Journey’s End | Little White Lies

Journey’s End

01 Feb 2018 / Released: 02 Feb 2018

Words by David Jenkins

Directed by Saul Dibb

Starring Asa Butterfield, Paul Bettany, and Sam Claflin

Soldiers in military uniforms with steel helmets, carrying equipment, against a backlit urban scene.
Soldiers in military uniforms with steel helmets, carrying equipment, against a backlit urban scene.
3

Anticipation.

A warhorse stage play receives another big screen run out.

3

Enjoyment.

Solid, old fashioned, does exactly what it says on the tin.

3

In Retrospect.

It’s exactly the film you think it’s going to be – for better and for worse.

The grim real­i­ties of life in the World War One trench­es is the sub­ject of this rous­ing if uno­rig­i­nal tale of sol­diers on the edge of sanity.

One of the joys of watch­ing The Simp­sons is the delayed grat­i­fi­ca­tion of unlock­ing all of its obscure ref­er­ence points. Years after you see an episode and chuck­le at a sur­re­al joke, some moment of hap­pen­stance will sud­den­ly lead to a rev­e­la­tion, and the cul­tur­al ref­er­ence will become appar­ent. The chain is com­plete. By the same ratio­nale, fans of the forth (and best) series of beloved BBC sit­com Black­ad­der – the one set in the trench­es of World War One – may want to catch up with this new ver­sion of Journey’s End, itself based on the hit 1928 stage play penned by ex-army offi­cer RC Sherriff.

But where writ­ers Ben Elton and Richard Cur­tis milk the agony of wait­ing for an immi­nent Ger­man attack for bawdy laughs in Black­ad­der, the orig­i­nal play offers up pure-brewed exis­ten­tial dread. It con­cerns a pla­toon of young men, fraz­zled and frayed due to their pri­or com­bat expe­ri­ences, and hav­ing to face the brit­tle real­i­ty of their poten­tial, prob­a­ble slaugh­ter from bul­let, bay­o­net or bomb. As with Black­ad­der, this new hand­some new fea­ture ver­sion nudges a sense of con­fused pluck to the fore, as char­ac­ters main­tain the banal, back-slap­py ban­ter and refuse to accept that death is very much on their mud-n-blood caked doorstep.

The set-up plays like some tor­ture porn hor­ror movie: squadrons take turns at the front, each spend­ing six days in the trench­es in case the Bosch unleash fury on the British lines. Sam Claflin’s Cap­tain Stan­hope leads the charge from behind a bot­tle of ration-qual­i­ty scotch and a whole mess of com­bat trau­ma. He’s holds it togeth­er just enough to keep his men in line, but in pri­vate he’s falling to pieces. New to the par­ty is Asa Butterfield’s Raleigh who request­ed post­ing to Stanhope’s reg­i­ment with the knowl­edge of the risks it would entail. Paul Bettany’s sto­ical Osbourne is the only one who’s able to oper­ate with a lev­el head in the sit­u­a­tion, and he becomes de fac­to moral arbiter between the old hand and the young pup.

Direc­tor Saul Dibb offers up a drab pres­tige treat­ment of the mate­r­i­al, attempt­ing as much as pos­si­ble to make the sto­ry feel like an expan­sive film rather than a boxy play. Most of the big emo­tion­al set pieces take place in crum­bling, dim­ly-lit dugouts with men engaged in dis­course about the pri­vate tor­ments of pub­lic war­fare. The per­for­mances in gen­er­al lack for sub­tle­ty, and feel like they would have been more at home in the imme­di­a­cy of a the­atre. Claflin espe­cial­ly per­haps reveals too much too soon, and his char­ac­ter doesn’t real­ly have any­where to go.

The film works when col­lect­ing togeth­er the details and the process­es of army life: the meals; the hygiene; the tem­pera­ment; the jobs; the rank­ing sys­tem; the com­mu­ni­ca­tions; the squalor. Yet it lacks for orig­i­nal images and unique per­spec­tives on this done-to-death sub­ject and may feel over­ly famil­iar to any­one who’s caught a half decent war movie in their time. The film was orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed for release in 2017 to mark the cen­te­nary of the War, but var­i­ous legal sna­fus held it back to 2018. No both­er, as its sim­ple depic­tion of war as non­sen­si­cal and need­less­ly dan­ger­ous sport still holds fast.

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