When it comes to the presence of war in the American popular imagination, no conflict can match World War II. It’s easy to see why. There were great villains (Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Benito Mussolini) and great heroes (Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower), epic battles (Midway, Okinawa, the Battle of the Bulge) and calamitous disasters (Pearl Harbor), great escapes (Dunkirk), and a grand-scale military operation where nothing less than the fate of human civilization was at stake (the Normandy invasion).
But how many Americans can name a single battle, general, hero, villain, or relevant political figure from World War I? For us, World War II was the good war, a struggle between good and evil. The reason we fought was as clear as the pillars of smoke ascending from the U.S. naval station near Honolulu, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941 and from the crematoria in Germany and Poland. But ask average Americans why we entered World War I and you’re likely to get far more shrugs than responses.
This is not the case in Europe, where World War I still looms large. France and Britain in particular were much more traumatized by the First World War than the Second. It’s not hard to understand why. The United States lost about 420,000 soldiers in World War II, almost three times the 117,000 lost in World War I. The French, on the other hand, lost about 600,000 soldiers in World War II and close to 2 million in World War I. About 450,000 British soldiers were killed in the Second World War, compared to a staggering 1 million in the Great War.
It is thus fitting that the most important film about World War I since Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) comes to us from British director Sam Mendes. The movie 1917 is based on a story Mendes heard from his grandfather, a World War I veteran, about a soldier who was sent on a dangerous mission across no man’s land, through bombed-out farmhouses and cities of the dead, in order to call off a planned attack on German lines.
Mendes has already received a lot of acclaim for 1917 (most notably, a Golden Globe for best director and best picture, as well as praise for presenting the film as a single, continuous shot), but the real star of the film is cinematographer Roger Deakins. He perfectly captures the drab colors and muddy textures of World War I: the staleness of the trenches, the fetid pools of water, the unreal lunar landscapes of no man’s land, the perpetual grayness — all evoking the war’s never-ending hopelessness as far as the eye can see. It is baffling that Deakins did not even receive a Golden Globe nomination for his work in 1917. Thankfully, the Oscars have corrected this injustice.
The film will draw inevitable comparisons to Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic. Both films are about the frantic attempt by a group of Allied soldiers to track down and save a fellow soldier’s brother. Both feature scenes of harrowing hand-to-hand combat. Both feature nerve-wracking shootouts with unseen snipers and blond-headed German soldiers. And while there is no scene in 1917 that can compare to the famous opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, Mendes does pay homage to that legendary Spielberg sequence. During the film’s climactic “going over the top” trench warfare charge scene, when Lance Cpl. Schofield (George MacKay) wades about among the wounded who are filing back into the trench, the pace slows slightly, and the volume drops precipitously — just as it did for Capt. John Miller (Tom Hanks) as he witnessed the wounded stagger across Omaha Beach. Some might go so far as to say that Mendes was trying to make a Saving Private Ryan for World War I, but this would be unfair given the different nature of the military struggles and of the particular stories that these directors are telling.
Still, the comparisons are inevitable, and they serve to highlight one of the film’s few flaws, which is the lack of balance between conveying both the sweeping, global nature of World War I and its tragic individual dimension. Whereas Mendes sacrifices the former at the expense of the latter, Spielberg was able to give nearly equal weight to both. Before turning to the more isolated, personal story about the search for Pvt. James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon), Saving Private Ryan spends a good 27 minutes (arguably the most intense 27 minutes in film history) depicting the Omaha Beach D-Day landing and subsequent battle in gory, gruesome, and heart-poundingly realistic detail. This was not a mere exercise in filmmaking craft (as is the single-shot style in 1917), but rather a vitally necessary part of the story that drove home both the horrors of D-Day and the riskiness of the American invasion. A good war film should spend at least some amount of time actually depicting war, and in this regard, the very brief battle sequence at the end of 1917 falls short. (Here, readers and viewers are advised to turn to Lewis Milestone’s 1930 adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, still the unsurpassed gold standard for World War I films.)
Spielberg is also quite simply a better storyteller — more adept at drawing us in, playing upon our emotions, creating narrative arcs, and developing characters throughout a film — than is Mendes, who is a technically sound and even excellent filmmaker but lacks a feel for those dramatic and novelistic qualities that separate Spielberg’s films from most others.
War is a terrible thing, but on film, it is glorious — especially on the big screen, where 1917 must be seen. When seeing an epic war film as gripping and as well-made as 1917 in a theater, you are experiencing film as it is meant to be experienced: the way that all great directors, Kubrick and Spielberg among them, have meant for it to be experienced. It may not exactly be the apotheosis of film, but it is sure close to it.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer living in New York, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of the forthcoming book Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
