j* movie reviews 2020

1917 (2020)

A good "walking film" with some interesting sense of camera.

"Walking films" are a particular genre, and exemplar of which is Lord of the Rings, which maintains a steady pace of walking for an entire extended length triology. 1917, on the other hand, makes quite snappy work of it's walking. Possibly it's like Gallipoli (1981), another war-walking movie, which I haven't seen since grade 10. But it's one of those side project movies, covering the less-warry angles on a war.

Our two main characters are messengers and whilst the saying goes "don't shoot the messenger" in war the messengers are fair game. They have to take the message to call off an attack about eight hours away because phone lines are down. This entertained me because I didn't much think of WW1 trenches as having phones. They have to go across no-mans land and other enemy territories.

Where this film really comes into it's own in that it presents as ONE SHOT! That is every shot we ever see either contains our two main characters or is close on their perspective. It is an epic masterpiece of roaming, reality like camera-work. There are maybe two moments in the whole film where we cut to dramatic black, for the rest of the film it's like we, the audience are a stalkery ride-along view. It's an epic idea and it's really well done. I just wish they'd done it with a more intersting story.

This also creates a really unique sense of time. We are told the journey will take 6-8hours, but we ride it through in "real time" in two hours. Which is pretty normal for a film, but it felt wilder because of the aforementioned one-shot business.

So it's a war film about messengers. There's all your usual war moments. You see an awful lot of dead bodies but very little death. If you ask me about it in six months time I'll probably be calling it "the one-shot walking war movie." I won't remember much of what happened, just walking war things, you know?

J* gives it 3 stars.