Like Dunkirk and Jarhead before it, Sam Mendes’s epic eschews bloodshed and sabre-rattling by focusing on soldiers who don’t want to kill
War movies used to celebrate military leaders (George C Scott’s Patton, Lawrence of Arabia) or courageous crack squads (The Dambusters, The Dirty Dozen) but today’s auteurs are less turned on by patriotism and violence, and so are their audiences. Just look at how the battle epic Midway, er, bombed last month. The workaround seems to be a new kind of war story centred on soldiers who really don’t want to kill anyone. You could call it a “pacifist war movie”.
Sam Mendes’s latest film, 1917, is a classic example. In real time, it follows two
British soldiers in
France on a dangerous mission to warn another battalion they are about to walk into a German trap. These men want to stop the killing rather than add to it. Even when one of them encounters a wounded German soldier, his first instinct is to get him a drink of water.