Do you believe in magic?
Because that’s all I saw while watching 1917.
If you didn’t know already, 1917 was filmed as a one shot. And if you don’t know what a one shot is, it’s when a scene is continuously filmed without any cuts. So imagine filming one continuous shot for an entire movie. Granted, there were a few cuts, cleverly hidden to make it appear like one long continuous moment, but on the screen all I saw was pure magic. There was one point when they panned over a small river and a bridge. The actor then begins to cross said bridge with the camera following. The next second the camera seems to be hovering over the river. Like how did they even do it? They panned over the water. There was nothing there. No bridge for the camera man to walk over. No apparatus to take the camera man across. I need to seriously watch some behind the scenes footage. I can’t sit on not knowing anymore.
If the technical idea of one long take isn’t enough of a reason to make you want to watch this movie, let me list some more reasons. The one shot let the viewer get into the tension of battle. Like my husband said, you never felt like you could blink. There was just the constant need to keep watching without a chance to breathe. This is the first movie where the feeling of battle washed over the crowd. Top that with the special effects, and your heart won’t stop pounding. At times, it seemed like the explosions even shook the camera, they were so close. Just think of the amount of coordination it took to pull these scenes off. If one person was off by a second it wouldn’t have worked. They would have had to shoot the whole thing all over again.
This is a nice little segway to talk about the sets. The details put into them - they even got the rotting corpses right. 1917 is not for the faint of heart. And does it make me a bad person that I was more affected by the dead animals than I was by the dead people all over the fields? At one point, I had to confirm that the dead animals were indeed fake. Again, I have to come back to the scale of what they achieved. Almost the entire set had to be set up to do the one shot, which means creating an entire battlefield.
Mind blown.
It takes great skill as an actor to pull off not only lines, but very choreographed scenes without the option to keep reshooting if you mess up. One mistake means you have to restart from the beginning. But in a way, this also led to a more realistic style. Minor errors that could be forgiven, lended to a less stiff form of delivery. They seemed like real people.
The movie wasn’t all roses and daisies though. I struggled with the story as a whole. Some will say that it was realistic. I say that the acting was flat at times and the dialogue too stiff. This is where the realism ended.
I mean… who milked the cow!?!?!?
I’ve come to accept the fact that I watch movies for the story and there wasn’t much to this one. When you walk out of a movie debating how long milk can last… well, you’re clearly focusing on the wrong parts.
Not every story decision was the wrong one. The bookends of the trees were pleasant and a nice rounding out of the story. The cherry blossoms presenting life and death. The color gone until the soldier walked between the trees as if from a dream. The rising sun to signify a fresh start. All in all, I didn’t hate the movie. In fact, I loved it a lot, but I can only see myself recommending it to a few people. The type of people who can see the real magic in its creation.
Hopefully you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.
Happy Watching
Love Kait