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Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather do the entire podcast in one take, as they overthink Sam Mendes’s 1917.
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Episode 604: The War is the Enemy
On the Overthinking It Podcast, we tackle awards contender “1917,” a World War I movie directed by Sam Mendes.
13 Comments on “Episode 604: The War is the Enemy”
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“Amateurs study tactics. Professionals study logistics.”
I think that the irony of Captain Cumberbatch’s statement on how the war ends has a lot to do with why, ostensibly, soldiers are sent off to fight in conflicts like World War 1. As acts of defense.
But there is a baby in a burning city who needs milk. And all the farmers are gone and most of the cows are dead and all around are enemy troops. So the war has defended nothing.
It’s difficult to be pro-war or anti-war in one’s actions, regardless of thoughts, when one is also actively being a soldier. I think it’s important to note the nearly first-person intimacy of this film in relationship to one of its first credits: an honorarium to one of the director’s older family members, “who told us the stories.”
I was actually really engaged with this film in a way that I’m often not for Academy Award fodder because I recognized it as having the soul of an old boys’ adventure novel. Maybe a Jack London-type. It was incidental in ways that I found really charming.
By the way, some classic afterlife imagery after Schofield gets shot and passes out. Not only all of the fire, but also the family life that he’s equal parts tempted by and tormented with (a call back to his earlier admission that he hated going home and why) and his escape via what might as well have been literally called the river Styx.
There was another film which came out in 2019 and which echoes Apocalypse Now: Ad Astra. Obviously these were two very different approaches but I think it’s interesting that you can now have a Heart of Darkness-through-time movie viewing party. I watched both of these recently and then played Metro Exodus (another 2019 release) which is also an episodic journey through inhospitable lands and also anti-war. I think I’m done with the apparent infinity of Martin Sheens on boats for a while.
I appreciate the mention of hurt acting. It wasn’t something that I really thought about until I listened to the James Bonding podcast and they brought it up years ago. I remember being impressed with Daisy Ridley in Force Awakens because of this. I mean, how do you act out pain opposite an invisible Force? Speaking of, my pick for worst hurt acting from a famous actor: Charlton Heston.
Also, CGI rats? It’s getting easier and easier to pull off this whole one-shot thing, isn’t it? I’m glad that it was put to good use here, though. I’ve never been a fan of Gravity, which I got trapped into watching because of a cinema class. Feel free to make any puns you’d like based on that.
I’m glad you brought up Gravity, which I found very similar to 1917. They are both stories about people traveling through hostile territory, bouncing from near-death experience to near-death experience. They’re both epic in scope but also very personal and emotional. They even both feature a companion who dies tragically, leaving the protagonist to finish the journey alone. But most notably, they’re also showoffy technical feats and that’s a big part of the marketing and hype.
I’m interested to know why you liked 1917 but not Gravity. Personally I loved them both, both on the level of storytelling and on the level of whiz-bang cinema.
Forgive me if my reply is lacking in detail but I saw Gravity about three (maybe four?) years ago now and since I wasn’t a fan it didn’t stick out in my memory.
What I do remember is the symbolism feeling cheap and on-the-nose, the characters being flat and uninteresting with no sense of being grounded in the technical realities of their jobs or their world, the one-take gimmick being basically useless in both technical achievement (since the entire thing was shot against a greenscreen and had very little dialogue anyways) and storytelling capacity (I mean, if you shoot Sandra Bullock for a long time or a short time, up close or from far away, it doesn’t add much when she’s only surrounded by space) and the situation feeling pointless since I wasn’t concerned with the lead character and her survival was the only stake in the game.
What I do remember liking are Ghost Clooney and the one time that the camera looked like it was in first-person.
Two movie-agnostic comments…
First, a couple of the discussions about weapons and poetry bring up the clear influence that World War II (especially the European Theater) had on Hollywood, to the point that it strongly influences anything that even smells like a war movie. Probably related to the idea that you can’t really make an anti-war movie is that it’s no longer easy to make a war movie without fighting Nazi stand-ins.
And it’s probably less relevant, but the comment made about the protagonist effectively “winning” reminds me that there are a few post-WWI, pre-WWII novels that look a lot like prototype superhero stories, wherein the big climax is actually an anti-climax. The protagonist in these decides to use his abilities to stop the war by making a bee-line to Berlin to assassinate the Kaiser, only to discover that Armistice has been declared, just before they can act. It’s an odd trope.
Do you have any examples of that literature? That sounds bizarre and I’m always interested in finding out about tropes/genres that dead-ended somewhere in history.
It’s worth pointing out that it’s not the point of any of the books I’ve found, just an element of the story’s climax. The funny thing, when you talk about a dead-end, is that the two that come immediately to mind look like what DC Comics could have been doing, if it had been founded decades earlier.
The easiest to find is probably Philip Wylie’s “Gladiator” (1930), a clear uncredited inspiration for Superman. The protagonist (who grows up in a small Kansas town with super-strength) actually travels to France to enlist in the war in 1915 or so. After a friend is killed, he starts tearing up the German lines when he finds out he’s too late and the war is over.
Harder to track down and much weirder (but surprisingly relevant to current issues) is “Number 87” (1922), by Eden Phillpotts as “Harrington Hext,” which is the weird, sci-fi Batman to Wylie’s Superman. There, the anti-hero protagonist (even named Bruce!) discovered a radioactive energy source that he uses to create a bat-shaped rocket, but uses it to go on a campaign of assassinating anti-science/anti-democratic demagogues instead of fighting crime. He suddenly realizes there’s a war going on, too, but delays his trip after getting sick and gets news of the Armistice while he convalesces at home.
I feel like I’ve read a couple of others (they may have been short stories in pulp magazines), but can’t recall which they would’ve been. But you’re right, we were VERY close to getting superheroes in the 1920s (and earlier), but the writers always had some reason to make them ineffective and either depressed (like these two) or desperate enough for a normal life to just stop their adventures (like “Gladiator” inspiration, “The Night Wind,” who uses his powers to clear his name and then settles down to be a banker for the rest of the series).
This stuff is fascinating. Similarly, although I always associated Tarzan with the 18th century, he actually debuted in 1912 and there’s at least one original Burroughs novel where he gets involved in WWI. I’ve always meant to read it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarzan_the_Untamed
Definitely, and I keep meaning to get into the Tarzan books. The John Carter books (also by Burroughs) are surprisingly good and Tarzan is much more influential in culture.
Thanks. The only one of these I’d heard of before was Gladiator. I’ll have to look into the rest.
On the subject of how Hollywood inevitably sees WWI through the lens of WWII, the African Queen book, from the 30s, has an ending where the heroes try to torpedo the German gunship, get captured, and the German captain just delivers them back to the British under a flag of truce. The movie from the 50s has the same German captain set to execute them. They changed the ending pretty blatantly to make the Germans more villainous.
The casting choices (following 2 actors I didn’t recognize as they keep running into big actors that I did recognize) kind of gave me a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern effect, like these big actors are the characters we would normally be following in this big WWI epic that doesn’t actually exist; instead we’re strictly following who would have been 2 small background charactersand how their one mission affected the bigger picture.
That’s really interesting! Yeah, there’s a feeling like despite all the heroics, these guys are just small cogs in a machine. They get 30 seconds in the command bunker, that’s it.
I haven’t listened to the podcast yet. I never look forward to anything dealing with war (especially something like WW1). Mainly because if the media doesn’t encourage turning the the face of every president, prime minister, monarch, industrialist responsible for this carnage – into a pulpy carnage, I just get really upset.