The story is simple, but fraught with peril. Two young army privates, Blake (Chapman) and Schofield (MacKay) are tasked by their superiors with delivering a vital message to a battalion in which Blake\u2019s brother (Richard Madden) serves. The battalion\u2019s commander, Colonel MacKenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a day away from an attack on German troops, but is about to lead his men into a deadly trap. To save the lives of hundreds of fellow soldiers, Blake and Schofield must deliver stopping orders to MacKenzie, which means crossing no-man\u2019s land and numerous battle lines, without being captured or killed by the Germans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1917<\/em> is as much a cinematographer and editor\u2019s movie as it is a director\u2019s. Mendes works closely with the legendary Roger Deakins, and wisely borrows Dunkirk<\/em> editor Lee Smith, to build and keep a perspective that moves with his heroes throughout the movie. 1917<\/em> contains plenty of emotional moments, but its most affecting element is its landscapes, and the way they subtly shift from pastoral fields to crowded trenches to hellish grey wastelands piled with bodies. Deakins\u2019 long shots, and Smith\u2019s ability to seamlessly stitch them together, makes those landscape changes gradual, the way they would be in real life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In moments of conflict, this approach also ramps up the tension, as with an extended nighttime sequence that follows Schofield through the ruins of a village, lit by the flames of distant battle. As Schofield attempts to avoid sniper fire, Deakins makes use of the heightened, frequently shifting light and shadows, resulting in a disorienting but beautiful long shot. Our eyes, like Schofield\u2019s, are frequently scanning the perimeter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That extended God\u2019s-eye perspective does have its occasional drawbacks, however. There are several moments \u2014 particularly in dialogue and action \u2014 where Mendes\u2019 film takes on a video game quality, as if the audience were wearing a VR rig or playing a first-person shooter. The times this happens are fairly obvious, and they threaten to ruin the illusion, but only momentarily. It certainly helps that the whole enterprise is undergirded by a fantastic score from Thomas Newman \u2014 some of his best work in years \u2014 that captures the film\u2019s purgatorial gloom and sorrow, as well as the protagonists\u2019 upward struggle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By spending the entire runtime of 1917<\/em> with Blake and Schofield, we\u2019re allowed to feel the enormity of the task in front of them, the obstacles stacked against them, and the emotional weight of their mission. Chapman and MacKay both have very open, youthful faces, and Mendes shows the effects of their experiences slowly playing out over their faces in different ways \u2014 MacKay\u2019s, in particular, gradually softens and gives way to ever-growing amounts of weariness and grief. Because the camera spends so much time at the characters\u2019 sides, we see this happen almost in real time, and the feeling is something like opening a window directly into their souls. Even though we\u2019re told little about Blake and Schofield\u2019s lives outside the war, by the end of the film, it\u2019s as if we know them intimately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It might be tempting for some to think of 1917<\/em> as a showy technical experiment, but the movie\u2019s ambitious vision is there for a reason. It\u2019s meant to communicate the toll of war on those who fight, and particularly to invite more mainstream consideration of a war that, from an American perspective at least, often gets less attention in popular culture. Mendes, Deakins and Smith\u2019s visual experimentation hits a couple of hurdles, but for the most part, it helps achieve that vision beautifully. A-<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If cinema is, as Roger Ebert famously put it, a machine that generates empathy, the camera is its motor. What […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":577,"featured_media":13077,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[340,1381],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/577"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/crookedc.png\")
<\/p>\n\n\n\n1 hr., 59 min.; rated R for violence, some disturbing images, and language<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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