‘1917’ or — No Man’s Bland?
Sam Mendes’ ‘1917’ (2019) presents to the audience an unflinching portrayal of two of the most harrowing scourges that humanity has visited upon itself in the modern world, namely — some director’s obsessions with single shot movies and the cinematography of Roger Deakins.
Okay look, let me state that ‘1917’ is not a bad movie and the issues I have with it are very much my own, idiosyncratic prejudices. For example — I like elaborate single take shots but only when used sparingly. Orson Welles’ ‘Touch of Evil’ (1958) has two blinders but I can completely understand why they are there and, besides, in the old days they knew they only had so much film they could use at one time so never over did it. But this obsession some directors have with a single take movie? Even Alfred Hitchcock thought it was a bit of a daft idea after he made ‘Rope’ (1948). So watching ‘1917’ I was less interested in how these two young lads would navigate the treacherous terrain and more how Mendes was going to pull off his self-imposed high-wire act and this artifice kept pulling me out of the movie, an artifice not helped by some of the effects work not quite working at times. It was frustrating.
Talking of artifice, even if every single person in the world told me Roger Deakins is a genius I still wouldn’t care for his cinematography aesthetic which is simply not to my taste. I find his approach is either to colour grade everything to high-buggery resulting in off-kilter (to my eye) looking colours or to hit the audience with a palette of chromatic uniformity so strident that my cone cells start going into spasm. The effect is camerawork that calls so much attention to itself that it would get its head blown off the moment it stuck it up above the trench. And why does Deakins have such a hard-on for shooting in pitch black with the golden light of fire as the only light source? Sure, it’s pretty but he’s used it so often that when watching a night-time sequence in ‘1917’ all I could think was “Oh yeah, this was shot by the guy who filmed ‘Skyfall’”; you know, the bit where Silva chases Bond through the night whilst the cottage burns in the background… and it was so over-stylised it got on my tits even then. And don’t even get me started on ‘Blade Runner: 2049’ (2017). It’s not that he isn’t technically brilliant, obviously he is, but much like Joe Satriani’s guitar playing it just isn’t my bag.
So what are you left with when you take these two elements away from ‘1917’? The main problem, and this is the serious one for me, is not much. The constriction of the single take approach combined with a script and story that emphasises incident over drama means you’re left with a movie consisting of isolated, discreet dramatic units, many of which I felt you could rearrange and shuffle about — take that scene with the plane and that scene in the river — and re-order them and it wouldn’t make any dramatic impact on the film in the slightest. This means that, for me, the movie was as emotionally flat as a piece of no man’s land and that as the film went along I realised that I didn’t actually care in the slightest about anything that happened or the fate of any of these people. I felt like a caricature of a clichéd British General standing behind the front line knowing thousands of young men were being sent to their deaths but not giving a damn. Will all these men be spared or will they die? Shockingly, I didn’t care.
‘Paths of Glory’ (1957) had anger and bite, ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ (1930) was horror whilst ‘Wooden Crosses’ (1932) contained a sickening tension and poetic brutality, but ‘1917’ only had me thinking of what filmmakers could get away with technically in 2019. The film ends with a dedication from Sam Mendes to his grandfather who fought in WW I although I think it would’ve been more accurate if he’d dedicated it to Christopher Nolan on whom Mendes seems to have been basing his career over the last few years.
As I said, this isn’t a bad movie in the slightest and the above is overly harsh (if honest) but if you’re going to make a movie about sacrifice and war then I’d like to, at least, actually give a damn about any of it.
