1917

Sam Mendes delivers a nerve-wracking wartime experience that will annoy action fans, as there are no big battles, and I take two points off for that as well, but otherwise it’s a flawless and excellent work in every way, and a lot of the credit goes to Roger Deakins, because the cinematographer is simply a genius. The film is shot in one take and so authentically that you feel like you are among the soldiers and experiencing the horrors of war with them. 1917 is basically a war road movie drama where you travel from A to B and even though nothing much actually happens, it has a gripping atmosphere, believable actors, awesome music and about three suspenseful, climactic scenes where I, a horror fan, wish Sam Mendes would make a horror movie next time. The intense finale ends up being highly emotional and had just about everyone with a heart in the theater rubbing their nose, so have tissues at hand. A nice experience, a must see at IMAX, and if Mendes had pushed the envelope a bt more and served up a proper war cry, this would be a clear contender for film of the year. (01/10/2020)

The cinematography was worked out to a monomaniacal degree of detail (all those trenches strewn with corpses, barbed wire and razed, burning cities), the mise-en-scene is composed masterfully and the special effects are fantastic but don’t seek to draw attention to themselves, nor are they in the audience’s face. In short, I’ve never before seen such production values in any film whose subject is World War I. And then there’s Mendes’s sheer virtuosity, captivating camera equilibristics, and (from the meeting with the young French woman) the requisite rush of emotions. I consider it a sad error in judgment on the part of the Academy that it preferred the shallow Parasite over this masterpiece. (03/21/2020)

1917 is a gut-punching cinematographic exhibition with stunning sets, a pulsating rhythm and cinema-loving details (I was most pleased by Mark Strong’s entrance into the scene). All of that is true of the first half. In the second half, less comprehensible things start to happen and the whole thing becomes a forced march towards the story’s conclusion. Nothing else in the plot is surprising, which only confirms the excessive simplicity and transparency of the subject, relying on clichéd symbols (sacrifice for a higher purpose, milk – unboiled?? – given to a child). It is far from the philosophical statement that it pretends to be. But the visuals are truly outstanding, and it was pleasing to see Thomas Newman step out of his comfort zone. It would be wrong to see 1917 anywhere other than at the cinema. Just like Gravity the other day. (03/09/2020)

I think that Sam Mendes was aiming for the Oscar here, I don’t know why there aren’t more films about the First World War, but it’s probably because most of the time the soldiers were battling boredom in the trenches rather thanfighting for territory on the ground. Sam Mendes, however, went a bit too far here, replacing filmmaking with an attempt at absolute realism. The illusion that everything is a single long shot makes the scenes look remarkably surreal. It all starts with the crash of a German plane into a dilapidated barn, continues with ruins of the town illuminated by flares and ends directly in the trenches, a few seconds before running into the turmoil ofbattle. I was bating my breath, fascinated by the fabricated scenes, and enjoyed one of the best war films made in the last few years. The trio of good old British actors (Firth, Cumberbatch, Strong) is the icing on the cake, which will draw you into the depicted events of the war and remind you that it is “only” a film. (02/17/2020)

Visually perfect. Deakins outdid himself again. Director/screenwriter/producer Mendes, who put together tales told by his grandfather and built a story around them, put his heart into 1917. The technical precision and illusion of one continuous shot make the whole movie an unbelievably intense experience that showed me that the topic of war still has something to say to the modern audience. But the movie does not fail to present a deeply human story, the most moving scene of which was the reciting of nursery rhymes to babies in a dark cellar somewhere in France. Newman’s music is strong and sometimes chilling. (02/29/2020)