plentiful amount of silent passages, ruminations if you will, between characters, in between all the bombs, sniper fire, and collapsing bridges.

The prep-work that must have been done by Mendes and Deakins, with thousands of extras and overtly complicated setups, makes “1917” an admirably potent feat of filmmaking—But why then is the film barely immersive in its attempt to suck the viewer into its highly-stylized frames? Maybe it’s because the one-take gimmick, and it is no doubt a gimmick, becomes ever-so distracting and the plight of its characters becomes secondary. It’s as if Mendes and Deakins, two pros at this game, were more concentrated on the virtuosic and less on character. They no doubt get our attention in many of the set-pieces they conceive here, a sort of uninterrupted ballet of movement that is very easy on the eyes, but rings false emotionally. The film ended up being too attention-craving for my tastes. Mendes and Deakins, quite clearly, want us to marvel at their technical powers, but, at the same time, forget that they have to also tell a story.

Mendes co-wrote the screenplay, a first for him, but the thin plotting and character development seems to be a negative trait of that endeavor. It doesn’t help that Thomas Newman’s sentiment-driven score weakens the grit further by sugarcoating moments meant to have raw potency, devoid of the sentimental strings that accompany them. This all further distances us from Schofield and Blake, two characters we never really get to know. Fine, their journey is one of survival and bravery, but the audience investment is dull and almost like hitting the start button of a video-game, only to eventually hit pause due to lack of interest. [C+]