1917—This Great War Is Not So Great
The multiple award-winning 1917 is inspired by “American Beauty” writer-director Sam Mendes’s great grandfather’s experience during World War I. Almost everything you’ve ever seen in a war film is here in 1917. There are several homages to the classic Stanley Kubrick film, “Paths of Glory” (1957), including the technique of tracking a long take, seemingly a continuous single-shot with no cuts, of the brutal trench warfare that cost 9-12 million soldiers’ lives. (The calculus for civilian deaths would double the total.) It is as if we’re in...