1917

Sto­ries. Some­times it’s sim­ply the way you tell ​’em. You could look to the heart-in-mouth beach land­ing scene in Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan, or the chill­ing depic­tion of Russ­ian roulette of The Deer Hunter, and take both a reminder as to how the over­crowd­ed war genre often requires a dash of the dif­fer­ent to stand out.

Step­ping away from the James Bond fran­chise for the first time in sev­en years, direc­tor Sam Mendes has turned to a sto­ry shared by his pater­nal grand­fa­ther from his time fight­ing in World War One. The upshot is 1917, a film of thread­bare plot but auda­cious­ly and thrilling­ly realised.

In the spring of 1917, the Ger­mans ini­ti­at­ed ​‘Oper­a­tion Alberich’, a plan to rein­force the defen­sive line in Hin­den­burg along the West­ern Front by way of strate­gic with­draw­al. The very fact of their retreat sug­gest­ed a belea­guered army on the back foot. It was a wily act of misdirection.

Against this his­tor­i­cal­ly ver­i­fi­able back­drop, we find two young British pri­vates, Blake (Dean-Charles Chap­man) and Schofield (George MacK­ay), tasked with deliv­er­ing a warn­ing to the com­pa­ny of 1,600 ser­vice­men who are prepar­ing to make the Big Push.

The fields that Blake and Schofield tra­verse to reach them are des­o­late. Rats scur­ry over decom­pos­ing hors­es in the sod­den soil. Deep craters house the bloat­ed corpses and skele­tal remains of the fall­en. Boo­by traps and land mines lie scat­tered in the pas­tures. The eti­o­lat­ed com­plex­ions of the liv­ing they meet along the way bear tes­ti­mo­ny to both the bit­ter asper­i­ties and sturm and drang of life on the front line.

Mendes mar­shals his lens like a third pair of eyes accom­pa­ny­ing the men. While this max­imis­es the film’s immer­sive attrib­ut­es, the optics often resem­ble an RPG, cre­at­ing moments where you might expect to look down and find a con­troller in your hand and an avatar on screen. It is a sen­sa­tion not helped by the fact that char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion is ditched quick­er than a bust­ed how­itzer on the field of battle.

Unlike, say, Alexan­der Sokurov’s Russ­ian Ark or Sebas­t­ian Schipper’s Vic­to­ria, 1917 is not com­prised of a sin­gle con­tin­u­ous take. The film has more in com­mon with the likes of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope or Ale­jan­dro González Iñárritu’s Bird­man, as it slips in a few dis­creet cuts (and one hard cut, rough­ly mid­way through). Bear­ing in mind the scale of the project, it’s an under­stand­able con­ces­sion and does not detract from the over­all tech­ni­cal achievement.

Two par­tic­u­lar col­lab­o­ra­tors are worth their weight in gold. Thomas New­man, who has worked on every Mendes direct­ing cred­it since 1999’s Amer­i­can Beau­ty, con­jures a remark­ably ver­sa­tile and effec­tive score, while DoP Roger Deakins wran­gles some exquis­ite sepia tones that fit the mode and mood of the pic­ture superbly.

1917 is not an intel­lec­tu­al explo­ration into the pol­i­tics and eth­i­cal quan­daries thrown up by bat­tle, but it is a lapel-grab­bing and throat-throt­tling assault on the sens­es. It’s vis­cer­al, pul­sat­ing and, above all, great­ly effec­tive. A tri­umph in sound and vision that not only push­es this war epic up and over the top, but over the line too.