I don’t know why U-571 get such an unjust IMO heap of scorn. It never said it was THE story of capturing an Enigma machine. It’s just a war movie. I mean, if you’re going to fault accuracy, let’s hear your posts about The Battle of the Bulge. It actually pretended to be accurate. Or The Great Escape. Or Imitation Game. Or Enigma.
For me, the gaping hole in 1917 was the timeline.
It’s all supposed to play like one unbroken shot, which means it has to transpire in real time – one minute in the movie’s reality equals one minute in the viewer’s reality. Yet the action starts well before dusk and wraps up shortly after dawn. It’s April, so that’s probably 14 hours of “movie reality time” elapsing in less than two hours of viewer reality.
Part of this gap can be explained by …
… the surviving corporal being knocked unconscious at one point, after it’s already dark. But he’d have to be unconscious for 12 hours, and it’s still dark when he wakes up.
So while I enjoyed the movie, the weirdness of time somehow flowing much faster than reality would dictate – in a movie shot to be a hyper-realistic single shot – bothered me.
Artillery will easily cut telephone wire, especially newly laid wire that’s just sitting on top of the ground and not even buried. Shelling to cut off communications (and otherwise disrupt rear areas) was really common in general, and would be a deliberate part of trying to set an ambush. For the pedantic, it’s ‘cut’ in the sense of ‘cut off contact’, not in the sense of ‘cut with a blade’.
Yeah, until fairly late in 1918, the results of a HUGE offensive like Arras, Cambrai or the 3rd Battle of Ypres/Passchendaele was an advance of five miles or less. It’s unlikely that a single battalion would be attacking on its own, unsupported.
I haven’t seen the movie, but the only possible situation I can see is if maybe the h-hour for a large attack was changed, but the other battalion didn’t get the message and was set to attack earlier, before the artillery barrage or something like that.
I thought of that also while watching it but came to the conclusion that the unbroken shot was more of an artistic storytelling choice made by the director rather than a literal unfolding of events. At the end of the movie Sam Mendes thanks his grandfather for providing “all the stories” and I take the movie as a visual interpretation of various stories verbally told to him by his grandfather. Embellishments, distorted memories, confused facts and all.
As a storyteller might string together a series of events that happened over a course of days with “and then this happened, and then this happened, and then we went over here, etc.” in a long run-on story that takes an hour or so the literal time it took to tell the story doesn’t match the literal time the events actually took.
Says who? It sounds like this is a rule that you invented for the film in advance of seeing it; it’s not the film’s fault if it didn’t cleave to your preconceived notion of how the timeline was to be structured.
I saw the film without having read anything about it in advance, and as such I wasn’t bothered by the timeline. The lack of cuts became apparent to me after watching the first ten minutes or so, but I didn’t leap to the conclusion that there were never going to be any cuts in the film. When I observed that they finally did make a time cut, I didn’t interpret it as a cinematographic error.
It has nothing to do with my preconceived notion and everything to do with how the film plays out. It feels like real time. We’re right there with the two corporals as they talk to the general, move through the trench, go over the top and make their way through no-man’s land, and since there are no cuts it feels like it’s happening in real time. It’s exhilarating. It was only toward the end when I started to wonder, wait, how is it light already? It only got dark a half hour ago.
I also kind of rolled my eyes at the contrivance of …
… the surviving corporal nearly drowning in the river before it just happens to deposit him at the exact location where the brigade he needs to reach is mustering in advance of the attack.
Neither of things came close to ruining the movie for me. I understand that making a watchable movie for mass audiences requires some directorial license. (For one thing, no one would watch it if were actually long enough to recreate the mission in real time.) But it’s so hyper-real feeling these discrepancies really stand out, at least to me.
As for U-571, I like to think of that as having been inspired by Gallery’s capture of U-505, supposedly the last time a USN captain gave the, “Away all boarders,” command . His intent was to capture an Enigma, but I think he just wanted to say it.
(Not giving in to my U-505 anecdote.)
Well, that’s basically how it felt to the soldier; it was dark and now it’s light out.
Right. and 1917 is getting good reviews too. People (who weren’t there 100 years ago) are saying that it is a good depiction of what it might have felt like, and the invented plot doesn’t do any more damage than the mountains in Salzberg did to The Sound of Music or the date errors do to Sherlock Holmes. The film is not a documentary, and 1917 is far enough in the past that they can get away with it.
The one plot hole that took me out of this otherwise fine movie was the damn waterfall!
Where in northern France is a waterfall preceded by class three rapids? Only in the fevered mind of the screenplay writer. Corporal Schofield jumped into a raging river to escape a German shooting worse than a stormtrooper. A lazy plot device.
It’s the same raging river canyon as the Illinois one in The Fugitive. 
Retreating tactically, as the Germans were, is risky and could result in major losses or a route. Shelling always invites retaliation and increased surveillance. Being shelled during a retreat would be especially dangerous. So no I don’t buy that at all.
Besides it would be very difficult to target communications specifically, at least without excellent intelligence on the enemy. Of course they could disrupt communications with some random artillery hits and that damage would be easy to repair.
Besides would anyone believe the German suddenly decided to leave their trench system and go home? The two soldiers themselves make the point in conversation. The situation is clear to everyone, the Germans are shortening their line, the Allies find out too late about this plan and would be trying to press for an advantage. There is no trap involved.
I also have trouble picturing a battalion commander ignoring divisional orders, although in that case he could always claim the orders arrived too late.
I enjoyed every second of this movie. I don’t think I’ve ever had an experience like that in the cinema before because it grips you from the start and never relents. And it was stunningly beautiful at times.
I would assume that they may have tried more than one method of sending the message but why would they tell the runners that? They make them believe they are the only hope and so the audience believe it too because the only perspective shown is the perspective of the runners.
Having just seen, and thoroughly enjoyed it, with the preceding discussion in mind, I don’t think that the premise is a plot hole.
The Devons have advanced, as they were ordered to do, against a seemingly panicked and retreating enemy. They’ve created a temporary trench line to consolidate and are intending to attack the Germans who, unsaid but implied, have also paused and bashed out a comparable quick and temporary halt line. That over-riding order to keep the Germans destabilised and moving was what General Colin Firth had to countermand. His pushy and ambitious careerist colonels got to high rank because, unlike the lower ranked officers we see, they know when to listen to the ever-shifting flow of instructions, and when to Act and apologise afterwards, having done the Right Thing.
In this context, the way their lines of communication were severed, and the need for messengers to hand-deliver explicit orders that reverse the over-riding instructions is entirely plausible, and largely explained through specific things said in the script. A plane dropping messages, or artillery shells firing messages close enough but not at a poorly located force are not going to do it, and the colonel could choose to deny they were ever received in time, or at all.
yes that was dumb to me too. They did not need to add the waterfall. Maybe it was a tribute to Butch Cassidy & Sundance Kid? (no waterfall but they did jump into the river)
The real plot holes would be that the British High command would give a rats ass about 1600 men or even 16000 men.
Douglas Haig kept sending in waves of men "over the top’ to gain a couple of years. His nickname was “Butcher Haig” for the two million British casualties the happened under his disastrous command.
Mind you I still want to watch the film.
Where and when was the British High Command shown in the film? The order came from the general played by Colin Firth.
Right, besides possibly just some German forces remaining the contested area. Wire got cut all the time. There’s nothing remotely far fetched about an advance unit losing wire contact with forces to the rear.
As to aerial message dropping that was possible and was done. However also as other posts pointed out there were various reasons it might not be. One was organizational, not necessarily the raw attitude ‘planes are new, I want nothing to do with them’ or ‘planes are more valuable than men’, but just the way things were organized arguably partly reflecting one or both ideas. Even in WWII formations as small as battalions or even parent regiment of this forward battalion would not usually directly interface with air units. That was usually done at higher levels like division, corps or army. The US Marine Corps in late WWII and then more celebrated in the Korean War was unusual up to mid 20th century that a unit as small as a battalion might have attached air controllers. Also in the drive across France after the breakout from the Normandy beachhead in 1944 there was innovative US and British cooperation between relatively small ground units and air support. But it was notable because still pretty unusual. You wouldn’t naturally assume a regimental command post missing one of its battalions to have n air service unit on ‘speed dial’ in WWII, let alone WWI. Artillery units more closely interfaced with air units at a lower level, or even had their own spotter planes in some cases, in the WW’s.
Also as was suggested for the general situation (I haven’t see the movie either) the exact location of the isolated forward unit might not be known clearly enough to give airmen easy instructions to find it. And air and ground units were notoriously bad at identifying one another in both WW’s. This was easier in later phases of WWII where the Allies had almost total air supremacy, but on the Western Front in 1917 an airplane could easily be hostile and risky for a ground force to deliberately attract it. And how about if the airmen dropped the message on a German unit they saw but didn’t correctly identify?
Speaking of possible real events related to this plot synopsis, the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in France in 1917 was one, though on a much bigger scale and not a tactical trap, but rather just to hold the Western Front with fewer men, a strategic withdrawal. Another somewhat related real episode was the US 77th Division’s ‘Lost Battalion’ in the Meuse Argonne offensive in September-October 1918. That was a phase when the front was becoming more fluid than in 1917 but anyway a group of US companies (from several different battalions actually) advanced into ground the Germans had mainly abandoned but then became trapped there.