This was one of the biggest releases of last year so it’s a given that we would get around to watching it eventually. I’m not a big fan of director Sam Mendes however and this film didn’t improve my opinion of him either. While this film is quite beautiful on a technical level, and the much vaunted single-take of the soldiers’ journey is a big reason for that, I feel that this film is overall underwhelming, being unable to live up to the promise of what it is trying to accomplish.

Tom Blake and his friend William Schofield are soldiers who are tapped by a general to carry a high priority message to another regiment. The unit has been ordered to launch an attack the next morning in the belief that the Germans are retreating but aerial reconnaissance has revealed that it is a trap and that the Germans are merely withdrawing to another pre-prepared line of defense. As the telegraph lines have been cut, someone must manually convey the orders to halt the attack and Blake has been chosen as his brother serves in the other regiment. As the two make their through their own lines onto no man’s land, they realize that the Germans have indeed withdrawn and marvel at the extensive size of the German’s abandoned underground bunkers. However Schofield is caught in a booby trap and has to be rescued by Blake. When they make it back to the surface, they make it to an abandoned farmhouse and witness a dogfight between German and British fighter aircraft and they have much further left to go.

As I noted, on a technical level this film is everything you could have hoped for in a big budget film about the First World War. There is an amazing wealth of detail in every shot and simply having the two soldiers walk and walk through their own lines conveys a sense of scale for how long those trenches were and how massive the front line was. The single shot framing of their journey heightens the sense of actually being there and being able to freely see what is happening all around them. This technique lends the film something of the feeling of a documentary as the camera provides a more objective perspective. Unfortunate, while the cinematography feels like a documentary, the plot events and encounters they have do not. The most egregious example is when the crashing German plane almost lands on top of them in the kind of cinematic flair that you always see in Hollywood action movies. The rest of the film is similarly packed with what can only be called war film clichés: jumping into a river and being carried along by the current until reaching a waterfall, meeting a pitiful French young woman who has to care for a baby, realizing that the commanding officer who has been ordered to stand down is an aggressive warmonger and so on. The film is torn between being a realistic depiction of war and an action movie full of the usual thrills and spills.

There are even places where the insistence of using a continuous shot harms the film. One pivotal scene involves grievous loss but just as we are grappling with the tragedy, suddenly the camera pans around to show a unit of British soldiers where none were seen previously. It ruins the moment and strains credibility. At every turn, the film sacrifices realism for the sake of drama. Friendly units do not suddenly show up in the middle of no man’s land. Units do not assemble in the middle of potentially hostile territory without posting guards. Offensives do not consist of infantry blinding charging forwards without being supported by artillery and aerial units. How many times do we need to see the enemy takes shots at our hero and miss? I think it matters that while this was partially based on true events, the primary sources consist of recollections of individual veterans and hence provide a very poor big picture view of what happened.

This is the kind of war film that aspires to stand on par with the likes of Saving Private Ryan and Dunkirk, but in fact it comes nowhere close. It has major problems with pacing and plausibility that prevent us from truly empathizing with the main characters. It is true that the First World War is underserved in the canon of war films but this film, while better than nothing, is not a worthy contender and I suspect that Mendes has spent too much time making standard action movies to easily break free of those bad habits.