Saw
1917 by Sam Mendes. I'll go look at what people thought of it here. I liked it quite a bit. Like all films done with that particular technical conceit or
parti-pris, it suffers a bit from the "theme park ride" effect though I'd say that out of that genera it's one example where the navel gazing by the performance of the camera is less pronounced. The first half or third of the film feels a bit artificial & unrealistic at times with how the writing tries to pack marquee scenes and exciting story beats... With the aforementioned theme park ride effect on top of it, we're somewhat closer to
Raiders of the Lost Ark than from the serious
in memoriam piece of art the movie sets out to be. (On a tangent : I thought of Peter Weir's
Gallipoli, which shares a superficial similarity story wise. Much recommended viewing).
The second half is really strong however, the movie going from one radically different and beautiful location to another, streamlining the pathos down to the core and letting the visuals do the talking (shades of
Come & See even, though fugitive ones, which is very high praise) and hitting all that WW1 imagery you would expect, evocative without being crass but certainly worth seeing on a big screen with big sound.
In short : WW1's
Saving Private Ryan without the preachy trappings.
Some D-grade British celeb / wank dad got all
at a Sikh soldier having a minor talking role (and maybe at the handful of black extras serving in the British army ?) being "forced diversity". I'm not a British army expert and maybe it's
technically correct that Sikhs and other colonial subjects served in colonial regiments only, never peppered through the regular, native metropolitan troops (AFAIK that's mostly how France did this). But FUUUUCCKK OOOOFFFFFFF, it's a film paying homage to those who had to serve then and colonial subjects certainly took enough share of that burden to excuse the writers bending ever so slightly history for dramatic effect.
Edit : Bebpo impressions are pretty close to mine and yeah I also thought the score use was very good.
