1917 cheats. The done-so-as-to-look-like-one-take gambit? They cheat on it. There’s a smash cut to black about halfway through that, while technically not a traditional cut as in one that would break up the action in the middle of a scene, definitely violates the parameters that the film sets up for itself. It comes out of the cut to black, and it’s night, when it was previously day. So the movie uses a cut to circumvent the real-time standard that it has, again, confined itself to. The screen stays black for a little bit, enough time to contemplate the fact that they have blatantly violated their own illusion.
And then the next scene happens and you don’t care.
1917 is a film with many flaws. It feels excessively like a video game. It spreads no plot over two hours. There honestly isn’t anything really here beyond the technical wizardry. AND IT DOESN’T MATTER AT ALL. There’s a scene that’s dumb, and you’ll think “this is dumb”, and then Roger Deakins appears in the flesh on the screen in a tuxedo waving a magic wand and pulls something out of nowhere and you’re awestruck and you think “HOW DID THEY DO THAT” and Deakins disappears in a puff of smoke and shouts “I AM THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME”. This happens several times in the film.
I can’t really attempt to describe the plot, because there is none. It consists of a journey to deliver an important message by two people (incoming spoilers), and eventually one person. There is a lot of gunfire, there are a lot of explosions, there is everything that you typically attribute to a war movie. In a sense, we’ve all seen this movie dozens of times. So why is it different? How does it pull off becoming something truly great in the face of overwhelming flaws and a done-to-death concept? It does it by executing a gimmick that’s also been done before. And it doesn’t really nail it either.
1917 will no doubt be widely compared to Birdman, because both films utilize the one-take conceit. In a lot of ways, this comparison is justified. The two masters of contemporary cinematography (Deakins here and Emmanuel Lubezki in the other film) strutting their stuff in vehicles for their own greatness. Yet they couldn’t be more different in what they accomplish with this technique. Birdman is jazz. It uses the one-take idea to create a flow, to emphasize an all-encompassing smoothness in the face of the chaos of the subject matter. 1917 is hell. The unbroken take gimmick bombards the viewer with inescapable atrocity and overwhelming hopelessness. Deakins creates a world of omnipresent yet ever-dissolving hope, of sorely needed yet unfortunately fleeting escape. There are moments of bliss in this film, moments where the ticking clock stands still and everything is allowed to breathe. Here is where the film falters. The single take effect collapses when it isn’t propelling the film, when everything meanders, it feels out of place and unnecessarily showy. There were many moments when Jeff Goldblum’s immortal Jurassic Park line, “your scientists were so preoccupied with figuring out whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”, came to mind. And then they pull of pure movie magic again and all is forgotten and forgiven.
Beyond Deakins’ cinematography, there isn’t much, but there isn’t nothing. A shockingly strong central performance by George MacKay of the earlier (and very bad) film Captain Fantastic anchors the film, and Thomas Newman’s brilliant score is deployed to perhaps an excessive extent, which isn’t really a problem. Like I said, this is a film with undeniable issues. Yet it overcomes these to make itself into something fantastic. This is a truly great film that I hope doesn’t take best picture over the far more deserving Parasite, as that would tarnish its legacy forever, and this is too good a film for that. Yes, it has problems, and yes, it’s nothing original, and yes, it’s overdone and showboaty. But at the end of the day, it delivers visceral thrills and awe, and that goes a long, long way.
Rating: 4.25/5. I told myself I had to pick between 4 and 4.5, the rational rating numbers, and then I realized that this is my blog and I can do whatever I want. So 4.25.
The Movie Files 