The basic plot of 1917 is as follows: In World War I, in northern France, the German and British armies occupy trenches separated by a narrow strip of no man’s land. The Germans make a tactical withdrawal, setting a trap for the British. Unaware of the trap, one British battalion pursues the Germans, planning to attack the next morning. The British who remain behind in the trenches become aware of the trap through aerial reconnaissance, but are unable to immediately warn their battalion because the Germans have cut the telegraph lines. So two British soldiers (and these two alone) are dispatched to hand-deliver a message to the battalion calling off the attack. On the way they are attacked by isolated German forces, including a fighter pilot, a sniper, and soldiers occupying a ruined town.
This plot has been criticized online for being nonsensical. These critics say that there was no need for the message to be precariously delivered overland, as it was a common practice for messages to be carried by air in relative safety (and simply dropped from the sky if landing was too dangerous). And indeed, we do see at least two British planes in the film.
Is this really a gaping plot hole, or is there some plausible explanation (even if it isn’t given explicitly in the film) as to why the message couldn’t have been delivered by air?
I liked the film a lot but yeah I wondered exactly the same thing. It would seem quite easy to send a message by air. I guess I am willing to suspend disbelief on this because the film as a whole worked.
Exactly. But at least this particular plot hole was debunked by Tolkien himself (not in the books, but in his letters), and has moreover attracted zillions of fanwanked explanations of varying degrees of plausibility. Are there any similar debunkings/explanations for 1917’s apparent plot hole?
I’ve not seen the movie so don’t know the scene. I have however read a few books on how they communicated between the trenches and such. There are two books by Dispatch Riders, one called Adventures of a Dispatch Rider, the other Commando Dispatch Rider. I think the Commando Dispatch Rider he later worked on the line communications and talked about how hard it was to keep them up and running.
Both books talked about how hard it was to get good information from the front to the back and back to the front again. I can see there being no good way to get information from the front line, to a plane, and then to have that plane drop the needed information to the other lines.
In reading both books I don’t recall at any time them talking about having planes deliver messages. Both books can be downloaded for free so I’m sure that they could be searched to make sure. Having not see the film, I’m can’t say for sure, but it sounds plausible to me.
Maybe, but how many men is a plane worth? The message in question was intended to prevent the wholesale slaughter of an entire battalion, which I suppose could be up to a thousand soldiers.
I’ve not seen the movie, but is it possible they did send a message by air drop, but also sent messengers by foot to increase the odds of the message being delivered, and we’re only seeing the second part?
No, the commanding officer in the trench makes it very clear that the two soldiers are the only ones tasked with relaying the orders to the battalion. The soldiers ask about this point specifically. I suppose the commander could have been lying to them (and thereby to the audience), but to what end?
The soldiers in the trenches don’t have a direct line of sight to the battalion, which is several kilometres away, down a river and through some woods.
Are you unfamiliar with the concept of a MacGuffin? Did you also notice in Casablanca that the “letters of transit” weren’t used for exiting Morocco? (Apologies to anyone who has not seen that movie.)
No. This is the whole point of this thread—to find out whether sending the soldiers overland is just a contrivance for the film, or if there is a plausible real-life reason why it might actually have been necessary.
If you do a Google search, you can find interviews in which the director describes the mission given to his grandfather during the war that inspired this film. It’s vaguely, sort of, similar. A single man or two men are given a message that has to get there.
I have seen the movie, and as I recall it the number was 1600 men.
Sending a couple of lance corporals with a message to a battalion several km away is entirely the sort of thing that did happen all the time in WW1. Specifically, the director’s grandfather spent a couple of days wandering around no man’s land looking for three missing companies to deliver orders.
A McGuffin is not the same thing as 1917’s message. A McGuffin is something the movie characters are chasing, but it isn’t important to the plot what it is. In 1917, the delivery of the message, and by extension the message itself, IS the plot. Sending two guys on food for a disaster-averting critical mission when a plane could (maybe!) do it in practically no time, could be a plot hole, and is the question of the thread.
Despite the fact no such unquestionable letters of transit could exist in Nazi Germany, Ilsa and Laszlo did use the letters to leave. It wasn’t obvious because Louie was being forced by Rick, but in the context of the movie they were needed to leave. Rick was going to use them to get on the plane, but he gave his to Victor. Strassar was going to stop them despite the letters (as he would if it were real life. But the letters are not a McGuffin, despite what Fake News Wikipedia has to say, because they were needed and did get used.)
It’s a plot hole, but covering it would have really disrupted the story the director wanted to tell. You could use bad weather to ground the RAF but then you’d have to lose the dogfight and the crash, not to mention screwing with the overall atmosphere and light. You could have the general’s assumption of a trap rejected by a higher up with authority over the planes, but like everything in the film that would have to be contrived to be witnessed by the hero.
You really have to look at this as a soldier’s story. He doesn’t know 90% of what’s going on in the big picture and most of the remaining 10% makes no sense, especially after he has retold and embellished the story countless times by the time a future filmmaker hears it