1917 (2019)

1917  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Sam Mendes
    George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman, Colin Firth,
    Benedict Cumberbatch, Andrew Scott, Mark Strong
If there's an ideal movie to go on a double bill with Peter Jackson's World War One documentary "They Shall Not Grow Old", it's probably this, Sam Mendes' narrative feature about two British soldiers assigned to cross nine miles of no man's land to warn the commander of a combat regiment that if he doesn't call off a planned attack on the German line, his troops will be annihilated. The first thing you notice in it is the camerawork. It's stunning, moving with the soldiers through the trenches and over the bombed-out countryside, a hellish landscape littered with rotting corpses, wounded comrades, flies, rats, barbed wire, dead horses, crippled weaponry, burning cities and abandoned farms. You're aware of the camera at first, and it's a little distracting, but as you adjust to it, the effect becomes organic and you're simply in the movie with the two corporals, dirty, hungry, terrified, exhausted, dodging bullets and stumbling through the mud, trying to stay alive from one moment to the next. The Great War brought to ghastly, heroic life.