The Movie 1917 An Acting And Technical Masterpiece But

According to an article written by Hugh Heart for Fortune:

“The film begins and ends in the trenches, with more than 5,200 feet of period-perfect ditches designed to accommodate walk-and-talk scenes between stars George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman….

“To construct the type of trenches that millions of soldiers called home during World War, Gassner pored over some 50,000 archival images and spent two weeks in France. There, he studied trenches and tunnels that had been restored at Vimy Ridge, site of a massive World War I battle.”

Additionally the massive muck, craters, mangled bodies of men and animals and barbed wire, the filmmaker version of no-man’s-land, which the main characters were required to negotiate their way across, was awesomely impressive, if such a thing can be said to be impressive.

Indeed, costume wise and set wise the movie certainly captured the ungodly essence of World War One (The Great War) in the trenches. Moreover, the near single shot take in real time along with first rate acting by the two primary actors made for a near perfect war movie experience, except for the plot.

Okay, the plot flaw may be just a personal thing with me rather than a real movie defect. Having, studied and written military history and walked many of the major battlefields of the First World War, I tend to be real picky about how that sort of brutal history it is portrayed on screen.

You see, the plot was a composite tale based around stories told to the movies’ director, Sam Mendes, by his grandfather who was a messenger in the Great War. In other words it was terrific that the experiences of his grandfather inspired Mendes to make a movie about messengers of the war, but what a waste to make it a fictional event of dubious circumstance.

First off, never was a major pullback on the Western Front designed as an ambush of a few battalions of the enemy. Therefore sending two lance corporals on a perilous mission overland to warn an advanced unit that the enemy (Germans) was bating them into a trap is farfetched, especially as air reconnaissance would have alerted the generals of such a strategic move as it was happening. Within this overall unreality were the smaller sometime irrational imperfections, like after one of the lead charters is stabbed to death by a German pilot, which our two heroes’ have just pulled from his burning plane, having crashed practically at their feet.

Both German and Allied solders were usually very friendly toward one another when not engaged in life or death combat struggles of the moment, and certainly it would have been highly unlikely for a German pilot to want to kill one whom had just saved his life. Both sides in that war saw themselves as simply doing what they were told to do — a job. And once circumstance changed to where that job was impossible, like having become a prisoner, the two sides interacted as just a couple of regular Joes laughing and joking together, using crude sign language.

From my non-Hollywood perspective it would have been far better to apply all that awesome technology to some heroic action in, say, a real combat like the Battle of the Somme. I mean, why cook up a synthetic story of World War One when there are dozens of real such heroic stories to choose from and still use the tales that he, Mendes, remembers from his grandfather to enhance character and plot?

Am I being too picky here?