1917 (2019)

[indianasmith]

My wife and I went to see this one this afternoon, and it did not disappoint!
There have been very few good films made this century about World War I, but this one is perhaps the best movie about that horrible conflict I have ever seen.  Set in April of the title year, this film describes the odyssey of two soldiers sent to warn an advancing British unit that they are stumbling into a trap (the retrograde movement of the Germans to the Hindenburg Line, the most impressive defensive works prepared by either side throughout the war).  Advancing through the stinking morass of No-Man's Land into the recently despoiled French countryside behind, they encounter enemy soldiers, desperate civilians, and some friendly forces along the way.  Incredible cinematography, including some of the longest single shots I've ever seen in a big-budget picture, draws the viewer in, and the pull-no-punches depiction of  the horrible human death toll of the Western Front will stay with you long after the storyline fades in your memory. 5/5

[Rev. Powell]

Agreed. It's as good as you've heard.

[Neville]

Saw it yesterday, found it very good. My mind is still debating wether the one-shot thing was necessary or not. Since the 1990s it seems to me that most of the directors who employ it are just show-offs.

[Dr. Whom]

What Indiana said

One of the things that makes the depiction of the horrors of the Western Front so effective, in my view, is that these aspects are not played for effect. Death and mutilation are simply part of the everyday reality in the trenches.

I am less convinced of limiting the action to a single protagonist. This means that everything that happens in the movie, has to happen to him. This makes it at times a bit like 'Gravity', but on the Western Front.

Still, it is well worth your time.

[ER]

If you were moved by 1917 you should go to the Somme battlefields someday if you get a chance, and stand there where so much of this happened and think about the death and horror that unfolded right there in a place that today is quiet and rural and looks for all the world like Nebraska.

You walk over top of shell casings and spent bullets, and to this day along roads are heaps of barbed wire and other debris from war. You can even stand on a hill (that thousands of British died trying to take) and see the shadowy ghosts of the trenches zigzagging along, filled in and mostly under farmers' fields.

There is a park there with a monument to the Newfoundland regiment, that in one short space of a day in July 1916 lost nearly every man in it just trying to get to the British forward trench, and in those times casualties were localized because people joined in their home towns and fought with others from there, so back in Canada the news hit that in many cases in these little Newfoundland farm towns and fishing villages....there were literally no men of military age left alive after just one day.

Maybe because the July 1916 battles fought there were closer to massacres than warfare, more than any other battlefield I've visited, the Somme holds tragedy that clings to the senses across time.

PS: And if you can't go, look at this:

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[indianasmith]

Visiting the Western Front is one of the things on my bucket list.  To walk through the ghostly outlines of the trenches and envision the carnage that happened there - the thought gives me goose bumps!
In 1995, I interviewed a black WWI veteran who was, at that time, 105 years old.  His regiment (a "colored regiment" in the segregated army of that day) was given the job of burying the dead at Verdun.  He told me that his unit alone buried some 30,000 skeletons in the space of a month.  They sorted them by the buttons and uniform insignia, to see what nation they had fought for.  Bodies with no scraps of uniforms left were stacked to one side, he said, and at the end of the day "us and the Germans, we drew straws for'em."

May we never forget, and never repeat, the Great War.