Review: Sam Mendes' World War I drama '1917' is a technical triumph — and a half-successful experiment
Sometime after nightfall in "1917," a gravely virtuosic dispatch from the front lines of World War I, a British soldier, Lance Cpl. Schofield (George MacKay), makes his way through a darkened building amid the ruins of a bombed-out French village. There, in a shadowy room illuminated by overhead flares and rattled by distant explosions, he stumbles on a frightened young woman (Claire Duburcq) in hiding.
They communicate in gestures and whispers. She sees that he's wounded and tenderly touches his bloodied head; he winces in pain but gratefully accepts. There's a surreal, even ghostly feel to this encounter, a fleeting moment of consolation in a place suffused with death. For the audience, it's a delicate interlude in a dark, violent story; for Schofield, it offers respite but no escape from a hell on earth that has raged for three years and shows little sign of abating.
The movie's simple title and taut time frame - it unfolds
