1917-SAM MENDES

[sym8]

Fantastic piece of film making.Incredible how this was made and you feel at times that you are there in the film.See this at the imax where possible not to be missed.

[KUNG FU BOB]

Ditto to what @sym8 said. We saw this in IMAX on Thursday night, and it's a fantastic film which takes you right along on the journey. The director filmed it in a bunch of very long takes (I was told that the entire last twenty minutes are one continuous take, which is mind-boggling) and blended them together seamlessly. This makes the experience seem so real instead of "put together with editing". And not once did I see anything that seemed like CGI or any sort of special effect either, it all seemed perfectly real. The cast play their roles with the utmost authenticity, always seeming to be living in World War 1 era times, and never feeling too modern (which I find to be a common distracting flaw in many period films). If I'd have first seen this on TV (even my nice, big 4K TV) I'd have been so upset that I'd missed it in the theaters (my son went with a few friends to see it a second time the very next day). I highly recommend seeing it on the biggest screen possible, not only for the picture, but for the full effect of the immersive sound design. 9/10  "I have spoken."- Kuiil 😁

[Drunken Monk]

One of the best films of the last twenty years, if not longer. This is INCREDIBLE cinema. From the story to the acting to the cinematography to the camera work. Damn near perfection. I left this film feeling emotionally exhausted in a very good way. This isn't just a film; it's an experience. For me, it's genuine a 10/10 movie. Damn near a perfect film.

[Secret Executioner]

Saw it last night as I had been curious about it but missed its first run and it got back in theaters (at least my local theater) thanks to the Oscars. At first glance when the camera started following Blake and Schofield, I was like "geez, following people walking for two hours ? About as ground-breaking as Gus Van Sant's Gerry." But then I quickly put that feeling aside when the realism and the details in the reconstitution of the trenches and the no man's land were on display - mud, barbed wires, holes resulting from blasts, corpses... Looked pretty much like what they told about WWI in history class and man are some of those details gruesome (and as @KUNG FU BOB said, the reconstitution feels realistic to the point you can't pinpoint special effects like CGI)... Overall, the characters are all quite unique and colorful in their own ways. There's some good chemistry between the two leads, and the people they meet on their journey are all fairly unique and often have colorful traits.

In its second half, the movie delivers more reconstitution of WWI with a town being a battlefield and I felt the character involved had literally gone to Hell - fire and ruins everywhere, enemies trying to shoot him... I felt though that while emotional and more poignant (as @Drunken Monk pointed out, this movie can wear you out on an emotional level with how strong it is), the second half also delivered a lot of clichees of the genre - there's an encounter with a civilian woman (and as often she's French - a very touching scene though, reminded me a bit of a similar scene from Sands of Iwo Jima), the attempt to find one of the protagonists' brother felt a bit Saving Private Ryan-like and the officer refusing to obey and sending soldiers to unavoidable doom could be reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory - though this scene's eventually followed by some dialogue that feels grim and pessimystic, but is also sadly realistic on what was going on and how the strategic thought process was at the time (a point that was kind of made fun of in Blackadder goes forth when Blackadder suggests the "strategy" is sending everybody out of the tranches to get slaughtered again and again hoping that maybe at one point there'll be a different outcome).

The narrative device of constantly following the characters also reminded me of The 317th Platoon, where there's focus mostly on the main characters and the audience doesn't know more than them. Both films have a more realistic and grounded approach, resulting in attacks or bad stuff being more startling and emotional than in movies where you know of the stuff in advance. Actually, the attack in 1917 not only startle you because you don't expect them, but also because I felt the sound of the gunshots and of the explosions was very crisp and seemed to have been made very loud to be even more startling and apocalyptic.

 

Definitely a very solid and investing film, you're really caught up with the leads in their attempt to succeed, and it's technically very spectacular. I noticed there was little to no soundtrack in this one, except for a few songs and a musical theme playing towards the end (making it even more of a tear-jerker) and as the ending credits rolled. Well worth seeing.