At the height of the First World War, two young British soldiers must cross enemy territory and deliver a message that will stop a deadly attack on hundreds of soldiers.
The Sam Mendes’ 1917 has been winning rave reviews from both critics and audiences for it’s dazzling technical expertise and ultra-graphic depictions of the horrors of the First World War. When it comes to showing combat from the point of view of the front-line soldier, it does indeed capture the experience of mud, blood and sudden death as convincingly as any war movie since Saving Private Ryan, from which this film is clearly derived. But for a movie that is touted as being as realistic as all get-out, the details and premise of 1917 manage to utterly ignore the simplest realities of modern warfare and basic common sense.
The story is about two British lance corporals who are given what we are to understand is a very dangerous, probably fatal mission: to carry orders to a Colonel, ordering the latter to call off his regiment’s attack on the Germans, because the High Command has learned that the German position is too strong to be taken, and the attack will be a massacre (also, and purely by coincidence, the brother of one of the couriers is serving in the doomed regiment.) The Germans have withdrawn to new positions, and the Colonel believes this indicates that they are ready to break if attacked, so he has advanced into the zone the Germans have evacuated, and is now isolated from the remainder of the British Army. This attack is planned for dawn the following day, but the orders cannot given by field telephone, because the Germans have cut the telephone wires. They will only need to travel nine miles, through an area that the Germans have evacuated, but one of the corporals is sure they will need to start right away, although they must have more than 12 hours to complete the mission.
There are so many things wrong with this that it is difficult to know where to start. First of all, if the Germans have indeed pulled out, why does everyone, from the general down, act as if the 2 corporals are on a suicide mission? Why did the Germans cut the telephone wire after they abandoned their old lines, and for that matter how, if their soldiers were gone? Why can’t the British just repair the broken telephone line? Surely that would be faster and easier than sending couriers, who will probably be killed and thus fail to deliver the orders. Since the general knows exactly where and when the regiment will be attacking, we must assume he received this information from the Colonel. So, if the Colonel (a waste of the talented Benedict Cumberbatch) is attacking without authorization, (more on this momentarily), as is implied, why wasn’t he ordered to cancel his attack when he told the general about it in the first place?
The filmmakers clearly believe that consistency is for petty minds, and they cannot be bothered with anything so trivial. Again, even though almost the first thing we are told is that the enemy has pulled out, the couriers somehow keep finding Germans to shoot at them. At one point, one of the corporals encounters a British truck convoy headed toward his destination. So why couldn’t the general send the messengers in a car, or give them to a motorcycle courier? It is hard to imagine a reason, and the writers do not even try.
But these are just a few of the minor holes in the contrived script. Even more serious is the way the screenwriters and director (the latter bears most of the blame, since he approved this brainless script,) blithely display their complete ignorance of the scale and operations of armies in the Twentieth Century in general, and the First world War in particular, in the film’s premise.
The British regiment in question, we are told, consists of 2 battalions of 1600 men each. We supposed to believe that the Colonel thinks he can defeat a German army which had somewhat more than 4 million men. Unless the Colonel was actively psychotic, he would understand that his regiment could not accomplish by itself, even if I could break through the German lines (which it could not.)
This bring us to another sore point: the chain of command. Colonel was (and is) not a particularly high rank in an army of millions, and he is not any sort of free agent. At a minimum, over him would be the Brigadier General commanding his brigade, a Major General in charge of the division, a Field Army commander, (a Lieutenant General or higher) and the Commander in Chief (or Chief of the General Staff,) a full General or Field Marshal Without authorization from above, no Colonel still in possession of even a handful of his marbles would think about attacking the Germans with his lone regiment, and if he was crazy enough to try it, he would be relieved of command and committed to an asylum.
Finally, even the details, which we are told are so very realistic, are falsified for cinematic effect. The climactic battle sequence (which was supposed to happen at dawn, but clearly is starting much later) as shown completely loses touch with reality. The Germans start shelling the British trenches the moment the attack starts, as if they had the schedule. The hero runs across the deadly bombardment, with soldiers dropping everywhere around him, while he, quite unbelievably, remains untouched. We supposed to be watching a Company attack, roughly 100 men (attacking a Company at a time is even more ludicrous than idea of the one-regiment offensive,) but we see hundreds of extras leaping up out of the trenches to be slaughtered, a battalion, at least. This of course, is because a company size attack would look puny and unimpressive, so forget about consistency. And although we witness what appears to be the destruction of the entire attacking force, it seems that when they return (and seems to happens in the blink an eye, after the Colonel reads the order,) there are a fair number of wounded men being brought back, but most of them seem to be unhurt. Yet, we saw them drop like flies when they went over the top just a few minutes before.
While 1917 is acclaimed for showing the truth about World War One, all it truly shows is how little respect director Sam Mendes has for the facts, and how easy it is for a fraud like this film to pass itself off as history.
