1917 4K 2019 Ultra HD 2160p

The film tells about the events of the First World War on behalf of two young soldiers of Scofield and Blake, followed by a camera everywhere. They are sent on an impossible mission - young people must make their way to the territory of the enemy and deliver a message designed to stop the deadly attack, the victims of which can become hundreds of soldiers.

1917 4K Review
The younger corporals Scofield (George McKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) were given an urgent and very important task - they need to deliver an order to the front line to cancel the impending offensive. The fact is that the connection with those parts is lost, and they do not know that the Germans' retreat is a trap. Corporals need to quietly cross enemy territory and do it very quickly, otherwise thousands of British soldiers will die, including Blake’s older brother.

The next two hours, soldiers will run, crawl, shoot and run again: “1917” - a military attraction, whose content is directly dictated by the form. The indefatigable camera of Roger Deakins, shooting the whole film as if with one - or, to be completely honest, two - frames (all the gluings here are neatly hidden, except for one exactly in the middle). This, in fact, is a chase film, where time itself is the enemy, and the necessary moments of respite are more like game checkpoints: they stopped, talked, watched the cut scene with a falling plane and ran on.

Because of this, it’s more interesting to consider the film technically (“oh, here the heroes go around the crowd so that the camera can overtake them”, “and then they go into the dark room to hide the gluing”) than to get involved emotionally in it - except several shocking, absolutely brilliant scenes where the pulse of the picture still resonates with the viewer. “1917” is a designer film that does not hesitate at all: all of its scenario bits, the location of active scenes and pauses, moments of rise and fall are clearly distributed mechanically.

Even the concept of “actant” - a hero in a work that crosses a certain “line” and thereby triggers the main conflict - is taken literally here. Scofield and Blake do physically cross the front line. It was as if Mendes literally took the script rules from the textbook of some Robert Mackey or Alexander Mitta (although it is unlikely that, to be honest, Mendes read Alexander Mitt).

For the director, such a frantic formalism is a clear exit from the comfort zone, and therefore it is especially surprising how confidently he feels inside this form. After all, Sam is not one of those authors who can be unquestioningly called a visionary: despite the stylistic flirting of The Cursed Way or the bright bombs of Skyfall, Mendes more often acts as a poet of life, a storyteller about how people unsuccessfully try to escape from the boring life of the American suburbs ( “American Beauty”, “Road of Changes”) or, say, army bases (“Marines”).

The life of Scofield and Blake is arbitrary, but not boring: shells are torn around them, they are covered with rotting corpses of enemies and comrades. They simply have no time for introspection and empty suffering - their path lies entirely in the external, in the physical. That, too, I must say, is unusual for the cinematic language of Mendes, a director who is very “actor-like,” who likes to put strong personalities and complex experiences in the center of the plot.

"1917" intentionally avoids personalities. The main characters in it are people whose characters are reduced to unconditional instincts, reactions to external stimuli in the form of eternal dirt, soot, shit and huge trench rats. Such a military version of "Survivor", similarly working with the aesthetics of purulent wounds and chthony sticking to their faces, only instead of spending the night in a horse’s corpse there is an open cut hand that is accidentally lowered inside a dead soldier.

However, something from the usual Mendes is here. As in most of his films, the director persistently embeds vivid poetic images - remember a package from American Beauty or an oil-stained horse in the Marines. In “1917” there are even more moments of sudden cinematic lyrics than Sam’s usual - as if this way he compensates for the too material essence of his new work. Petals falling on corpses, burning cities and sad songs under the crowns of trees: sharp flashes of metaphysics in the midst of pure biophysics.

It is quite clear why such an approach can annoy someone: yes, it is corny, simple, pretentious, insert any other word with a negative connotation. But in the context of this particular film and this specific director’s task, Mendes’s decision is actually very accurate - it would have been impossible to connect the external and internal in the film with such an outstanding form. Someone, however, may be annoyed by the very fact of the designer film as a work of supposedly soulless: yes, Andre Bazin would hardly have liked “1917”, but not all of us need to be desperate of his followers, and not all directors should strive for Tarkovsky. The mechanical essence of “1917” is obviously an intentional choice, and the film is almost impeccable inside the chosen form.