Critics reviews

With 1917, Mendes is attempting to bring WWI to life with visceral immediacy, but instead the impeccable craftsmanship gives it a strangely distancing effect. Every sequence is a technical tour de force, displaying incredibly fluid camerawork and expert blocking, and the longer the movie goes on the more obvious and distracting the technique becomes.

The issue is that 1917 is less of a film than an act of filmmaking – something you can and almost certainly will marvel at in the cinema, but one whose subject isn’t ultimately the war, but itself.

In Sir Sam Mendes’s 1917, form and content meet in perfect harmony: the pointlessness of the film exactly mirrors the pointlessness of World War I.

Yet for all the steel-trap visceral efficiency, it’s the more low-key moments that really pack a punch – those moments when we’re confronted with the simple human cost of war... It’s a quality perfectly captured by MacKay’s endlessly watchable eyes, which manage simultaneously to project ravaged innocence and world-weary exhaustion – fatalism and hope.

[T]he movie is more successful as a thriller than as a thoughtful examination of war and its horrors; Mendes seems less interested in bigger ideas about the nightmare of battle and its effects on his characters than he is in Hitchcockian audience manipulation.

It is a story of what war does to us, of how arbitrary and senseless it can seem, of how we win by avoiding needless battle, of how war can be about saving and not taking lives. That’s how Mendes pays true tribute to the soldiers, by not boxing them in as cardboard heroes or glamorizing the action.

An anti-war statement drowned out amid the bombast of a blockbuster, 1917 is more likely to move you physically - it jolts you, shakes you up - than emotionally, and as with Dunkirk, that's because it covers a lot of ground without ever seeming to gain much in the way of the harsh, instructive life experience that was central to the war movies of old.

If Mendes’s film-making has sometimes felt as if it has not fully outgrown his beginnings in theatre, 1917 is wildly cinematic, a movie that makes you feel the breath of mortality on your neck.

The so-called long take serves as a mask—a gross bit of earnest showmanship that both conceals and reflects the trickery and the cheap machinations of the script, the shallowness of the direction of the actors, and the brazenly superficial and emotion-dictating music score.

The script, which Mendes co-wrote alongside Krysty Wilson-Cairns, quietly brings into question how we frame the word “heroism” in terms of individual action versus collective bravery... It’s a shame that the rest of the film so rigorously undercuts its own themes.

The script, by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, keeps hinting at the ultimate futility of the First World War, during which millions of men heaved themselves out of trenches and toward certain death for the sake of a few miles of territory. Though 1917 tries to communicate that nightmarish reality, its long-take trickery ends up feeling similarly pointless.

This sort of immersive identification—in which the protagonist becomes our mere surrogate or avatar—is what, for me, makes 1917 such a rebarbative viewing experience.