When it was revealed that Sam Mendes’s mysterious first world war drama 1917 would actually be a one-shot thriller (with the key caveat that certain edits would be made) there were concerned murmurs. After being trapped for the majority of a decade in committee-led Bond franchise hell, what did the stage director turned Oscar-winning film-maker have to prove? Might his return to prestige cinema end up like so many other one-shot experiments: an audacious but ultimately empty technical exercise?
But mere moments into its last-minute unveiling, just six days after Mendes finished editing, 1917 revealed itself to be far from simple gimmickry. The director’s flashy return to the real world is a work of astonishing magnitude, an immersive, thrilling, emotionally involving experience and, in my opinion, his greatest film to date.
The simple story – inspired by Mendes’s grandfather, who fought on the Belgian front – centers on a life-or-death message that two young soldiers, played by George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman, must transport over dangerous terrain. But the journey itself is not quite as straightforward, spinning from precarious to horrifying in the blink of an eye. It’s why the decision to indulge in unbroken takes works so well, deftly conveying the terrifying unpredictability of any given day at war. Reuniting with cinematographer Roger Deakins, whose jaw-dropping work should earn him a second Oscar next year, Mendes inserts us into the middle of the chaos and traps us there, dragging us from one seat-edge set piece to the next, each more breathtakingly constructed than the last.
On paper, it’s similar to Christopher Nolan’s ambitious second world war saga Dunkirk, an action-heavy war film with an equally lofty budget from another acclaimed British director. But where that film, for me, was technically proficient but disappointingly cold, 1917 marries the mayhem with piercing emotion, felt most devastatingly midway through in a nightmarish, heartbreaking twist. There’s genuine weight to the horror unfolding in front of us, and after a career of switching between intimate human drama and big-budget action, Mendes has found the perfect way to combine the two. The use of two lesser-known leads works in the film’s favour, stripping away any preconceptions and enhancing the film’s naturalism. For that reason, I’d argue that the celebrity cameos, from Colin Firth to Benedict Cumberbatch, prove distracting, briefly removing us from the ordeal.
I left 1917 feeling sombre and exhausted, but also excited to see what else Mendes can do when untethered from franchise requirements. It shows a rare originality for a film with a $100m budget, and has heart and energy and purpose. I wait impatiently for 1918.
