1917

The cinematography was worked out to a monomaniacal degree of detail (all those trenches strewn with corpses, barbed wire and razed, burning cities), the mise-en-scene is composed masterfully and the special effects are fantastic but don’t seek to draw attention to themselves, nor are they in the audience’s face. In short, I’ve never before seen such production values in any film whose subject is World War I. And then there’s Mendes’s sheer virtuosity, captivating camera equilibristics, and (from the meeting with the young French woman) the requisite rush of emotions. I consider it a sad error in judgment on the part of the Academy that it preferred the shallow Parasite over this masterpiece. (21/03/2020)

From start to finish, a formally perfect spectacle where I marvel at how much work went into each shot and how many trenches had to be dug for each scene. However, the captivating visuals are where it ends. The heart-wrenching journey did not captivate me even for a moment, the narrative style forces me to reminisce about many genre predecessors, and in the end I only see the most clichéd war story, which it fundamentally is. (06/02/2020)

This film is a typical representative of so-called experiential cinema. It relies on perfect technical execution, grand spectacle, and the backdrop of a large studio. It is directly predestined for the big screen, where the perfect image will fully excel. The most impressive part is the first third, which is also in line with the concept of trench warfare as we know it. However, as a whole, the film definitely lacks authenticity. It is simply an adventurous mission that was created in the imagination of its creators and has nothing to do with the reality of the battles of 1917. A similar story could purely hypothetically take place at the very beginning or end of the war, but certainly not during the time when the armies were firmly confined to trenches and shelters due to the enemy's firepower. The structure of the film resembles computer games where the hero progresses and completes individual tasks. It is definitely worth seeing, even though it does not make sense to ponder the meaningfulness of the combat mission (perhaps Napoleon more than a hundred years ago could have instructed his units in a faster and more efficient way). The performances and visual aspects are the reasons why you should watch 1917. Overall impression: 75%. (03/01/2021)

I think that Sam Mendes was aiming for the Oscar here, I don’t know why there aren’t more films about the First World War, but it’s probably because most of the time the soldiers were battling boredom in the trenches rather thanfighting for territory on the ground. Sam Mendes, however, went a bit too far here, replacing filmmaking with an attempt at absolute realism. The illusion that everything is a single long shot makes the scenes look remarkably surreal. It all starts with the crash of a German plane into a dilapidated barn, continues with ruins of the town illuminated by flares and ends directly in the trenches, a few seconds before running into the turmoil ofbattle. I was bating my breath, fascinated by the fabricated scenes, and enjoyed one of the best war films made in the last few years. The trio of good old British actors (Firth, Cumberbatch, Strong) is the icing on the cake, which will draw you into the depicted events of the war and remind you that it is “only” a film. (17/02/2020)

Visually perfect. Deakins outdid himself again. Director/screenwriter/producer Mendes, who put together tales told by his grandfather and built a story around them, put his heart into 1917. The technical precision and illusion of one continuous shot make the whole movie an unbelievably intense experience that showed me that the topic of war still has something to say to the modern audience. But the movie does not fail to present a deeply human story, the most moving scene of which was the reciting of nursery rhymes to babies in a dark cellar somewhere in France. Newman’s music is strong and sometimes chilling. (01/03/2020)