{"id":8210,"date":"2020-01-29T08:56:35","date_gmt":"2020-01-29T13:56:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8210"},"modified":"2020-01-29T08:56:37","modified_gmt":"2020-01-29T13:56:37","slug":"1917","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/29\/1917\/","title":{"rendered":"1917."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sam Mendes’ 1917 <\/em>was a bit of a surprise winner at\nthe Golden Globes, where it took the Best Motion Picture \u2013 Drama prize and Best\nDirector honors despite only receiving one nomination in any other category\n(Best Original Score). It feels like the kind of movie that awards voters love \u2013\nit’s an ambitious war movie, it’s about the struggles of white men, and it has\na significant gimmick to it that would appeal to the more technically minded\nvoters \u2013 even though the film itself is more competent than brilliant, with a\nplot that borders on the ridiculous and a gimmick that is ultimately too distracting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Sam Mendes has said the film is inspired by true\nstories his grandfather Alfred told about his experiences in World War I, the\nstory itself is fictional. It follows two Lance Corporals, Tom Blake and Will\nSchofield, as they attempt to cross into no man’s land and possibly slip behind\nenemy lines to deliver a message to a colonel who is planning an attack that will\nactually lead his 1600 men into a trap set by the Germans. Along the way they\nmeet many of the horrors of war, including multiple dungeon-crawl-like trips\nthrough English and German trench networks, run into half the cast of Tinker,\nTailor, Soldier, Spy<\/em>, and somehow manage to avoid all of the bullets flying\nin their directions en route to their destination. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is absolutely gripping to watch in what seems like real\ntime, with a script that seldom eases up on the throttle for you to relax. Even\nwhen Blake and Schofield are alone, they end up in some sort of danger, and\neventually we follow one of the two into a bombed-out village that looks like a\ndeath trap for him between the lack of cover and the various Germans stationed\naround the ruins. When the action stops, there’s usually the threat of action\naround a (literal) corner, and Mendes has no issue ratcheting up the tension or\nthe extent of the threats to his characters to make the film more exciting \u2013\neven though Schofield in particular seems to survive multiple incidents that\nwould kill an actual human being. It’s as exciting as any mainstream action\nfilm, without the usual crutches of the latter genre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The gimmick I mentioned above is the use of long takes to\nmake the film appear to comprise one continuous shot, although there’s one very\nobvious break and a couple of others you’ll probably think you spotted. This\nisn’t actually new; Birdman<\/em> tried it and won Best Picture at least in\npart because of it, and Alfred Hitchcock did it in Rope<\/em> when there were\nfar more severe limitations on how long any single shot could be. It is\nimmersive, and thus effective at putting you more in the action as you watch,\nbut within a half an hour my eyes were already tired of the constant motion and\nfrom trying to shift focus between the characters in the foreground and the\nendless activity in the background. I was more than ready for the film’s one\nactual break, where one of the two main characters passes out and the screen\ngoes black for a few seconds, less for the pause in the action \u2013 which I generally\nenjoyed \u2013 than for the rest for my eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s also a good bit of stunt casting here, as the famous names attached to 1917 <\/em>each appear for a few minutes, at most. Colin Firth, Mark Strong, and Benedict Cumberbatch \u2013 all of whom appeared in the 2011 adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy<\/a><\/em> \u2013 each have cameos, as does Andrew Scott as the hot priest \u2026 no, wait, wrong show, he’s a lieutenant whose regiment has just been hit. None is on screen for very long; the two stars are less well-known, although you’ve likely seen one before: George Mackay (Captain Fantastic<\/a><\/em>) plays Schofield, doing a very credible job in a role where he’s asked to carry a substantial amount of the weight, while Dean-Charles Chapman (Game of Thrones<\/em>) plays Blake and has more to do in the first third of the film. There’s one woman anywhere in the movie, and I believe only one person of color speaks, a Sikh soldier, even though there were plenty of black<\/a> and south Asian<\/a> soldiers in the British army.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I write this, 1917<\/em> has emerged as a favorite for Best Picture, even over what I think are more highly acclaimed films in Parasite<\/a><\/em>, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood<\/a><\/em>, and The Irishman<\/a><\/em>. (Even Little Women<\/a><\/em> seems to be better regarded, but no one thinks it has a snowball’s chance of winning.) I found it generally entertaining, if stylized and a bit absurd, with an ending that simply doesn’t work. The cinematography is remarkable, and seems likely to get Roger Deakins his second Oscar in three years after 13 nominations without a win. It may also win for Production Design; as much as I would like to see Parasite<\/em> win for the house, the re-creation of the trench networks and some of the battlefields here was a much more significant undertaking. But the overall experience of 1917<\/em> felt a little bit like a shell game, pun intended; this isn’t a true story, or even a plausible one, but it’s depicted like one, and when it was over I thought I’d been taken for a ride \u2013 especially after the ending. It’s more of a great technical achievement and a good film than a great film in its own right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sam Mendes’ 1917 was a bit of a surprise winner at the Golden Globes, where it took the Best Motion Picture \u2013 Drama prize and Best Director honors despite only receiving one nomination in any other category (Best Original Score). It feels like the kind of movie that awards voters love \u2013 it’s an ambitious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1144,1142,1077,215,867],"class_list":["post-8210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2019-best-director-nominees","tag-2019-best-picture-nominees","tag-2019-movies","tag-movies","tag-world-war-i","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8210"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8211,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8210\/revisions\/8211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}