10 / 10
Official trailer
1917 is the best war film of the last twenty years. Sam Mendes directed it. Roger Deakins shot it. The whole movie is built to look like one unbroken take. That sounds like a gimmick until you watch it and realize the gimmick is the point. You never get a cut to release the tension. The camera stays on these two soldiers from the moment they get the order until the moment one of them either delivers the message or doesn’t.
Mendes based it on stories his grandfather Alfred told him about being a runner in the First World War. He co-wrote the script with Krysty Wilson-Cairns. Two lance corporals are ordered to cross several miles of recently abandoned German territory to call off a British attack that will walk into a trap and kill sixteen hundred men, including the brother of one of the corporals.
This film puts a knot in my chest and keeps it there. I’m scared for Schofield the whole way across that abandoned ground in a way I rarely am for anybody on a screen, and the ending leaves me wrung out. The character work is thin and I barely care, because nothing else in war cinema has made me feel that much time pass at the front.
What Works
Deakins won his second Oscar for the cinematography and he earned it.
The film stitches the single-take illusion together from long takes lasting up to eight minutes each, hidden behind whip pans, doorways, and a moment in a burning village where the protagonist is knocked unconscious. Once you stop trying to spot the cuts you stop noticing them. The film just keeps moving.
The ruined village at night, lit only by flares dropping from the sky, is one of the great sequences in modern cinema.
It looks like a Goya painting set to a Thomas Newman score. The flare-light makes the shadows move. That means the dead bodies in the ruins look like they’re moving. Schofield runs through it the way you’d run through hell, because that’s what it is.
That village is the scene I’d use to explain why the rating is a 10. I think it’s the most beautiful and frightening thing Deakins has shot, and the Newman music underneath it makes the hair on my arms stand up.
For Writers
1917 makes a structural choice that costs it character depth and pays for it in immersion. The single-take format locks off every dramatic tool that depends on editing. No flashbacks. No cutting away. No giving a supporting character their own scene. What you get instead is a reader trapped inside the protagonist’s experience for the entire runtime. If you’re choosing a structural constraint for a story, decide what it costs you and whether what it buys is worth that.
The Trenches
The trench scenes are accurate to a degree most war films don’t attempt. The trenches were built to spec on the Salisbury Plain. The mud, the duckboards, the rats, the corpses worked into the walls. None of it is decoration. The camera moves through it because the soldiers move through it.
The script also gets the abandoned German trench right. It’s cleaner than the British one, deeper, better engineered. The British soldiers find it and immediately understand they’ve been losing the engineering war. That’s a real thing that happened on the Western Front and most films skip it. That German trench thrills me. It’s the kind of detail a lazier film skips, and the moment the two men see how well the enemy built it tells me more about the Western Front than any speech could.
What’s Less Great
The character work is thin. George MacKay as Schofield is good, but the script doesn’t give him much to play beyond exhaustion and resolve. Dean-Charles Chapman as Blake gets one real scene before the plot does its work on him. Famous British actors doing single-scene cameos fill the supporting roles. Colin Firth as the general. Andrew Scott as the captain in the forward trench. Mark Strong, Richard Madden, Benedict Cumberbatch. Each gets about ninety seconds. None of them have time to be characters.
None of that matters as much as it should. The film is about the war. The men are how you get to look at it.
The cameos do bug me a little. Firth and Cumberbatch walking in for ninety seconds each pulled me out of the trench for a beat, and I’d have traded a couple of them for one more real scene with Blake.
For Writers
Mendes used famous faces as cameo roles instead of building proper supporting characters. The trick works because each face is famous enough to hold a scene in ninety seconds. You know who Colin Firth is. You don’t need backstory. The risk is that it only works because the casting did the character building. If you try the same move in prose without the actor’s pre-existing weight, the supporting character is just a name. Either give the character their own scene or accept that they’re scenery with a job to do.
The Score
Thomas Newman scored it. The music is restrained for most of the runtime, then opens up during the river sequence and the final run across the field. Holding the orchestra back for two acts gives the score room to land when it finally arrives. Most war films overscore. This one knows when to shut up.
The river and the final run are where I lose it. Newman finally lets the orchestra go, Schofield runs across that field, and I think it’s the best use of a held-back score I can name.
Where It Sits
1917 won three Oscars: Cinematography, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects. It was nominated for ten including Best Picture and Director and lost to Parasite.
It was the right call. Parasite is a better film. 1917 is the better technical achievement. It made over two hundred million dollars worldwide on a budget around ninety-five million, and that’s rare for a serious war film.
For Writers
1917 sells a serious WWI film to a mass audience by leading with a gimmick. The marketing hook was “one continuous shot.” That hook got people in the door who wouldn’t have shown up for another trench drama. The lesson is that high-concept framing isn’t the enemy of serious work. It can be the delivery mechanism. The trap is when the gimmick is all there is. Pick a hook that promises something you deliver, then deliver more than the hook promised.
Craft Note
Sam Mendes directed and co-wrote with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, based on his grandfather Alfred’s WWI stories. Roger Deakins shot it and won the Oscar. George MacKay played Schofield, Dean-Charles Chapman played Blake. Cameos from Colin Firth, Andrew Scott, Mark Strong, Richard Madden, and Benedict Cumberbatch. Thomas Newman scored. The single-take illusion was constructed from long takes hidden behind whip pans, doorways, and a moment of unconsciousness. Trenches built to spec on Salisbury Plain. Three Oscars from ten nominations. Released December 2019.
Is 1917 as good as people say?
10/10. It’s the best war film of the last twenty years, and I’d put it beside anything ever made about the First World War. It has flaws: the character work is thin, the supporting cast is wasted, and the single-take conceit is sometimes too obvious. None of that touches the rating, because the film does something almost no other war film has managed. It makes you feel the duration of a soldier’s day at the front, and I feel it in my bones. Watch it.
