It’s a beautiful movie but I couldn’t enjoy it fully because every step of the story feels unrealistic. Like an alternate reality where a retreating enemy cuts the other sides phone lines and magically blocks them from the world, booby trapped tunnels rumble on the verge of collapse for minutes, and a sniper on a prepared position is killed by a guy crossing a bridge in the open and shooting over his shoulder.
The “trap” laid out by the Germans is also pretty damn silly. It seems to be loosely base on Operation Alberich, where the Germans were always on the backfoot and managed to pull off a logistically difficult orderly retreat to a new line.
It’s still not as bad as Hurt Locker.
On a tangential note, 11-11 Memories Retold is an excellent PC/Console game in a similar vein to the film. No shots are fired in the game.
The two guys also seem like pretty lousy soldiers. They’re good actors but happy-go-lucky boy seems way too cheerful and carefree for someone who’s seen the horrors of trench warfare and you’d think the blond one would have enough sense to stay out of the line of fire opening that door. He can’t have been hit by the shot at point blank by the dying German sniper but the movie never really explains what happens other than he got a knock on the head. The Germans also can’t shoot for shit for some reason. He would have been dead ten times over.
They probably weren’t good soldiers. The documentary “They shall never grow old” pressed upon the point that many of the British soldiers were very young, very inexperienced, and very naive.
I also had to find a clip on-line to see what happened that knocked him back. Looks like he took a point blank shot directly to the helmet which even as a glancing blow would be enough to knock you back without piercing the helmet.
You’re right, the Internet agrees with you, bullet bouncing off his helmet knocked him back. I have no issues with that, it was just difficult to tell what happened. I thought the bullet might have hit his rifle, but since he was aiming it it was almost impossible.
Now that you mention “They shall not grow old”, I enjoyed that much, much more than this movie. Highly recommended.
They showed all the soldiers urinating beside the barn to indicate that the convoy had just stopped a few minutes earlier.
Surely the prize for improbably daft moments has to be when Schofield happens across a hungry baby and just happens to have with him a canteen full of milk?
j
No one you saw in the film won.
True. There are too many to list them all. It also annoys me how the main protagonist blabs the message from the general that the Germans are setting a trap to anyone who’ll listen. You have an order, deliver an urgent message to Colonel McKenzie, that’s it, shut up and do it. Everything else is just sowing fear and confusion and a break in military standards and discipline.
He didn’t just happen to have it. He filled up at the “dairy farm” when it was all that was available to drink.
I think rounds from the sniper were hitting in places physically impossible from his perch but I’d have to look again.
They had a water well. And finding an open bucket of fresh natural milk on an abandoned farm, yeah, these people must have fled minutes before the two arrived (and left the buildings completely run down). Or maybe the German soldiers, the same ones who were shooting cows because scorched earth, left it there.
Remembered another one, the warm embers moment right in the beginning was also a really fake tension building gimmick.
What about the conclusion? First, Schofield, you dumbass, run along the other side of the trench.
Secondly, they didn’t save Blake’s brother after all, he just survived the first wave and stands there understandably a bit shell-shocked at the death of his younger brother. Cool. So what, we’ve accompanied Schofield’s journey surviving multiple time by sheer dumb luck to learn what, war is hell?
Sorry, this script is really weak and I had high expectations. If you’re going to do an historical war movie, especially one in remembrance of the people who fought and their sacrifices (or not), do it properly or not at all.
Not sure if Schofield deliberately chose to fill the canteen with milk rather than water. But he might have simply thought; it’s here. Why waste it? And also, practically speaking, milk offers more nutrition than just hydration, which might be desirable in a war situation.
My understanding is that raw milk on an open container at ambient temperature spoils very quickly. I don’t think that carrying it in a canteen will be that useful either versus other sources of nutrition (unless there is a baby to feed). But OK, maybe he really likes milk.
I liked it a lot. It draws immediate comparison to Dunkirk, which I also liked, but where I felt the non-linear storytelling was more a gimmick than a legitimate story-telling device. By contrast I think the pseudo one-shot technique used in 1917 genuinely served the story which is about one day in the lives of two ordinary soldiers. The film vividly showed us what living and fighting in a WW1 hellscape would have felt like while also delivering a lean but powerful narrative arc with the two soldiers and the brother.
The other side of the trench has all the access trenches (the trench system was a bit like a comb with the spine of the comb being the front-line and the teeth being the access trenches to medical, latrines, supplies, housing, etc). It would’ve been impossible to run on the other side without going down one trench, up the other side, down another trench, or, going wayyy around.
The movie had some flaws, but I loved it. It’s a movie I still think of due to the amazing cinematography.
This seemed like a temporary simple slit in the ground dug specifically to launch the attack, different from the complex permanent multi-level systems you are referring to, but maybe there were still some obstacles. It’s a fair point.
Scared and desperate people often make sub-optimal decisions. Hastily planted booby traps don’t always blow up as powerfully as hoped.