Escaping the Trench
THE PROBLEM WITH WORLD WAR I ON THE SCREEN is exactly the problem of World War I in reality: it may have been a linchpin of modern history, the fissure dividing the 19th century from the 20th, profoundly transformative and utterly destructive, but it was also a static affair, fought from fortified trench lines out of which hundreds of thousands of young men emerged just long enough to be killed. Stanley Kubrick located a superb film, 1957’s Paths of Glory, in the ornate chambers (and the perfidy) of the generals who oversaw the waste of those lives. But motion pictures do require a certain amount of motion, and the major accomplishment of 1917, the latest film to join the canon, may be that its makers figured out what the generals could not: a way to advance.
The breakthrough idea of director Sam Mendes was to dispatch a pair of messengers into a no-man’s-land that has been mysteriously expanded from a few hundred yards to several miles by The aim is to immerse the viewer in a propulsive, at times headlong journey that travels like a lit fuse.
