[D66] Sam Mendes’ 1917

[A.OUT]

wsws.org:

Sam Mendes’ 1917: A technological step forward, several ideological and 
artistic steps back
By Joanne Laurier
17 January 2020

Directed by Sam Mendes; screenplay by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns

1917, directed by British filmmaker Sir Sam Mendes (American Beauty, 
Jarhead, Revolutionary Road, Skyfall), recounts a fictionalized episode 
set during World War I, loosely inspired by stories told to the director 
by his grandfather.

Co-written by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, the movie concerns two 
young British soldiers on a mission to halt an attack by a British 
battalion. That offensive would fall into a German ambush leading to the 
possible destruction of the unit.

While the film graphically shows some of the horrors of trench warfare, 
it fails to indict those responsible for the carnage and is oblivious to 
the war’s socio-historical context. To put it bluntly, 1917 does not 
qualify as an anti-war film.

In fact, the movie, treating one of the titanic events of modern times, 
is largely conventional and intellectually shallow. Fully accepting 
national divisions and enmities, it opens the door to British and other 
patriotisms. While 1917 is something of a technological tour-de-force, 
ideologically it represents a significant regression from anti-war films 
on the subject of World War I such as Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the 
Western Front (1930), Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937) and Stanley 
Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), as well as Peter Jackson’s 2018 
documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old.

Mendes’ movie opens in Northern France on April 6, 1917 and unfolds over 
a 24-hour period. Two young British lance corporals, Tom Blake 
(Dean-Charles Chapman) and Will Schofield (George MacKay), receive 
instructions from General Erinmore (Colin Firth) about a high-risk 
mission to get a message to a British battalion planning to attack 
German forces, believed to be in retreat.

Aerial intelligence has learned that the Germans are not retreating but 
have only made a tactical withdrawal in order to ensnare their enemy. 
With communication lines cut, Tom and Will must hand-deliver an urgent 
message to the 2nd Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment to call off 
their planned offensive. Some 1,600 lives are at stake, including that 
of Tom’s brother.

Passing through British trenches strewn with damaged and war-weary 
soldiers, many of them boys, the duo cross No Man’s Land, reaching 
abandoned German bunkers. A rat trips a wire, causing the tunnels to 
collapse, burying Will alive. Rescued by Tom, the pair continue their 
journey through a hellish landscape of rotting, bloated corpses, 
blown-up artillery, bombed-out buildings. It is destruction on an almost 
unimaginable scale and scope.

During their perilous expedition, the more cynical Will tells the naive 
Tom that he traded a combat medal he won for a bottle of wine (“It’s 
just a bloody bit of tin”). But when tragedy strikes, Will becomes an 
unstoppable fighting machine. He is warned by a captain (Mark Strong) to 
“make sure there are witnesses,” when he delivers the message to halt 
the attack, because “some men just want the fight.”

In considering 1917 as a whole, it should be noted, first of all, that 
while Mendes’ grandfather, the future writer Alfred Hubert Mendes, 
carried a message through hazardous territory in 1917 during the mutual 
mass slaughter known as the Battle of Passchendaele (in which hundreds 
of thousands of British, French, German, Canadian, New Zealand, 
Australian, Indian, South African and Belgian soldiers died 
pointlessly), the “life-saving” character of the mission and the 
personal element (the desire to save a brother) are entirely invented. 
The film has a melodramatically manipulative character from the outset.

Moreover, the title, 1917, displayed in large typeface in the film’s 
advertising campaign, is bombastic and even deceptive. For much of the 
world’s population, its most politically conscious elements certainly, 
“1917” is identified primarily with the October Revolution in Russia, 
the event that, above all, helped bring about the end of the bloody 
madhouse of the imperialist war. If not for the Russian Revolution and 
the threat of revolution elsewhere (the German Revolution erupted in 
November 1918), the various Great Powers would have carried on the death 
and devastation, resulting in even more catastrophic human suffering. 
Whether intentionally or not, the titling of the film is an effort to 
“reclaim” the year 1917 for the cause of national honor, patriotism and 
military valor.

Leaving the October Revolution aside, the title is disproportionate to 
the story it tells, which hardly encompasses even the purely military 
side of the conflict in 1917. The movie’s principal strength is its 
remarkable cinematography (Roger Deakins), creating an exhausting two 
hours of terrifying war imagery. As previously noted, the spectator is 
overwhelmed by visuals and unimpressed by the historical analysis. While 
there is sympathy for the British casualties, there is none for the 
German victims. In one scene, Will and Tom try to minister to a gravely 
wounded German fighter and pay dearly for their merciful efforts. It is 
a historical fact that the biggest danger to the British soldiers, in 
the end, came from their own commanding officers and ruling elite.

The unceasing, tension-filled momentum of the film serves to conceal its 
essential lack of ideas or criticism. Alonso Duralde at The Wrap noted 
legitimately that “the movie is more successful as a thriller than as a 
thoughtful examination of war and its horrors; Mendes seems less 
interested in bigger ideas about the nightmare of battle and its effects 
on his characters than he is in Hitchcockian audience manipulation.” 
Duralde contrasted 1917 with “tales like Paths of Glory or Gallipoli 
[Peter Weir, 1981] or [Renoir’s] La Grande Illusion, which used the 
conflict as a way to discuss class or military injustice or the last 
gasp of the European aristocracy.”

Along those lines, it is worth recalling director Jean Renoir’s comments 
in his autobiography: “If a French farmer should find himself dining at 
the same table as a French financier, those two Frenchmen would have 
nothing to say to each other, each being unconcerned with the other’s 
interests. But if a French farmer meets a Chinese farmer they will find 
any amount to talk about. This theme of the bringing together of men 
through their callings and common interests has haunted me all my life 
and does so still. It is the theme of La Grande Illusion and it is 
present, more or less, in all my works.”

Mendes’ movie never asks who was responsible for one of the most 
barbaric episodes in world history, a calamity that resulted in some 40 
million civilian and military casualties, including an estimated 22 
million dead.

In fact, 1917 ’s one political comment on the war comes when a British 
general utters “The only one way this war ends … is the last man 
standing.” The claims that the film’s depiction of numerous atrocities 
makes it an anti-war work are spurious, as is the case in regard to 
various contemporary movies on the subjects of the Iraq and Afghanistan 
invasions (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Lions for Lambs, Mendes’ 
own Jarhead, etc.).

It is entirely possible to picture the awfulness of such 
conflicts—particularly as they affect one’s “own” side—and still insist, 
or imply, that such conflicts are necessary, inevitable, or, once begun, 
have to be “carried through to the end” in the national interest. The 
uncritical, narrowly focused treatment of the immediate “facts” of the 
war in 1917 helps plant it firmly in the pro-British establishment camp.
George MacKay in 1917

Media accounts suggest that Mendes and Wilson-Cairns, described as a “a 
World War I buff,” were unserious in their approach to the deeper, 
starker meaning of the events depicted in 1917. Indiewire describes 
Mendes—appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British 
Empire in 2000 and only recently knighted, and fresh from directing two 
empty-headed James Bond extravaganzas (Skyfall and Spectre)—and 
Wilson-Cairns spreading maps “showing front line locations in April 
1917” on the “London kitchen table where Mendes perfected Skyfall .”

Indie wire continues: “The writers figured out where the French towns 
were, then traced—and timed—the treacherous route the two infantrymen 
would take on foot, throwing in incidents and stories they had each 
picked up over the years.”

There is no indication that Mendes and Wilson-Cairns carried out 
substantive historical research into the processes that made the ghastly 
situation in 1917 possible, much less consulted critics of war and 
imperialism.

If they had, they might have learned that not everyone conceives of the 
bloody inferno of World War I as a clash between the “good” British and 
the “evil” Germans, the conception the film leans toward. As the WSWS 
explained in November 2018, the 1914-18 war was not fought, as the 
British authorities propagandized, “to defend the right of small nations 
against the depredations of Germany.” Nor was it fought for any of the 
self-serving, lying justifications provided by the other belligerents, 
Germany, France, Austria, Russia or the US.

The relentless blasting of the guns, the senseless mass slaughter in 
what was later to be falsely labeled the “war to end all wars” or the 
war to “make the world safe for democracy,” was pursued for the sake of 
markets, profits, resources, colonies and spheres of influence.” Mendes’ 
“epic” film has no interest in such matters.