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.