(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415611&forum_id=2#39382981)

Orwell: “In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff, is done by small minorities. The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious. They do not retain among their historical memories the name of a single military victory. English literature, like other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats. There is no popular poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance. Sir John Moore's army at Corunna, fighting a desperate rearguard action before escaping overseas (just like Dunkirk!) has more appeal than a brilliant victory. The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction. And of the last war, the four names which have really engraved themselves on the popular memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, every time a disaster. The names of the great battles that finally broke the German armies are simply unknown to the general public.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415611&forum_id=2#39511934)

Date: January 5th, 2020 7:23 PM

Author: Officer G

I bet you thought that was extremely clever and you’d get a cascade of blank bumps for it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415611&forum_id=2#39383196)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415611&forum_id=2#39383722)

2. This movie seems exactly like Gallipoli due to the Running/Messenger aspect. I have NOT seen it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415611&forum_id=2#39383724)

face it, dunkirk fucking blew and this one probably does too

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415611&forum_id=2#39387280)

IT's still a million times better than the interchangeable trash blockbusters that are dumped out by the dozen every year.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415611&forum_id=2#39387439)

Is the pipeline really clogged up with these films? Do we really have too many historical dramas? Who the hell would argue that. lol, please. We have more shit-blockbusters and horror film trash than ever. Regular old dramas or war films have been run off the mainstream. It's nice that every once in a while something like this makes it through to the big screen.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415611&forum_id=2#39387575)

While Dunkirk gave the same feel of horror and claustrophobia it had too many characters, I liked how 1917 really played up shitty and pointlessly frustrating trench warfare was to random doods.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415611&forum_id=2#39510976)

Or is this for the “Attorneys’ Choice Awards”?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415611&forum_id=2#39511634)

Too intense to ever watch again but glad WW1 got a good modern film about it

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415611&forum_id=2#39511923)

Cinematography is excellent but the rest is not worth watching.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415611&forum_id=2#39534126)

Sam Mendes directs this visually extravagant drama about young British soldiers on a perilous mission in World War I.

George MacKay plays a lance corporal in “1917,” directed by Sam Mendes.

George MacKay plays a lance corporal in “1917,” directed by Sam Mendes.Credit...Francois Duhamel/Universal Pictures

By Manohla Dargis

Published Dec. 24, 2019

Updated Dec. 27, 2019

1917Directed by Sam MendesDrama, WarR1h 59m

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On June 28, 1914, a young Serbian nationalist assassinated the presumptive heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, thus starting World War I. That, at any rate, is the familiar way that the origins for this war have been shaped into a story, even if historians agree the genesis of the conflict is far more complicated. None of those complications and next to no history, though, have made it into “1917,” a carefully organized and sanitized war picture from Sam Mendes that turns one of the most catastrophic episodes in modern times into an exercise in preening showmanship.

The story is simple. It opens on April 6, 1917, with Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay), British soldiers stationed in France, receiving new orders. They are to deliver a message to troops at the front line who are readying an assault on the Germans, who have retreated. (Coincidentally or not, April 6 is the date that the United States formally entered the war.) The British command, however, believes that the German withdrawal is a trap, an operational Trojan horse. The two messengers need to carry the dispatch ordering the waiting British troops to stand down, thereby saving countless lives.

It’s the usual action-movie setup — a mission, extraordinary odds, ready-made heroes — but with trenches, barbed wire and a largely faceless threat. Blake jumps on the assignment because his brother is among the troops preparing the assault. Schofield takes orders more reluctantly, having already survived the Battle of the Somme, with its million-plus casualties. The modest difference in attitude between the messengers will vanish, presumably because any real criticism — including any skepticism about this or any war — might impede the movie’s embrace of heroic individualism for the greater good, which here largely translates as vague national struggle and sacrifice.

What complicates the movie is that it has been created to look like it was made with a single continuous shot. In service of this illusion, the editing has been obscured, though there are instances — an abrupt transition to black, an eruption of thick dust — where the seams almost show. Throughout, the camera remains fluid, its point of view unfixed. At times, it shows you what Blake and Schofield see, though it sometimes moves like another character. Like a silent yet aggressively restless unit member, it rushes before or alongside or behind the messengers as they snake through the mazy trenches and cross into No Man’s Land, the nightmarish expanse between the fronts.

The idea behind the camerawork seems to be to bring viewers close to the action, so you can share what Blake and Schofield endure each step of the way. Mostly, though, the illusion of seamlessness draws attention away from the messengers, who are only lightly sketched in, and toward Roger Deakins’s cinematography and, by extension, Mendes’s filmmaking. Whether the camera is figuratively breathing down Blake’s and Schofield’s necks or pulling back to show them creeping inside a water-filled crater as big as a swimming pool, you are always keenly aware of the technical hurdles involved in getting the characters from here to there, from this trench to that crater.

In another movie, such demonstrative self-reflexivity might have been deployed to productive effect; here, it registers as grandstanding. It’s too bad and it’s frustrating, because the two leads make appealing company: The round-faced Chapman brings loose, affable charm to his role, while MacKay, a talented actor who’s all sharp angles, primarily delivers reactive intensity. This lack of nuance can be blamed on Mendes, who throughout seems far more interested in the movie’s machinery than in the human costs of war or the attendant subjects — sacrifice, patriotism and so on — that puff into view like little wisps of engine steam.

The absence of history ensures that “1917” remains a palatable war simulation, the kind in which every button on every uniform has been diligently recreated, and no wound, no blown-off limb, is ghastly enough to truly horrify the audience. Here, everything looks authentic but manicured, ordered, sane, sterile. Save for a quick appearance by Andrew Scott, as an officer whose overly bright eyes and jaundiced affect suggest he’s been too long in the trenches, nothing gestures at madness. Worse, the longer this amazing race continues, the more it resembles an obstacle course by way of an Indiana Jones-style adventure, complete with a showstopping plane crash and battlefield sprint.

Mendes, who wrote the script with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, has included a note of dedication to his grandfather, Alfred H. Mendes, who served in World War I. It’s the most personal moment in a movie that, beyond its technical virtues, is intriguing only because of Britain’s current moment. Certainly, the country’s acrimonious withdrawal from the European Union makes a notable contrast with the onscreen camaraderie. And while the budget probably explains why most of the superior officers who pop in briefly are played by name actors — Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch — their casting also adds distinctly royal filigree to the ostensibly democratic mix.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415611&forum_id=2#39625603)

‘1917’ Turns a Horrific War Into an Uplifting Hero’s Journey

World War I was a disaster, but Sam Mendes’s Oscar-nominated epic paints a dangerously misleading picture of the conflict.

By Cathy Tempelsman

Ms. Tempelsman is a writer.

Feb. 8, 2020

Dead British soldiers lying on a roadside in northern France during World War I.

Dead British soldiers lying on a roadside in northern France during World War I.Credit...Daily Herald Archive/SSPL, via Getty Images

I was looking forward to seeing Sam Mendes’s film “1917” when it arrived in theaters in December. I have a special interest in the subject — my grandfather fought in World War I, and I’ve done years of research on the events while writing a play about the war.

I can’t argue with Mr. Mendes’s artistry. Visually and technically speaking, “1917,” which is nominated for 10 Academy Awards, is dazzling. The filmmaking team cleverly manages to make the entire movie seem like one long, continuous take, and I, like many viewers, found myself wondering how certain scenes were shot.

The director’s own grandfather inspired him with stories about volunteering to run messages across open, war-ravaged terrain. In an interview, Mr. Mendes said that “1917” called for “a different kind of storytelling.” He described the “Great War” as “a chaos of mismanagement and human tragedy on a vast scale.”

If only he had told that story. Instead, “1917” left me uneasy. Mr. Mendes paints an uplifting and dangerously misleading picture of the war.

The fictionalized premise is this: General Erinmore (Colin Firth) sends two British soldiers on an urgent mission. They have until dawn to deliver a vital message: The Second Battalion is about to walk into a trap, and the attack must be called off. The general warns one of the soldiers, Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), “If you don’t get there in time, we will lose 1,600 men — your brother among them.”

Right away, “1917” suggests a concern for the sanctity of human life from the top down. The reality was something else: an appalling indifference as the British high command sent hundreds of thousands of their young men to die.

Germany had a clear advantage in terms of training and weaponry, including the machine gun. The British infantry, still trained with rifles and bayonets, didn’t stand a chance. But that didn’t stop the English high command from planning deadly offensives — deadly, that is, for its own men.

In my research, I read chilling accounts of these attacks.

In ecstatic terms, Gen. Thomas Wynford Rees of Britain described the “marvelous advance” of his infantry brigade, “dressed as if on parade,” at the Battle of the Somme. Incredulous Germans watched the men walk — yes, walk — in long rows across open terrain — then proceeded to mow them down. To General Rees, the massacre was a “magnificent display of gallantry.”

On July 1, 1916, the first day of the Somme, there were nearly 60,000 British casualties (a third of them died). Five months later, the number rose to nearly 500,000, and a British general, Douglas Haig, finally ended the attack, but not before claiming that results “fully justify” the effort. He expressed no remorse for the loss of life.

In his book “The Myth of the Great War,” John Mosier describes this “slaughter of the infantry” as “almost exclusively a British achievement.”

Years later, Prime Minister David Lloyd George wrote that while General Haig “ordered many bloody battles in this war,” he took part in only two. Mr. George also noted an “inexhaustible vanity that will never admit a mistake.” It’s no wonder that General Haig was called “the butcher.”

In the film, just before being assigned his mission, Lance Corporal Blake says, “Must be something big if the general’s here.” With that line, the film acknowledges just how improbable his appearance would have been. Top commanders often remained far from the front, out of touch with the knee-deep mud and rat-filled trenches that the infantry endured. Many officers, in fact, lived in beautiful chateaus.

But most jarring for me was hearing the general tell Blake, “If you fail, it will be a massacre.” By 1917, the loss of 1,600 men in an attack would have been a good day.

Mr. Mendes doesn’t ignore the horror altogether; the camera pans bodies and limbs strewn about battlefields. But photos of the maimed in World War I reveal truly grotesque wounds that are sanitized in “1917.” We see soldiers with bandaged eyes, but not the dreadful blisters from mustard gas as it was absorbed by woolen uniforms.

And what about shell shock? By that point in the war, the British high command was stymied by “womanish” recruits who showed signs of breakdown (hysteria, horrible tics, dreadful nightmares) despite having no physical wounds. The commanders’ answer was to shame the men and order them back to the front.

I don’t expect Mr. Mendes to include every fact about the war. Almost by definition, historical drama is selective; we invent characters, we compress events.

But we do this in the interest of creating emotional truth. Mr. Mendes does the opposite. By disguising the brutal truths of the war, he sentimentalizes and even valorizes it — a war in which disregard for human life led to approximately 8.5 million military deaths around the world, and an estimated 21 million wounded.

If it’s chilling to read of British soldiers being sent to their deaths early in the war, equally horrifying are accounts of “needless slaughter” in the American Expeditionary Forces.

The United States entered the war late, at the same time as events in “1917.” (Woodrow Wilson was only re-elected president after promising to keep Americans out of the conflict.) By the fall of 1918, the Germans were calling for an end to fighting. They knew the arrival of two million American soldiers, however inexperienced, meant the Allies would prevail.

At dawn on Nov. 11, 1918, an Armistice ending the war was signed: no victors, no losers. But Gen. John Pershing hated the idea of letting Germany off without an unconditional surrender. And so, even though the war was effectively over (the Armistice went into effect hours later, at 11 a.m.), he had American commanders continue to send men to fight.

Joseph Persico gives a gripping account of the final day of World War I in his book, “Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour.” “The carnage that went on up to the final minute so perfectly captures the essential futility of the entire war,” he writes. Mr. Persico estimates that another 3,000 men on all sides died in fighting after the Armistice was signed, with thousands more wounded.

In writing my play about events in the United States just after World War I, I found so many disturbing parallels: partisan politics that rival today’s (Republicans held hearings to smear President Wilson and to win back the White House at any cost); a deep vein of racism (back at home, black soldiers who wore their uniforms might be lynched); and a fierce nationalism heard in Henry Cabot Lodge’s toxic cries of “America first!”

“The winds that were blowing then are blowing now,” Mr. Mendes has rightly said of the political inspiration for his film. Yet with so much at stake, his stated goal was nevertheless to make a “movie that operates more like a ticking-clock thriller at times.” This is a legitimate artistic choice, and he succeeded. But the problem with thrilling an audience with one physical stunt after another is that it can become numbed to the emotional horror.

The illusion that the entire film was done in a single-camera shot becomes a distraction. We focus on the storytelling rather than the story itself. With its relentless stunts, “1917” begins to feel like a video game.

Any director faces a challenge in making a movie about war, of how to create sympathy for those who act with courage and yet avoid feeding our appetite for antiquated notions of heroism.

Peter Weir does this admirably in the magnificent and deeply moving “Gallipoli,” about Australian fighters in World War I. Like “1917,” Mr. Weir’s movie features an unlikely pair of soldiers and builds to a futile attack that must be called off. But Mr. Weir takes his time to develop the characters. We become fully invested in their humanity. Writing to his family, Archy Hamilton (Mark Lee) echoes so many young men desperate to fight: “There’s a feeling that we’re all somehow involved in an adventure larger than life.”

When Mel Gibson’s character arrives seconds too late with the message to call off the slaughter, we watch in stunned disbelief. In “Gallipoli,” war is anything but a game. In the words of a devastated field commander, “it’s coldblooded murder.”

The great paradox of “1917” is that Mr. Mendes uses modern technology to produce a throwback: a redemptive war story. One of the final images is a group of soldiers singing in a grassy wood before going into battle.

“1917” provides escape from the true carnage of the “Great War.” Instead, it might have forced us to question the endless, inconclusive conflicts that have followed, and the butchery and sacrifice they inflict. We don’t need to feel better about World War I’s slaughter. We need to feel worse.

In a poignant image straight out of Shakespeare, Mr. Mendes’s grandfather is said to have washed his hands compulsively for the rest of his life because “he could never get clean” of the war. If we’re going to avoid the stain of endless, senseless wars in the future, we have to tell stories that focus on the horror, rather than false heroics and filmmaking feats of wonder.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415611&forum_id=2#39625658)

‘1917’ Was an Impossible Mission. Here’s How Sam Mendes Pulled It Off.

The World War I drama, seemingly filmed in one bravura take, is a tribute to his grandfather that Mendes never thought he’d make.

Sam Mendes directs Dean-Charles Chapman, left, and George MacKay on the set of “1917.”

Sam Mendes directs Dean-Charles Chapman, left, and George MacKay on the set of “1917.”Credit...François Duhamel/Universal Pictures

Kyle Buchanan

By Kyle Buchanan

Published Dec. 23, 2019

Updated Dec. 25, 2019

When the director Sam Mendes was a young boy, he and his father often traveled to the West Indies to visit his grandfather Alfred Mendes, a novelist. Sam, who had been brought up in North London, found his grandfather to be quite exotic: The small and wiry World War I veteran would sing opera in a booming Trinidadian accent, traipse around his creaky Colonial house in shorts and flip-flops and vigorously greet each morning with a pre-dawn plunge into the sea.

Alfred Mendes also had a tendency to obsessively wash his hands, always for several minutes at a time, to the point where Sam and his cousins noticed that above all his other quirks. “We would laugh at him,” the director recalled, “until I asked my dad, ‘Why does Granddad Alfie wash his hands so much?’ And he said, ‘Oh, he remembers the mud of the trenches during the war, and the fact that he could never get clean.’”

That’s when the boys stopped laughing at their grandfather. It’s also when they began asking what happened when, at age 19, Alfred Mendes enlisted and fought on behalf of Britain in what would become one of the world’s deadliest conflicts.

“We expected, I suppose, conventional stories of heroism and bravery,” Mendes said. “We certainly didn’t expect what he told us, which was unbelievably shocking and quite graphic tales of utter futility and chaos.”

There was the wounded soldier his grandfather carried back to the trench under enemy fire, only to discover once he arrived that the man was dead, his body having absorbed a bullet meant for Alfred. Another story involved a German soldier whose head was lost in an explosion, though his body somehow carried on running.

And then there was the mission that Alfred Mendes volunteered for on Oct. 12, 1917, after nearly a third of the men in his battalion had been killed in the Battle of Poelcappelle. The survivors were stranded across many miles, and Alfred, who had been trained as a signaler, was sent to rescue them and lead them back to his camp.

“That tiny man in the midst of that vast expanse of death, that was the thing I could never get out of my mind,” said Mendes.

It is the image that inspired the new film “1917,” directed and co-written by Mendes, about two British lance corporals who must make their way across miles of battleground to deliver an urgent message that could save 1,600 of their fellow soldiers from a massacre. Still, though the stories his grandfather told him had never been far from Mendes’s mind, that didn’t mean making a movie like this came easily.

“People say, ‘Oh, you must’ve wanted to tell the story for years,’ and actually, I didn’t,” said Mendes, 54, whose career has encompassed big-screen projects like “American Beauty” as well as a long list of stage credits, including “The Ferryman” and the 1990s revival of “Cabaret.”

“The truth was, it never felt like my story to tell,” he said. “It felt like it was my granddad’s story, and I didn’t own it.”

Mendes was also aware that while Hollywood has made many a World War II movie about hero soldiers fighting Nazis, the more muddled motivations and trench-warfare stalemates of the First World War would require a different kind of storytelling. “That war was just a chaos of mismanagement and human tragedy on a vast scale,” he said. “You could kill someone at 1,000 yards with a machine gun, but you couldn’t communicate with a soldier 20 yards away.”

After directing the James Bond movies “Skyfall” and “Spectre,” Mendes was having trouble mounting a new film project. His agent Beth Swofford suggested that he explore the World War I stories he had once told her. In 2017, a year after the Brexit vote, Mendes found further inspiration. “I’m afraid that the winds that were blowing before the First World War are blowing again,” he said. “There was this generation of men fighting then for a free and unified Europe, which we would do well to remember.”

Once Mendes began mulling the screenplay with co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns, he quickly laid down three rules. Instead of adapting his grandfather’s own story, Mendes would follow two relatively anonymous soldiers whose heroism would be accidental. The story would take place in the spring of 1917, when the Germans retreated to the Hindenburg Line and left a trail of devastation and traps in their wake.

And there was one other artistic inspiration that would turn out to be the film’s defining feature. Mendes wrote it on the screenplay’s first page: “1917” would be presented as if it were all shot in one take.

“It was absolutely a given that was what excited me about it,” said Mendes. “There’s a great danger that once you’ve got used to making films, you get lazy with the way you shoot them. ‘Oh yeah, I know: close-up, over the shoulder, two-shot, moving shot, fancy shot every three scenes.’ You can kind of read it in other people’s movies.”

But to film “1917” in robust long takes and to stitch those separate pieces together in nearly invisible ways would pose a unique challenge. “For the first few scenes in the draft, I would feel like I was wearing a straitjacket,” admitted Wilson-Cairns. “It’s a real bummer, the loss of moving around in time and space. But in exchange for that, you get to move around the film landscape the way we do in reality, and what that gives you as a writer is the ultimate ability to disappear.”

Mendes began filming “1917” in April of this year at Bovingdon Airfield in England. He was locked into a Christmas Day release, giving him an unusually short window to complete a film of this scale. And though Mendes had rehearsed the film extensively with his cast and assembled an Oscar-winning team of behind-the-scenes collaborators, including the cinematographer Roger Deakins and the editor Lee Smith, any little thing that went wrong during all of those long takes could scuttle the work of hundreds of people.

“There were times when I thought, ‘I’m using every fiber of everything I know about theater and film combined,” Mendes said. “I was pushed to the limit to try and find solutions.”

He didn’t make it easy on himself. Though the shots were planned with the utmost precision, what happened within the frame was often subject to change depending on the weather, the ability of the actors to hit their marks in the mud, or how the more capricious members of the cast — including several animals and a baby — would react to the camera. When George MacKay, who plays one of the main characters, was accidentally knocked to the ground by another actor during a perilous sprint, Mendes kept it in the movie.

“I wanted to lock the audience in with the characters,” said Mendes. “The audience reacts to those scenes in a different way because they know they’re not going to get out of it unless the men get out of it. You have a level of association that perhaps would not exist if we shot it conventionally.”

Mendes finished the film a few days before Thanksgiving, and since then he has been on a whirlwind media tour meant to give “1917” a late award-season push. So far, so good: The Golden Globes nominated Mendes for best director and the film for best drama. Still, he has hardly had time to take a breath. “I find talking about the movie is my gradual goodbye to it,” he said.

It’s also a chance to reflect further on the grandfather who helped inspire it. Mendes recalled that when he was 12, Alfred Mendes asked him to sign a contract the older man had written out by hand, in which the young boy promised he would write his first novel by the age of 18. “He told me, ‘You’re going to tell stories. This is what you have to do.’”

Still, Alfred Mendes could hardly have imagined that one day, that grandson would go on to tell a story drawn so vividly from the tales he spun in that great drafty house in the West Indies. Now, with “1917” finally complete, Mendes is reminded of the quote from the philosopher Albert Camus, that “a man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

“And I think that is true of those stories,” Mendes said. “I think, for whatever reason, my heart first opened in those moments.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415611&forum_id=2#39625661)

Dunkirk was twice as good

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4415611&forum_id=2#42865162)