Review of 1917 (2019) by Twitu — 18 Mar 2020

The main actors are good and believable, except for a few situations that werent authentic, like soldiers in WW1 would have reacted.

And thats the only good thing about this movie.

The rest reminded me of the plot of bad video games (incl. massive plot holes, like one area being extremely muddy and wet and then they only move a few hundred meters further on and its suddenly dry as a desert with dust blowing up, etc.).

The action scenes were basically exactly like a video game where the main guy doesnt get hit at all (or if he does, he doesnt care much, because he just gets a healthkit) and his enemies dont know how to use a rifle or how to stop a human at all.

Especially the scenes in Écoust are extremely unrealistic, and literally reminded me of a certain video game. And the sniper scene was so bad that that German sniper should have shot that guy 20 times. Especially at the last shot, where he knew EXACTLY where the guy was gonna pop up again.

Also the main guy going out without seeking cover in a flare-lit town where everyone can see him was face palm inducing. Again he wasnt hit at all.

Also there are many reports that made all the reactions in this movie look weird: Soldiers actually were very often reluctant to shoot or otherwise kill people. Especially in situations where they didnt have peer pressure or pressure from an officer (and thats why military training was massively altered after WW1, to make people more willing to shoot other people), which happen often in this movie. But even then they wouldnt try to kill people. Does the movie try to explain the bad shots with this? If so, that would be stupid, because especially in the scene where he is caught alone by a lone soldier, they wouldnt have fired at him at all, since he didnt even make an effort to shoot at them either. Him shooting first, trying to get cover and shooting back, instead of hoping that these guys were utter bad shots, would have made sense, since hes on such an important mission. But he didnt. The funny thing is, the drunk guy was the one that placed his shot as close to him as the sniper did, while all others couldnt hit a barn door from point blank.

Then theres the scene with the airplane crash that simply was stupid. Why would the pilot act that way? It made no sense whatsoever. Pilots on both sides were actually one of the most honorable people back then. They had mutual "fair play" rules that would be impossible nowadays or even in WW2. Totally unbelievable.

All in all the movie felt a lot like Fury. Fury also had many of these unrealistic situations that simply could not be true, which made it seem like a propaganda film right out of that time.

Same with this movie.

But they obviously made a huge effort to find out if there were really many racial minorities serving in Europe in the British Army. Should have put that effort into other research, too. For example the accuracy of German rifles and the differences in training of German and British soldiers.