Review of 1917 (2019) by Notor12 — 10 Jan 2020

Unfortunately, the one-shot gimmick seemed to limit the scope of the story to a point which ultimately harmed the film overall....Many of the sequences and plot points come across as being in service to maintaining this one uninterrupted shot instead of the shot being in service to the story. That would have been fine if this problem arose here or there, but it is a pervasive throughout.

That said, the film does what it set out to do and it does it well. It carries great emotional weight in certain places in part thanks to the uninterrupted shot style. It is highly suspenseful in places. It just doesn't tell much of a story; It's sort of like designing an entire movie around a chase sequence. People may be in imminent peril at all times, but there are no stakes for the audience unless you develop your characters so that we know them, empathize with them, and care about them.

That is why the comparisons to Saving Private Ryan don't make sense to me....There was much, much more character development and story in Saving Private Ryan than in this film. There was a simple objective in both, but far less plot linearity towards that objective in Saving Private Ryan. Being limited to two characters in an unbroken shot also caused some awkward moments where the characters had to basically tell the audience what was happening instead of the film showing them, which was jarring and took me out of the moment.

This isn't a bad movie.....but it isn't an all time great war movie either. World War I was such a disastrously stupid war and it boggles my mind that no film to take up the subject to date has quite captured its utter folly or causes. This film carries such a narrow focus it does not really do the war justice, in a sense. It focuses on the glory and the bravery of the individuals who fought it (of which there was plenty) but glory can obfuscate the truth when it is removed from its context; That truth here, where millions died for little to no good reason at all, and they knew it too.