1917 [4K UHD]

This World War I story is very well done. I suspect this will be a classic war movies in time. The cinematography is masterfully done. The story is keep the attention. Along with Dunkirk, one of the best war movies I’ve seen in quite a while.

Great picture quality, and I liked the movie. I watched it back in 2020, so I don’t remember exactly why I liked it.

Good film, but not remotely a great film. Mostly the plot is just so unbelievable. Mendes throws in everything but the kitchen sink...more a "Serious" Indiana Jones film than "Serious" film. Way too many things happen to one person...whose every shot is accurate, while everyone shooting at him manages to miss. I'm sorry, it's NOT a SERIOUS plot. It's all made up, with too much absurd action in mind. And the worst part, is that leads up to action just take so much time, while providing little more than "LEAD-UP" into the action.

This is a great movie. I originally saw this on the TV. Of course it was edited and full of commercials and I wanted to watch the complete uninterrupted movie so bought the DVD. Now I can watch anytime in the future.

The one-shot photography is remarkable - this is not a movie that you can "half-watch". You sit down and before you know it you are immersed in the horrors of WWII's static warfare and can't move until it's finished.

Amazing movie. Filmed with a single shot through the movie. Gives a very compelling look at WWI.

Great, but too solemn for a 2nd watch.

In 1917 Director Sam Mendes has left us with more than just another film of war. A clue lies with the term “Gehenna” (aka - hell, hades, limbo, catabasis) used for the title of a movement in the film’s music score – he is clearly alluding to the layered meanings of this remarkable film. 1917 is an allegory of yet another allegory nearly 3,000 years old. It demands repeated viewing to absorb its nuanced and symbolic iconography. The landscapes of dark beauty, the liturgical score and most of all the unbroken camera flow that rarely breaks from the protagonists every step work subliminally much as a dream. Veterans who have survived combat might cast a memory of war beneath shut eyes this way. It connects you to the experience of a soldier at his own level. Few other films of this genre compare. The ancient Greeks believed we come here with “sealed orders.” Lance Corporal Schofield and Corporal Blake are ordered to deliver an army command message that would save 1,600 men from annihilation. It’s a race against time. The first hour of 1917 could be entitled “catabasis” from the epics of Homer – a term we can apply appropriately here to describe the sacrifice of a nation’s children in war. The graphic depiction of “no man’s land” separating the British and German front lines leaves little to your worst imaginings. In the second hour, when Schofield awakens from a fall, he discovers his watch has stopped. Is he therefore even still alive? As he steps into Ecoust, a city of burning rubble, we enter the underworld with him. His solitary journey here is now so much that of book 6 from Virgil’s “Aeneid.” For Schofield to “go over” he must first complete his task. He must kill to survive, shun the pleas for an orphaned infant, nearly drown in a river (the Styx?) near Crosillies, climb over an island of dead civilians, and only then in a quiet forest find the Devon Rifle Company he was seeking. A soldier can be heard singing “I Am A Lonely Wayfaring Wanderer” - a hymn of warriors free of woe, crossing "the Jordan" to return to their parents in death. It is one of many carefully engineered symbols throughout the film, each of them a paradox. In the suspenseful and relentless race against time that governs the final 20 minutes of the film Schofield staggers, exhausted, shell shocked, dogging a rain of shrapnel through the surreal chalk trenches to reach his destination and deliver the message. And also deliver another more personal message of his own. Shall all these phantom warriors yet find their way to “Elysium” in the tender green fields of Belgium? Schofield carried with him a photo of his wife. On the reverse she had written “come back to us.” Virgil's Aeneid was a poem of the Trojan wars. It addressed war with the subliminal aesthetics of that time as civilization’s great nightmare, and mankind’s greatest test. It remains relevant today and going forward. That aesthetics rather than reality can leave an emotional and not only an intellectual comment is the truest definition of art