1917 Film

[italwars]

You’re welcome ...but pleas don’t be jealous or despair your stance is very common 

[Arundel]

Must say this is a fun conversation, lads. I almost choked on my tea several times whilst reading the books comments. It's refreshing to see the love of history worn lightly.

[italwars]

Which brand of tea?

[Arundel]

Brand? Trader Joes. Kind? Irish Breakfast. 

[italwars]

You re luckier than me..I was in the office and my only tea bags left were “black peppermint tea” ..disgusting even if I’m not British and my tastes are rough

[Driscoles]

Please Stick to the topic!
Thank you.

[DeRuyter]

Please Stick to the topic!
Thank you.

Perhaps we should be asking whether the tea in the movie was historically accurate?


All in good fun Mr. Moderator sir! 

[Doug ex-em4]

Saw it today. Quite an enjoyable adventure yarn; explosions, unlikely escapes from deadly situations, briefly suffering from serious injury then galloping of like a racehorse - all that king of stuff. I didn’t go with the hope that it’d be a history lesson so no disappointment there. I thought the scene setting, atmosphere, background music were all good and I liked the much vaunted "single shot" technique. The town bit seemed largely irrelevant. Some nice cameos from the usual group of British character actors.

All-in-all, not a bad way to spend a couple of hours on a dark, wet January afternoon and worth the five quid entrance money.

It’s a film. Entertainment. Ephemera. That’s it.

Doug

[Maniac]

My wife and I saw it last night and both enjoyed it.  The single shots (essentially 3 shots for the whole film, 1 up to the blackout, 1 to the river, and 1 for everything after that) were amazing.  The amount of coordination and planning for that is incredible.  Oddly enough it made me think of Lawerence of Arabia.  It lacks that films sweeping scale panning around the desert, but the unbroken nature of the shots gave me a similar sense of scale.

It is of course implausible in places, it is a movie, but overall it tells a good story and captures the horror of the first war (such as one of the stumbles in No Man's land).  Having driven through many small English villages, and seeing all of the memorials for the two wars, it is shocking the scale of the wars.  I think the film captured that pretty well.

[Harry Faversham]

I can understand why they added a lot (relatively speaking) of coloured soldiers, but it did grate on me a bit...it's the historical nerd in me.

I can't understand it either, I counted at least 12 black soldiers in the film. It grated on me too, you'd be hard put to find one period photograph, showing a black man in a British infantry Battalion.*

*Memo to the saddo who posts one...
you've just proved my argument.

[Juan]

In my humble opinion, an stupid story in a boring movie. In the same line as "Dunkirk", I think.

[TWD]

I can't understand it either, I counted at least 12 black soldiers in the film. It grated on me too, you'd be hard put to find one period photograph, showing a black man in a British infantry Battalion.*

*Memo to the saddo who posts one...
you've just proved my argument.

https://www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/section/bhm-heroes/how-black-soldiers-helped-britain-in-first-world-war/

[Driscoles]

Now that this is clear with TWD ´s link ( thanks )  we focus on the movie discussion itself. Thank you.

[Captain Blood]

Gents, PLEASE let's keep this off race. Despite Driscoles' request earlier, there's been more - which I've removed.

It's a fact that hundreds of thousands of troops of different nationalities from across Britain's dominions and colonies fought in Flanders in the First World War, including many divisions and battalions of black and Asian troops. Whilst it would probably be unusual to find individual black or Indian soldiers serving in the ranks of UK county battalions, it's perfectly likely that this did happen from time to time. And in any case, it's a completely fictional movie set in a distinctly stylised depiction of a long distant conflict. Movies are an art-form, and many directors these days favour so-called colour-blind casting. You may or may not agree with it, but that's not a discussion for this wargames forum. See the forum rules.

Now, as Driscoles says, please let's focus on discussion of the movie.

[Sir_Theo]

The other war film it reminded me of most was Apocalypse Now, with a dash of Thin Red Line. An almost dreamlike trudge through various WW1 in the west tropes to capture a flavour of the war. The story makes no logical sense but it doesn't really need to. It attempts to capture a sense of the war over its span. So we get the horrors of trench warfare, the destroyed rural and urban landscapes. Surreal bits like the singing in the forest. Horrific bits like the bloated corpses in the river. And then it starts and ends with the guy sat under a tree (at the end probably likely to die of sepsis) surrounded by the beauty of nature.

As for issues of diversity, I'm not getting into that other than to say I was really pleased to see a Sikh soldier on screen in a film of this setting. Long overdue.

I felt the story lacked something because of the unfocused and aslightly contrived nature of the plot but as a piece of technical film making its frequently magnificent. The bit when they go 'over the top' and the camera lurches up with them was fantastic. If you are to go and see it definitely one to make a trip to the cinema for, for the spectacle (just like Dunkirk was)