His sense of duty yields an effortful and sanctimonious movie that, at the same time, takes its place in a lamentable recent trend. (It’s worth comparing their films to the work of Clint Eastwood, who’s upfront about the powers and limits of his stunted heroes.) What’s more, the battalions to which Blake is being dispatched include his brother, a lieutenant.For screen and stage, Mendes works like a sculptor—continually molding and remolding space, speech, and gesture.Instead, Mendes shuts down Blake and Schofield and envelops them in a silence of the mind in order not to probe or care what they think. It’s only one in a series of painfully blatant dramatic reversals that wouldn’t be out of place in any of the comic-book movies that are so readily contrasted with “authentic” cinema. Peter Sobczynski is a contributor to eFilmcritic.com and Magill's Cinema Annual and can be heard weekly on the nationally syndicated "Mancow's Morning Madhouse" radio show.“1917” is not entirely without interest. TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. Somewhere behind the lines in France, a young British lance corporal, Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), dozing during downtime, is awakened by a sergeant and told, “Pick a man, bring your kit.” Blake chooses a fellow lance corporal, Will Schofield (George MacKay), a friend who’d been napping in the grass alongside him. Yet that visual trickery isn’t the fakest aspect of the movie. This is a classic idea, one that comes packed with an elegant irony. The darker suggestion, utterly unexplored, is that morale and commitment were issues in the British Army at this latter stage of the Great War (the action begins on April 6, 1917, and concludes the next morning), and that a soldier without Blake’s personal motive for saving the two battalions might not be trusted to put himself at risk to fulfill it.The awakening of Jo March’s literary vocation is pulled taut by two conflicting desires: making a good living from one’s art, and relying on that art as a mode of personal expression.After six months of unrest, anti-Beijing protesters are increasingly unwilling to compromise. 1917 Is Rubbish. Yes, I said it. He endows Blake and Schofield with no comparable sense of their own mission, their own disproportionate moment. Hollywood’s next war movie instalment is about as soulless and dull as Dunkirk before it. Scott, in particular, makes a huge impression early on as a trench commander dripping with cynicism; his character’s backstory seems far more interesting than Schofield and Blake’s trek, but there’s no time to delve into it.Sam Mendes’s war drama is designed to look like it was shot in two long takes. But this technical accomplishment is wasted on a soulless film. The script (written by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns) is imagination-free, which is to say that it endows the characters with no inner lives whatsoever. What do they think? Mendes joins such directors of proud and bombastic craft as Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Peter Jackson, and Damien Chazelle, who’ve recently made films that are fixated on the heroic deeds of earlier British and American generations. But this technical accomplishment is wasted on a soulless film. The movie’s long takes, far from intensifying the experience of war, trivialize it; the effect isn’t one of artistic imagination expanded by technique but of convention showily tweaked. “1917” essentially wants to do for World War I what “Saving Private Ryan” did for World War II and “Platoon” did for Vietnam—provide a visceral depiction of the horrors of combat for viewers whose only frame of reference for those conflicts has been history books or other movies. (For instance, it’s the idea at work in John Ford’s brief and brilliant Civil War episode in “How the West Was Won,” depicting the fateful encounter of two foot soldiers and two Union generals.)
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