With a new decade already greeted by a decades-old conflict reignited by trigger-happy old men, perhaps it's fitting that 2020's first big release is a film that resurrects a 100-year-old battle as summer spectacle — because apparently, the world needs yet another reminder of war's essential stupidity.
Director Sam Mendes's Golden Globe-winning 1917, loosely based on the stories of his grandfather and co-written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, returns to the proverbial "war to end all wars" — World War I — and to the trenches and artillery-ravaged ruins of the battlefield in Northern France.
The film's ostensible selling point is that it's digitally stitched together to give the impression of being captured in a single, seamless take, the kind of show-offy, big boy director move that wows the easily impressed with its gestures toward immersive experience.
Here, though, the effect is both captivating and strangely dissociative; a modern sensibility roaming through the reconstituted phantoms of history.
As a war epic, 1917 is rather more low-key than the Sturm und Drang typical of the genre: the film's strength lies in its eerier passages, which linger in the mind with a sense of reflection.
From a muddy trench on the battlefield, young Lance Corporals Schofield (George MacKay, star of True History of the Kelly Gang) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) are dispatched by British General Erinmore (Colin Firth, making a stiff-upper-lip cameo) on a mission to deliver a message to the 2nd Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment in order to stop a potentially disastrous attack that will lead the Allies into a trap set by the retreating German forces.
After an amusing, alcoholic blessing from a listless Lieutenant (Fleabag's Andrew Scott), the two soldiers set out across No Man's Land — rendered in a muted, effectively ashen palette by veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins (No Country For Old Men) — and into enemy terrain, encountering an abandoned German underground bunker riddled with rats and trip wire, and later, facing off against a downed German fighter plane that crashes out of a distant dogfight and into centre frame.
Their journey is pockmarked with the carcasses of horses, dogs and soldiers, some mummified in frozen screams, each a reminder — in the film's often empty landscape — of the very real and recent violence that has torn the countryside apart.
It's not the first time movies have feigned the effect of a sustained single take, of course, and Mendes and Deakins follow their protagonists in ways that can't help but recall Laszlo Nemes's hyper-intense Son of Saul (2015), a World War II thriller that rendered a labyrinthine trip through Auschwitz as harrowing, first-person video game experience.
1917 offers similarly visceral sequences — in one scene, Schofield hunts a sniper through the bombed-out village of Ecoust-Saint-Mein to the goading sounds of Thomas Newman's anachronistic, modern action genre score — which quickens the pulse but can distance the audience from the presumed immersive intent.
Yet while 1917 boasts its share of action, the effect here is more elegiac, even ghostly, with Deakins's camera often evoking the rotational sweep of the collaborations between Terrence Malick and Emmanuel Lubezki on films like The New World (2005) and The Tree of Life (2011).
MacKay and Chapman, meanwhile, often appear less as battle-hardened grunts than 21st-century suburban lost boys wandering a landscape as abstract as it is meticulously recreated.
This emptiness is magnified by the marked lack of Germans, who hover in the shadows like targets ready to be dodged or picked off for extra game lives — when they do appear, it's usually as duplicitous, vengeful caricatures portrayed with little sympathy.
Mendes, an Oscar-winning filmmaker (American Beauty) who's spent the last few years delivering the Bond series into prestige approximations of fun (Skyfall, Spectre), feels caught between executing the thrills promised by the one-shot premise and reaching for something more poetic — as in the film's piece de resistance, a night-time sequence set among the ruins of a township where Schofield seems terrorised more by his own fears than the lurking, wraith-like Hun that await him.
Like this sequence, 1917's best moments are its most surreal, as when Mendes steers his hero into a chance encounter with a lone French survivor (Claire Duburcq) and an orphaned infant, or a haunting scene in which Schofield happens upon a gathering of troops huddled around a soldier singing an a cappella hymn — an incongruous spiritual vision sprung forth amid the horrors of war.
Such scenes — and MacKay's still, observant features, which seem both contemporary and the kind that could only exist in the faded images of the era — lend the film a grace that resonates beyond its formal impressiveness; a calm that's informed by the luxury of time and perspective.
1917 closes with a dedication to Mendes's paternal grandfather, a World War I veteran who went on to some acclaim as an author of short stories, and the tribute brings the film into gentle focus: much less the calculated ploy for grand, horrors-of-war gravitas that it initially seems, it's something far more personal, even minor key.
Your grandparents are probably going to love it.
1917 is in cinemas from January 9.