Sam Mendes
1917

What criticisms would you make of someone who films World War I in a single continuous shot? Actually, it seems to me that this is an opportunity to better frame a trend now consolidated in certain Hollywood cinema, from Cuarón and Iñárritu onwards. And that is to completely put the content in the background in favor of form. Because in the end, form is more content than content itself, especially in today's American cinema. Gravity is to space what 1917 is to war.

A Hollywood that has now told everything and is desperately searching for new stories. Or, when authorial credentials allow it, retells the already said and well-trodden, but through different, more refined, surprising (slightly self-indulgent) aesthetic lenses. It remakes classic cinema but with a new eye.

And so, I repeat, what on earth do you want to say to someone who serves you two hours of continuous shot (albeit fictitious, like Birdman) between trenches and tunnels, between ruins and burning cities, between ethereal rivers and battlefields never so green and aestheticized? What do we want to tell him? That it doesn't say anything new about war? Oh, please! It's not up to Hollywood to say something new about war, especially World War I at that.

It's true, it leaves you a bit cold. It's a brain orgasm, but the heart doesn't race. Maybe, however, it's a personal issue. I was so engrossed by the camera movements, the infernal beauty of the sets (never so atmospheric in a war film), the meticulous attention to detail, the rats and the flames... that I didn't let myself get too caught up in the emotional story of the protagonists. Just a little bit, let's say. But because I was too taken by something else, the direction captivated me completely. And that's not insignificant, not at all.

Obviously, when you tell about war, you always say so much even without saying it, but that is certainly not the reason why 1917 will be remembered. It will be remembered because war has never been so beautiful (forgive me the term), never so adventurous, so fantasy if you will. The eye is so close to the individuals that the collective carnage becomes an individual epic, hyperbole, a serpent of adventures. Even death is spectacular, for a hawk-like director like Mendes here.

It is the opposite of Dunkirk, which refused protagonism. But in the end, it turns out to be even tougher; after the adventure and the vertigo, it delivers a couple of fatal blows to the moral of the story... which, of course, was an illusion.

It's not a film for reflecting on the theme, yet in part, it becomes one. But above all, it is a device aimed at epic entertainment with very fresh, innovative methods for the genre, a narrative cohesion that makes previous films seem like collages of disconnected pieces.