I’m not really an “indoors” kind of person, and it’s killing me to be cooped up inside all the time during lockdown. Now I know how prisoners in solitary must feel. Jeebus.
But I did take the chance to order the DVD version of “1917” and watch it. Then watch it again…. So here is my very short review.
One word: “wow”.
Since I am a huge history fan, and since I have done a wee bit of amateur film-making myself (I did some sci-fi fan films for YouTube many years ago), I watched “1917” in two different ways. And loved them both.
First, the film-making aspect. Wow. By now everyone probably knows that the film was shot to appear as if it were all done with one continuous sequence (though it actually has a lot of very well hidden edit cuts). It really is a masterpiece of cinematography. While some of the cuts can be seen if you know what to look for, the effect is stunning. The camera work not only draws you into the movie, but it is cleverly used to set the emotional mood of each sequence—some enclosed and claustrophobic, and others open and vulnerable. It is a visually stunning movie.
And from the historical viewpoint, it also impressed me. The Great War is not often the topic of movies, especially in the US since our involvement with it was short and late (though we like to believe that we won the whole thing singlehandedly or something). Probably not coincidentally, the movie is set on April 6, 1917—the day the US entered the war.
Although the movie does not re-enact any specific incident from the war, it does capture the essence of the Great War—a bloody muddy slugfest where neither side could move and where mass attack after mass attack was made, all of them resulting in mown-down waves of slaughtered men. The movie captures the hopelessness of it all.
There were lots of little historical details that the production team included even though most audience members would never recognize them. As the two protagonists set out on their mission, for instance, they run up a trench in the wrong direction and are yelled at by a trooper. The trench networks during the war were very specifically laid out, and traffic patterns were carefully set so that the flow of men and ammo to the front (and wounded to the rear) was not impeded. So when the protagonists get yelled at for going “up” in a “down” trench, it is an accurate historical detail, and one that most people probably don’t even notice or understand. Also, we can visually see that the British trenches were mud-filled shitholes, while the Germans had much nicer and better-built trenches: again an accurate historical detail, since the Germans intentionally constructed their trenches by pulling back to suitable ground, while the British were ordered to dig their networks wherever they happened to be, even if it was a low-lying floodplain.
And as a military aviation fan, I also caught another historical detail that sort of surprised me to see: in the movie’s “dogfight” scene, we see the crash of what is recognizably an Albatros D5, which was period to the time of 1917. It surprised me because virtually every WW1 movie ever made depicts the much more famous Fokker triplane instead, even though the Albatros was in fact the primary German fighter plane for the time.
It was apparent that the producers went through an awful lot of research to make the details as accurately as they could.
I loved it.