OK chaps. This is what we need. We inhabit a country that’s becoming increasingly obsessed with the idea that fundamentally we won two world wars single handed. Vanquished the monstrous Hun, saved a lot of fetching French women and basically acted with a degree of heroism and British sang-froid which marks us apart as clinically superior to our European neighbours. We don’t want anything too meaty, let’s have some straight-off emotional plot points, photos of loved ones back in Blighty, brother saving brother, a good death scene, (which is also a narrative twist, catchy?),some communal male singing, because that’s what they all did, and plenty of doomed bonhomie. And for fuck’s sake, let’s not make it too deathly serious. Let’s have lots of swearing and lets reel in the youts by giving it a real video game aesthetic. You know, like you’re there living this and the Hun is coming after you and it’s kill or be killed, and you’ve got a fixed target which gives you a big (emotional) pay-off. Let’s package it up with a shedload of extras and some nifty explosions and maybe just maybe we can do it like in one take?
You’re an intern in the production company at an early planning meeting (concept; target audience; reference) with the esteemed Cambridge graduate director. After keeping quiet for a long time you summon up some courage and say - ‘Has anyone seen Son of Saul?’ Some people in the room nod approvingly, others look slightly confuesed. Then you add: ‘Let’s make the Apocalypse Now of the first world war’. The team look at you and say: this chap or chapess knows her shit. What you don’t say is: ‘Do you realise that this is just going to reinforce national stereotypes and play up to the increasingly ultra-right agenda of modern British politics?’ (You definitely wouldn’t mention the B word.) Or, let’s hypothesise that if you did say that, you would have been quietly lead away to the room reserved for people with a modicum of political awareness and farmed out to Loach or someone of their ilk.
1917 is a technically well-executed movie which uses an off-the-peg Blake Snyder template. Sadly it’s an exemplar of where we are now, a culture that cooks up effective but vapid, bellicose content targeted at the world’s conservative heartlands. No idea what a ‘European’ watching this film would make of it; in particular the quite absurd necessity to turn the German pilot into the villain of the piece, a scene that could have been scripted by a Mail-Murdoch hack. Personally I can’t say I found it depressing or moving or challenging. It’s blandness and predictability washed over me like a stolen vote that you’ve got no option but to learn to live with.
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