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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe\nfilm takes place in the title year in the French countryside in the midst of World\nWar I. Two British soldiers, Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George\nMcKay) are ordered by their general (Colin Firth) to deliver a message to the\nheadstrong Col. Mackenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch) calling off an ill-informed\nmaneuver that could cost the army 1,600 men, including Blake\u2019s brother. Our\nheroes have to travel roughly 25 miles in 24 hours and the path is muddy. Yes,\nmud is one of about a thousand obstacles preventing the young men from\ncompleting their mission, and it\u2019s one of the less dangerous ones. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Other\nobstacles include long walks the wrong way through trenches, patches of barbed\nwire, tripwires that trigger explosions, an underground cave-in, a perilous\njump over a pit, blindness, dehydration, teased dissention, armed planes,\ncrashing planes, stab-y enemy soldiers, shoot-y enemy soldiers, bomb-y enemy\nsoldiers, and unfriendly soldiers on the main soldiers\u2019 side. Everybody seems\nto have a mission that runs counter to the one at hand, and cooperation is\nimpossible to find. The ending especially plays like one of those nightmares\nwhere you\u2019re screaming critical information with all your might and nobody\nhears or acknowledges you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nightmares\nare an apt comparison for much of this movie, actually. There\u2019s tangible\nviolence to be sure, but more than that there\u2019s a consistently unnerving\natmosphere of terror. Something could pop up and kill the main characters at\nany time, and nasty surprises are a common occurrence in this film. And at the\nsame time, the characters have a mission to carry out, and stopping to process\nthe horrors they\u2019re seeing, or even breaking to strategize, just isn\u2019t an\noption. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which\nleads me back to the one-long-shot presentation. It isn\u2019t really one long shot,\nof course. Edits are hidden when the characters, say, walk behind a pole or\nthrough a shadow. The film does an admirable job trying to make these\ntransitions as seamlessly as possible, but the problem with the film looking so\nincredible is that it\u2019s hard to not look for tricks that indicate that what\nyou\u2019re watching is not a literal miracle of filmmaking. It\u2019s also hard not to\nnotice when the film is doing some computer trickery, like with the sky.\nSomehow this film has hacked into the very color of the sky, and while I know\nwhy it can\u2019t show us what the sky actually looked like on the various days of\nfilming, the effect is occasionally distracting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\nmay have been wrong earlier when I said that the one-shot presentation is the\nonly thing \u201c1917\u201d has in common with \u201cBirdman.\u201d The latter film won the Academy\nAward for Best Picture, and I have to say this film has a decent shot at it. It\nhas already won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture \u2013 Drama, which makes\nit something of a frontrunner, plus its clout is increasing with its impressive\nbox office performance. Even if the film doesn\u2019t take home the top prize, it\u2019s\nsure to clean up in the technical categories because the cinematography and\nspecial effects are amazing. I can\u2019t say I would personally call this the best\nfilm of 2019 (I have, after all, seen the one-shot trick done before and know\nto look for the seams), but I can see where one would. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grade: B<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201c1917\u201d is rated R for violence,\nsome disturbing images, and language. Its running time is 119 minutes. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Bob Garver Back in 2014, my favorite movie of the year was \u201cBirdman,\u201d a chaotic comedy about a Broadway show gone wrong. The Academy agreed with me, awarding… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":45725,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45724"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45724\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}