For the opening of his 2015 Bond movie Spectre, director Sam Mendes (who won an Oscar for

his first feature, American Beauty) mounted a memorable sequence set amid Mexico City’s day

of the dead festival. In what appears to be a single continuous shot, the camera tracks a masked

figure through crowded streets, into a hotel lobby, up an elevator, out of a window, and over the

rooftops to a deadly assignation. It’s an audacious, attention-grabbing curtain-raiser widely

hailed as the film’s strongest asset.

For his latest movie – an awards-garlanded first world war drama that has already won best

picture honours at the Golden Globes – Mendes has returned to the lure of the “one-shot” format,

this time stretching it out to feature length. Like Hitchcock’s Rope or Alejandro González

Iñárritu’s Birdman, 1917 uses several takes and set-ups, seamlessly conjoined to give the

appearance of a continuous cinematic POV, albeit with periodic ellipses. The result is a populist,

immersive drama that leads the viewer through the trenches and battlefields of northern France,

as two young British soldiers attempt to make their way through enemy lines on 6 April 1917.

George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman are perfectly cast as Schofield and Blake, the lance

corporals enlisted to venture into enemy territory with a message for fellow troops poised to

launch a potentially catastrophic assault. The Germans have made a “strategic withdrawal”,

suggesting that they are on the run. In fact they’re lying in wait, armed and ready to repel the

planned British push. Together, these young soldiers must reach their comrades and halt the

attack – a race against time and insurmountable odds.

With meticulous attention to detail (plaudits to production designer Dennis Gassner) and

astonishingly fluid cinematography by Roger Deakins that shifts from ground level to God’s-eye

view, Mendes puts his audience right there in the middle of the unfolding chaos. There’s a real
sense of epic scale as the action moves breathlessly from one hellish environment to the next,

effectively capturing our reluctant heroes’ sense of anxiety and discovery as they stumble into

each new unchartered terrain. This is nail-biting stuff, interspersed with genuine shocks and

surprises. Whether it’s a tripwire moment that provokes an audible gasp, a distant dogfight

segueing into up-close-and-personal horror, or a single gunshot that made me jump out of my

seat during an otherwise near-silent sequence, there’s no doubting the film’s theatrical impact.

Yet for all the steel-trap visceral efficiency, it’s the more low-key moments that really pack a

punch – those moments when we’re confronted with the simple human cost of war. As with

Peter Jackson’s monumentally moving documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, 1917 works best

when showing us the boyish face of this conflict; the pitiable plight of a young generation, old or

lost before their time. It’s a quality perfectly captured by MacKay’s endlessly watchable eyes,

which manage simultaneously to project ravaged innocence and world-weary exhaustion –

fatalism and hope.

“Hope is a dangerous thing,” says Benedict Cumberbatch’s Colonel MacKenzie, just one of a

number of small roles filled by high-profile actors happy to play second fiddle. It’s a line that

mirrors the central refrain from The Shawshank Redemption, another humanist movie tinged with

horror that seems to haunt Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns’ script. There are evocations, too,

of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, not only in the unflinching depiction of battlefield violence,

but also in a plot device that sets soldiers searching for a brother in a desperate quest for

redemption. In one of its more surreal (or perhaps transcendent) sequences, wherein a purgatorial

night-time underworld is illuminated in a yellow phosphorescent haze, I was unexpectedly

reminded of a dream scene from Waltz With Bashir, in which young men rise from the water,

like ghosts walking among the living.

Throughout this Homeric odyssey, Thomas Newman’s pulsing score ratchets up the tension,

travelling “up the down trench”, through the body-strewn carnage of no man’s land (a forest of

wood and wire, bone and blood) and into the eerie environs of deserted farmhouses and bombed-

out churches. Occasionally, we hear echoes of the rising crescendo of Hans

Zimmer’s Dunkirk score; elsewhere, Newman’s cues are full of piercing melancholia mingled

with distant threat.

In a film in which music plays such a crucial role, it’s significant that perhaps the most powerful

scene is an interlude of song. Emerging from a river after a baptismal episode of death and

rebirth, we find ourselves in a wood where a young man sings The Wayfaring Stranger. It’s an

interlude that brings the characters and audiences together in silence, communally experiencing

that still-small voice of calm that lies at the heart of so many great war movies.
I agree that the film 1917 delivers visually. The cinematography is a breakthrough in terms of

modern production values. The one-shot cinematography makes it feel as though the audience is

experiencing the trials of war with the characters. Although the movie was not the most

historically accurate compared to many others illustrating World War I, it did embody the

emotional and psychological experiences of a soldier. Will Schofield’s journey not only

describes being dutiful to one’s country but more importantly being dutiful to your partner.

Schofield was dedicated to giving Blake’s brother memorial objects of him such as the rings.

Perhaps his partner dying gave him new determination to reach the end of his mission without

giving up.

1917 is not historically accurate. There are many instances where there was incorrect military

etiquette being used. War critics have pointed out the inaccuracies such as when Will Schofield,

a lance corporal, addressed the sergeant as ‘sarge’. This example of casualty would not have

been accepted during World War I. It was also unrealistic that the two would’ve crossed into no-

man’s land in broad daylight even with insight of evacuation of German troops. It is expected

that certain scenes of the movie would be exaggerated for the purposes of dramatization. One of

these dramatizations is how easy it was for Will to get into the forward command post.

Realistically, with how he was presenting himself by the end of the movie and his frantic mental

state, officers would not have easily allowed him to address the senior officer. Another scene that

played out inaccurately is when Blake was killed by the German pilot. Instead of taking a

compass, ammunition and other military or navigation necessities, Will opts for objects of

sentimentality. While these scenes do evoke emotions in viewers, realistically, they would not

occur.
Few films impact the national psyche with as much force as Peter Weir’s 1981 hit starring Mark

Lee and Mel Gibson as young athletes shipped off to war. Gallipoli is one of the best loved and

most quintessentially “Australian” films. It contemplates themes as baked in to national identity

as the fur of a koala and the gristle of a meat pie – from mateship and camaraderie to perceptions

of justice (the eternal “fair go”) and obsession with sport and physical performance.

This initially heart-warming but ultimately devastating story begins in Western Australia in 1915

with a training sequence between a drill sergeant-like coach and runner, Archy (Lee). Before

Archy blazes through a makeshift finishing line (a string attached to two sticks stuck in the

ground) he jogs on the spot and partakes in one of Australian cinema’s most famous exchanges.

“What are your legs?”

“Springs. Steel springs.”

“What are they going to do?”

“Hurl me down the track.”

“How fast can you run?”

“As fast as a leopard.”

“How fast are you going to run?”

“As fast as a leopard.”

Archy crouches and puts his hands in the dirt; later his hands will be covered by a different kind

of crud, far away from the Aussie outback. For the first 25 minutes, Gallipoli is an archetypal

sports movie, the protagonist establishing his skills in against-the-odds challenges (he outruns a

man on a horse then wins a race with mangled feet).

The film begins and ends with Archy running. It could be interpreted as a metaphor for the cruel

task taken on by professional athletes: the war against themselves and others, the sweat and tears

expended for the arguably futile nature of it all – a universe in which, as certain as bodies slain in

battle fields, one record is eclipsed by another. It also reads as a commentary on how emerging

genius can be stymied in a world obsessed with other, crueller things, such as fighting and dying

for patches of land.

But the most potent interpretation of Gallipoli – and one that hasn’t lost a jot of power all these

years later – concerns Weir and screenwriter David Williamson’s scathing deconstruction of the

atavistic perception of war as a great adventure.

“Come and find out how to get into the greatest game of them all,” an army recruiter yells after a

local race. Archy takes up the challenge, viewing fighting for his country as an obligation and

another way of pushing himself to mental and physical greatness.

The energy of the film builds to a gasp-inducing conclusion in which the protagonist’s body

connects with a torrent of bullets – a harrowing final kablamo that’s still, to this day, the highest-

impact ending of any Australian film. For films that juxtapose the beauty of nature and the

artifice of war, it’s hard to match the painful elegance of All Quiet on the Western Front (both

the 1930 and 1979 adaptations), when a character reaches for a butterfly and is shot in the head

by a sniper. But Weir and Williamson’s trading of emotional complexity for brutal shock hardly

seems out of place given the subject matter.

So great is the impact of Gallipoli’s ending and the moments leading up to it that it’s easy to

forget only a small portion of the film is based on the battlefield. The core of it is a heart on
sleeve bromance between Archy and co-runner Frank (Mel Gibson), whose friendship blossoms

after initial rivalry. Most of it is about forming friendships, leaving home and preparing for war.

An hour in, the characters are still training in pretend combat on desert sand in Cairo.

They eventually arrive on the shores of Gallipoli, with explosions going off like firecrackers.

Suddenly this war film becomes a real war film – or so it seems. Weir’s cameras are reluctant to

enter the battle, viewing fighting as a largely off-frame activity, for context rather than action.

There is such a strong sense of optimism, a sense the characters aren’t in any imminent threat,

shrewdly and careful maintained, that when the danger finally hits in the last 20 minutes, it hits

hard.

This final sequence is a horrifying spectacle in which allied troops, following orders to storm the

enemy, barely get over the top of the trenches. The men are mowed down from afar and slain

like cattle. “They are being cut down before they can get five yards,” shrieks Frank to a superior,

only to be told the attack must proceed. When he gets word the big boss is rethinking the attack,

Frank runs like hell to impart the news, but he’s too late. Bill Hunter, as Major Barton, walks

alongside his men, understanding they are being sent to certain death. One of them recites the

Lord’s Prayer.

Then Weir introduces the mother of all callbacks. He rests the frame on Archy, who asks

himself: “How fast are you going to run?” The answer is nowhere near fast enough.
I agree that the movie takes an interesting approach to setting up the characters. Introducing them

both as athletes to emphasize the ultimate moment when Archy dies. This movie not only

highlights the thrill of joining the war but also the doubt and terror that comes along with it. The

contrast between the beginning of the movie where Archy’s excitement and positivity radiated,

and the end of the movie where he still tried to instill confidence in himself but ultimately failed,

is jarring. Similarly, to 1917, this movie also has partnerships between soldiers. The guilt Frank

must have felt for not arriving on time to save the lives of the third wave soldiers, including

Archy, must have been like how Will Schofield felt when he watched his partner die in front of

him.

Gallipoli is historically accurate. It accurately depicted recruitment of the war and the spirits of

young patriotic men eager to serve their country for glory. Many young men enlisted in the army

and when they didn’t their “mates” would call them cowards. During the scene where Archy and

Frank arrive at a house, the family only celebrates Archy’s goals of getting into the Light Horse

and not Frank’s when he says he’s going to Perth for business. When they finally arrive at

Gallipoli the dangers of war do not seem apparent in the first few scenes. They’re still engaging

in regular activities, that is, until they are sent to the front lines. The mismanagement of troops,

poor communication between officers is accurate to the period. Australians did not adopt the

German method of an isolated team where generals could make their own decisions. If they had

adopted this method, it would have prevented the blood bath. A historically accurate moment in

the movie was when the artillery guns stopped firing. This was because the watched of the

different officers had not been synchronized. It is portrayed in the movie when a general back at

the camp said that they were supposed to move forward three minutes ago.