1917: A well written story about commitment to friendship
“1917” is a 2019 British movie directed by Sam Mendes that tells a story about sacrifice, friendship, commitment and brotherhood in the muddy trenches of the Western Front of World War One. Our "heroes" (that are not typical heroes , but just two privates executing the orders) are the Lance Corporal William Schofield (George MacKay) and the Lance Corporal Thomas Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman). They receive direct orders from their general to cross enemy territory that has been abandoned by the Germans in a strategic withdrawal, and get in touch with the Devon regiment to stop a Colonel from launching an attack that will push 1600 English soldiers in a trap and probably in a massacre.
The film is incredibly well written, acted and planned, with a miniature model of each scene built to see how to give to the scenes realistic lighting and to plan and calculate the cameramen's movements and jumps. The camera movements in the movie are done in such a way that it is really hard to spot a cut in the film and there was a lot of planning on this specific feature to find particular places and situations where you could hide a cut. It was done this way so that the spectators could identify more in the story because the camera is almost another silent and invisible character in the script. This has led to ingenious ways to move the camera around in on-water sections or in the trenches, and it achieves its goal: the fact that there is no spottable cut in the movie makes the story easy to follow and very simple for us, the spectators, to sympathize with the protagonists.
The acting is masterful with every scene bringing you to the edge of your seat feeling anxious and worried for the two soldiers that have to survive in the harmful and dangerous world that is WW1. That is well represented and gives a pretty good idea of what the no man's land looked like with numerous scenes with rats and bodies of fallen friends and enemies, sometimes with an allied soldier that ironically gives them nicknames to be used as landmarks and points of reference for the passages in the wire (for example right at the beginning the soldiers of the frontline can be heard referring to a body entangled in the barbed wire as the "bowed man" because he has remained stuck in a strange position, entangled in the wire). This gives such a cool and unsettling idea about soldiers that have become insensitive to the horrors of war and have to keep making fun of not so funny things like death to remain mentally stable. This cannot be seen in the enemies that are depicted as obscure shadows without a recognisable face. The interpretation of the two actors, that hold the scene together for all the movie all by themselves, is a masterful job: so much so that it is hard to recognise the fact that that's a movie and not original footage. Overall it's a great experience and I recommend everyone to see the movie if you still haven’t , and if you have already watched it you can watch it again and pay attention to the such little details as the phantom cuts.
