Is 1917 the most overrated film in years?

This has been a terrific few months for Sam Mendes and his film, 1917. He won Best Director and the film won Best Motion Picture at the Golden Globes. And now the film has been nominated for ten Oscars and nine BAFTAs.

The reviews have been just as good. Variety called 1917, “one of 2019’s most impressive cinematic achievements”. The Guardian called it “a single-shot masterpiece”, “an amazingly audacious film”. Rolling Stone called it “one of the best war films of all time” and Vanity Fair described it as “a staggering piece of filmmaking”.

The hype is ridiculous. 1917 is the most overrated film in years. The two lead performances are poor. The script is worse. You get no sense of the characters or their inner lives. One describes returning home from the front, but what is his family like? The whole plot, weak as it is, turns on a soldier trying to warn British soldiers of a German ambush, which will kill 1,600 troops, including his brother. But we learn nothing of his relationship with this brother. Do they even like each other?

The film is shockingly implausible. A British soldier meets a French peasant woman. He doesn’t speak French and there’s no reason why she should speak any English, yet they manage to communicate. One of the soldiers might as well be a Marvel super-hero. He survives everything. Gunfire, waterfalls, booby-traps. He runs like Usain Bolt and swims like Michael Phelps.

More to the point, Mendes doesn’t manage to get inside the soldiers’ heads. What do they think or feel? What was it like to serve on the Western Front? We are not told. Do the two soldiers have any friends? What is it like in the winter cold or the summer heat? What are they fed? How do they cope with illness? Have they been over the top before? Where are they from? What did they do before the war? They encounter one Indian soldier and one black soldier. Have they ever seen non-white people before?

The film has its strengths. It is technically brilliant. The cinematography by the great Roger Deakins is outstanding. There are fine cameos by stars like Andrew Scott, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong and Colin Firth. The sets and locations are superb. The technicians deserve their nominations.

But none of these are enough. They don’t make up for the predictable story-line, the limp dialogue, the lack of interest in any of the characters or in the war itself. Robbie Collin in the Daily Telegraph nails it: The film is “emotionally inert”.

1917 is also derivative. The storyline is taken from Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. At times it feels like The Lord of the Rings, a heroic adventure through a desolate landscape full of mortal danger.

What it doesn’t do is invent its own unique world or reinvent the First World War. Peter Jackson’s documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old, presented the trenches in colour. You could see the state of the soldier’s teeth, their sallow skin. In 1917 their skin looks clear, their teeth are white, they are tall, fit and strong. Most British soldiers were between 5’ and 5’8. The two lead actors are 5’9 and 6’0 and they look as if they have just come from the West End not the Western Front.

The film is about technical effects, spectacle and long shots, not about human lives. In a devastating review in the New Yorker, Richard Brody writes, “Mendes shuts down Blake and Schofield and envelops them in a silence of the mind in order not to probe or care what they think. What he substitutes for their inner lives are sequences that exist solely because they make for striking images… These shotlike compositions that arise from the flow of long takes come at the expense of plot and character… Once more, violence is moved offstage and prettified. The movie’s long takes, far from intensifying the experience of war, trivialize it…”

1917 is not about feelings or ideas. It is about spectacle and CGI effects. As a result, whatever happened to any of the characters, I just didn’t care. This is a film about film not about people or war. The opening sequence of the BBC’s The Great War was more powerful.