1917

1917 est une vitrine sur les capacités techniques et compétences cinématographiques pour lesquelles il mérite tous les Oscars reçus, mais à part ça, son thème suffit tout au plus à faire l’objet d’une attraction dans le parc d’attractions d’Universal Studios. La scène dans laquelle un soldat trouve refuge chez une belle Française était déjà un cliché éculé dans les années 1960, alors aujourd'hui… (11/12/2021)

Une exposition cinématographique colorée avec un décor époustouflant, un rythme palpitant et des détails cinématographiques (j'ai été très satisfait de l'entrée en scène de Mark Strong). Le film fonctionne bien dans sa première partie. Dans la deuxième, des choses moins compréhensibles commencent à se produire, et tout cela devient simplement une étape forcée pour clôturer l’histoire. Rien n'y est surprenant en termes d'intrigue et cela ne fait que confirmer l'excès de simplicité et de transparence du sujet, dont le contenu repose sur des symboles clichés de la pensée (sacrifice pour un objectif supérieur, lait (non bouilli ??) pour un enfant). On est loin de la philosophie prétendument affichée. Mais les visuels étaient vraiment géniaux. Même hors de sa zone de confort, Thomas Newman fait plaisir. Le voir ailleurs qu’au cinéma est un délit. Tout comme dans Gravity auparavant. (09/03/2020)

1917 will be talked about as the war film that was shot in one take. Which it isn't, but we all know that, and I don't feel like anyone should mind. However, it would be a big mistake to just look at it as a technically perfect film where Sam Mendes and Roger Deakins fool around with the camera. The latter is, of course, amazing; 1917 looks like a computer game, with the camera managing to pan around the characters during dialogue, crawling along with them across the battlefield with cameraman looking for the craziest but still functional angles from which to capture everything. But the main star here is still Mendes as the narrator, who manages to get under the skin of both the characters and the audience in that "one shot". Initially, cold and distant, and like one of the soldiers, he treats the whole mission as just an order to be carried out, hoping to survive. Gradually, however, he begins to acknowledge the importance of the mission and very powerful and emotional scenes subtly, but eventually very intensely, surface. And for example the whole passage in the burning village or the very end are incredibly powerful moments. The film doesn't just look great. It's great throughout. (18/02/2020)

The cinematography was worked out to a monomaniacal degree of detail (all those trenches strewn with corpses, barbed wire and razed, burning cities), the mise-en-scene is composed masterfully and the special effects are fantastic but don’t seek to draw attention to themselves, nor are they in the audience’s face. In short, I’ve never before seen such production values in any film whose subject is World War I. And then there’s Mendes’s sheer virtuosity, captivating camera equilibristics, and (from the meeting with the young French woman) the requisite rush of emotions. I consider it a sad error in judgment on the part of the Academy that it preferred the shallow Parasite over this masterpiece. (21/03/2020)

I think that Sam Mendes was aiming for the Oscar here, I don’t know why there aren’t more films about the First World War, but it’s probably because most of the time the soldiers were battling boredom in the trenches rather thanfighting for territory on the ground. Sam Mendes, however, went a bit too far here, replacing filmmaking with an attempt at absolute realism. The illusion that everything is a single long shot makes the scenes look remarkably surreal. It all starts with the crash of a German plane into a dilapidated barn, continues with ruins of the town illuminated by flares and ends directly in the trenches, a few seconds before running into the turmoil ofbattle. I was bating my breath, fascinated by the fabricated scenes, and enjoyed one of the best war films made in the last few years. The trio of good old British actors (Firth, Cumberbatch, Strong) is the icing on the cake, which will draw you into the depicted events of the war and remind you that it is “only” a film. (17/02/2020)