Spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned.
I just came back from the theater after watching the movie 1917, and to be honest I’m unsure where to start. My first thoughts were some of the same that crowd my head after watching any realistic war film. War is terrible, and the biggest tragedy of human nature is it seems to make war inevitable. What those two main characters went through, what the camera, unflinching, never left as they made their way to deliver a message and stop an ill-fated assault before it began. It was some incredible storytelling. The choice to make it a chained sequence of long takes appearing as one uninterrupted scene in my mind gave the film a closeness and a connection.
One of those I saw the film with wondered what Blake was thinking trying to help the downed German pilot, that they should have shot the pilot immediately. It would have both put the pilot out of his misery and have kept them from harm. I can’t argue that logic. Unquestionably it’s what should have been done. And yet … Blake chose to help. And it got him killed. A naive thing to do. He didn’t see the knife. He had reason to think the man helpless. Perhaps in that flash decision he didn’t see an enemy combatant, just someone about to burn to death in a downed aircraft. Who can say?
M. Weald
M. Weald 