1917

Something about World War I encourages representation of its battlefields in a continuous and unbroken spectacle, an uninterrupted presentation of men and machines moving across ravaged terrain.  Perhaps, this sort of representation arises from the basically linear nature of the conflict -- two parallel trenches facing one another and snaking over the landscape of France and Belgium for 800 or more miles.  In 1930, Lewis Milestone designed the battle scenes in All Quiet on the Western Front as an unedited shot of men advancing slowly through bomb craters and barb wire in a hail of enemy fire -- the long tracking scenes of combat remains some of the most astonishing battle sequences ever filmed.  (In 1937, Milestone made a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front,  a picture called The Way Back.   For that movie, Milestone developing a tracking crane that would allow his cameras to follow battlefield action not only laterally but also vertically, craning up and down over obstacles -- with this device, Milestone was able to create even longer tracking scenes in his battle sequences in the later film.)  Stanley Kubrick in 1957 features minutes long tracking sequences in Paths of  Glory when Kirk Douglas as Dax tours the trenches and, then, later during the failed assault on the German position "the Ant Hill."  In 2013, the distinguished cartoonist, Joe Sacco, finished a book called The Great War: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme -- Sacco's book is made so that it can be read as a continuous scroll, opening up to show a thirty foot black and white panorama of the battlefield from the rear through the front lines and, then, progressing toward rear of the enemy forces; the effect is a bit like the extended panels of a Chinese scroll.  And, finally, Sam Mendes' 1917 is a film that is created to feel like a continuous take -- the entire movie seems to be presented as one perpetually moving shot, an enormous tracking sequence that follows the fortunes of two soldiers dispatched on a suicidal mission in April of  1917.

Mendes is an effective director.  I liked his American Beauty and his stage production of the musical Cabaret.  He knows how to orchestrate an action sequence:  the last half-hour of his James Bond film Skyfall transcended the material, staging a violent siege at a country house on the moors much in the way of a John Ford or Howard Hawks' Western.  By and large 1917 is successful.  Despite the perverse technique, the film doesn't flag -- at least for the most part.  There are some scenes, of course, where the viewer feels trapped with the soldiers and wishes that the director would just cut away so we don't have to watch protracted images of people just walking around or, even, sitting in a lorry that keeps getting stuck in the mud.  But, for the most part, Mendes keeps the film propelled forward and it's reasonably exciting.  The picture has no plot and no acting to speak of -- most of the performance consist of embittered clipped obscenities and horrified reaction shots.  Two young men, Blake and Scofield are dispatched on a nine mile run to reach a battalion of soldiers, the Devons, who are about to launch an attack that will be suicidally futile -- the Germans have retreated, but only to consolidate and fortify their position.  The British troops will be marching into a lethal trap.  The  Germans have cut the telephone lines, although it's not totally clear to me why the English would be relying on their enemy's communication system -- you just have to accept this as a premise for the race against time that governs the film's story, such as it is.  There are some real surprises in the narrative and, so, I'm not going to summarize what happens -- suffice it to say that the boys proceed through some nightmarish terrain, encountering all sorts of obstacles to their mission. 

Far and away, the best scenes in the movie are in its first half-hour -- these are the sequences in which the heroes depart from a meadow to the rear of their lines, advance to the front, and, then, creep through a hellish No-Man's-Land to reach the abandoned German positions.  The battlefield is decorated with appallingly mangled corpses and the craters are full of greasy water and rats are scurrying around everywhere.  This part of the movie represents a considerable achievement and is probably the reason to go see the picture.  Things, however, soon start to come unstuck.  First, there are minor details -- we're told about the stench of the dead horses and, in fact, as our boys scramble past the animal-corpses the air is full of humming, buzzing flies.  But later, the boys are creeping through pits full of human bodies, all of them half-decomposed and there seem to be no flies around at all.  (The same is true of a bravura scene toward the end of the movie in which the hero scrambles over a bulwark of floating bloated corpses in a river -- where are the CGI flies in this scene?)  There's a big explosion that buries one of the protagonists in a deep pile of fragmented concrete -- the other guy digs out his buddy who, amazingly, is okay.  (One would have expected the blast that tore apart concrete to have ripped the man's body to pieces as well.)  The worse miscalculation occurs late in the film -- it's a scene that is shown in the trailers broadcast on TV for the movie and rings totally false even in that context.  The hero falls into a river.  For some reason, the river is wild, full of spectacular white-water rapids roaring over huge boulders -- where exactly in Belgium or France would we find a river of this sort?  The river terminates at a huge waterfall over which the hero is swept.  This seems utterly implausible.  But, later, the hero reaches his objective and pulls his letter of orders out of his pocket to present it to Benedict Cumberbatch of all people who seems to have wandered in from Spielberg's War Horse.  The orders must have been written in indelible ink on strangely waterproof paper because there are no water stains at all on the documents.  How did they avoid getting soaked and becoming illegible when the hero was floating down stream through miles of white-water rapids and, then, falling eighty feet over a huge waterfall in which he is submerged completely for about two minutes in the cascade's plunge pool?  Even worse, there is a maudlin ending in which the hero looks through some papers -- there are family photographs and a sort of diary.  All of these materials were in his pocket when he went over the waterfall.  So how has this stuff survived without so much as a moist spot on the pictures and writings? 

Some of the movie works well enough -- a scene in which the hero approaches a group of soldiers about to be sent over the top and hears a man singing "Poor Wayfaring Stranger" makes perfect sense in the context of this film.  We have seen the main characters crossing dangerous terrain for an hour and, indeed, they seem to be wayfaring strangers.  A scene in which the hero wanders around a maze of ruined buildings lit by surreal flares that cast huge shadows is excellent and scary.  The actual combat scenes, which are limited to a few minutes in the movie's last ten minutes are impressive.  But a shadow hangs over the whole enterprise.  Inevitably, the movie looks and feels like a first-person shooter, that is, a video game in which the protagonist runs around a maze overcoming (or succumbing to) various hazards.  From time to time, in these games, the hero will stagger into a room lit by a fire and a solicitous officer will lean forward to confer with the man -- it's like those moments in Doom or Duke Nuke-em in which the first-person shooter suddenly encounters someone with a message relevant to the game:  "It sure you took you a helluva long time to get here, Marine!  But now that you've made up, load up your plasma gun with these ammo canisters and, then, get your ass up to the Starship reactor to see what's happening there."  It's not Mendes' fault that the movie feels a little bit like a first-person shooter or, even, a version of Myst where you have to navigate a complicated maze picking up clues.  But the picture has this ambience and it detracts a bit from the experience.