We start our annual series with the frontrunner: Sam Mendes’s cinematic groundbreaker, which immerses us in the horror of war as never before
Ever since All Quiet on the Western Front, the least we’ve come to expect from a war-is-hell actioner is grungy realism. Yet in Sam Mendes’s 1917, the trenches are dry, wide and handsomely constructed. Uniforms look fresh out of Brooks Brothers. Even the rats seem pet-shop friendly. The flatlands of Flanders improbably furnish rapids and a plunging cataract, while corpse-strewn, shell-ravaged battlefields quickly give way to flower-strewn meadows. The incineration of a town becomes an alluring firework display.
This unconvincing backdrop foregrounds cardboard cutout protagonists devoid of backstory or interiority. Minor roles are cliched caricatures, peppered with pointlessly distracting star cameos. Wooden dialogue limits the scope for acting prowess. A bald, subplot-less storyline embraces both sentimentality and implausibility, as our hero-in-a-hurry takes time out to succour an abandoned baby with milk he happens to have picked up on the way, and skips across no man’s land miraculously immune to shot and shell.
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