ruth is stranger than fiction, as it has famously been said. That certainly holds when it comes to the plot of director Sam Mendes’s new WWI epic, 1917, which just won Best Motion Picture – Drama at the Golden Globes and gets its wide release on Friday. (Mendes also cowrote the script alongside Penny Dreadful staff scribe Krysty Wilson-Cairns.) To be clear, there are no aliens or overlapping universes to contend with across the film’s 117 minutes, just the daunting, terrifying absurdity of war.
The film opens with a claustrophia-inducing trek through the ill-kept British trenches that introduces Mendes unique filming style, which feels like it was filmed via one continuous shot. Then, our two heroes receive their orders. It’s April 6, 1917—coincidentally the day the U.S. formally entered the war—in northern France when Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman, best known as Tommen Baratheon on the HBO juggernaut Game of Thrones) and Lance Corporal Schofield (George McKay) are called into their superior’s bunker. The troops at the front line are about to walk into an ambush, they’re told by a fictional General Erinmore (Colin Firth).
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