1917

Halfway through 1917, Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay) comes to, after a blow to his head, only to discover that the whole world around him is on fire. Thomas Newman’s grand, ambiguous score corkscrews upward; it seems almost to fan the flames this village is writhing in—the medieval edifices humbled by German shells. I can describe no emotion to attach to the grandeur. The lonely foreigner has reason to believe he’s died and gone to hell, or that he’s been there all along; what can this inferno possibly tell him when this is what he was sent to the Western Front to protect? I can’t name the emotion, and yet it is there, surging against interpretation.

1917 wobbles in the no man’s land between humanism and mechanism. It was shot, by Roger Deakins, to simulate a single take, and tells the story in real time. Though Sam Mendes, the director, based it on stories told to him by his grandfather, a First World War veteran, the movie is less a personal journey than it is a guided tour. The Germans are luring the British into an ambush—and the only way to notify the vulnerable battalions is to deliver the news to them by hand. Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) was not picked for this mission out of the blue: his brother will be among the victims, if it fails. That leaves Schofield alone with the bitter clarity that those troops are more faceless numbers for a war that digs uncountable graves.

But it isn’t Schofield’s lot to learn the patriotism that was made stirring in Dunkirk—prelude to the “good” war. 1917 is like Dunkirk deconstructed and straightened out. But it is also a crash course in sensory impressions, with details that flow past like foam down a river: registered but rarely lingered on. The momentum is breathless but its effects are supple—a hand dipped into a cadaver’s wound plays as black comedy; a drunk soldier’s lurches as horror; a hymn rising in a glade as fantasy. When Mark Strong cautions against “men [who] just want the fight,” it isn’t dialogue, it’s texture.

Though some reviews have dismissed the one-take conceit by comparing the movie to V.R. or a video game, I think such associations actually work in its favor. If the Great War was about anything, it was about men being consumed by their machines, and we are as locked into perspective as the infantrymen are locked into their mission: into combat itself. Schofield is skeptical of his orders—but whether because he’s a hero or a clockwork orange, or merely degraded, by circumstance, into a walking nervous system, he follows them. There’s simply no time for interiority.

The movie can’t resolve the paradox of honoring the legacy of World War I by making its heroes relatively anonymous, just as it can’t absolve itself of all technical gimmickry (at one point, a biplane barrels toward the camera like the boulder that chased Indiana Jones). But MacKay makes Schofield’s humanity increasingly palpable as he opens up his oblong face. In crossing the biomechanical boneyard of No Man’s Land, he may as well be entering the Land of the Dead—the other side of trench warfare. His taciturn senior officers, played in passing by Benedict Cumberbatch and Colin Firth, are as removed from him as the corpses that dam a river. A Frenchwoman (Claire Duburcq) with a baby provides what hospitality can be expected in embers; she’s the second foreigner in his life who doesn’t introduce themself with a bayonet. The first is a Sikh conscript (Nabhaan Rizwan) in Schofield’s own army: a reminder of the extra injustice that the colonized had to bear.

What seems axiomatic a century later was a terrible lesson learned by millions in real time: this war severed meaning from suffering. (Andrew Scott—who was the “hot priest” on Fleabag—suggests the Lost Generation in embryo; he’s curt under his Hemingway-hipster mustache.) But axioms lose their force in the death of living memory, even when it is pressing to remember who really suffers, for forces that become irrelevant and then invisible, when wars are waged by technology for nationalism or power. 1917 may not always be a sophisticated film, but it honors memory with lambent sensuality: a feedback loop between beauty and horror.