Review of 1917 (2019) by Mauro_Lanari — 24 Jan 2020
(Mauro Lanari).
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play" ("Wargames": Badham, 1983).
A (suicide?) mission as an existential journey in the "no man's land" between two (enemy?) trenches, a "zone" which lies between the ghostly landscape of "Stalker" (Tarkovskij, 1979) and the endopsychic one of "The Dead Zone" (King, 1979; Cronenberg, 1983), a borderline area between life and death. This is the fascinating fulcrum of "1917", not the inevitable technical virtuosity in "Oscar bait" function and still less a too often shameless playstation perspective, but the odyssey to deliver the counter-order to cancel an attack, the sense of spatiotemporal suspension, the deliberate following of (almost) empty moments, the persisted stalemates, "The Wrong Move" ("False Bewegung") of circularity, and that's what differentiates it from the journey of the soldier Bardamu, of Captain Willard, of Commander Bowman, of Captain Miller (Spielberg continues to produce Mendes with DreamWorks). "I am a poor wayfaring stranger / While traveling thru this world of woe". A little beyond sufficiency.
This review of 1917 (2019) was written by Mauro_Lanari on 24 Jan 2020.
1917 has generally received very positive reviews.
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