gave this a whirl after the golden globe wins for director and best picture, not to validate the hfpa but seemed as good a reason as any for a movie i was pretty indifferent about.
apart from the undeniably impressive technical bravado, which loses its narrative efficacy about a half hour in anyway, this is straight mierda. the writing and thomas newman's score are laughably bad. more often than not, it plays like cut scenes from call of duty: paths of glory. that sam mendes won an award for directing (for continuing his streak of bargain bin chris nolan look-what-i-can-do shenanigans) over scorsese, tarantino, and bong is a travesty, especially since the three of them turned in some of their best work this year. but then again, no one gives a shit.
as far as deakins goes, this is fairly middling outside of the orchestration of the long takes. i wish he'd stop wasting his time with mendes.
it's a pretty bad movie. i have a feeling it'll win best picture at the oscars.
I haven't seen this yet, but your write-up reminds me of how I felt about Dunkirk. I look forward to missing this.
And I'm hoping ...Hollywood wins Best Picture just so I can wear my hair shirt well into Spring. :laughing:
The one shot thing is a neat trick, but that's all it is. It weirdly has the opposite affect of what I think the intent is. I always felt the artifice of it all, always felt at arm's length from the characters, and it also sucked a lot of the tension out of the thing. It did feel like a long cutscene a lot of the time. Didn't help that the writing was pretty weak and yeah the score was corny and distracting af.
Don't let samsong get you down. The hype is real. This is a GREAT movie.
I feel like if you go in with a skeptical POV and turn your nose up at the one-shot gimmick, this has a real chance of failing for you. But for me it was so purely experiential. The one-shot trick definitely increased my immersion and had the effect of removing artifice. Somewhere in the middle, I had the sincere thought that all other filmmakers are cowards for not doing this.
There were times I just wanted to stand up and yell "HOW?" at the screen. There are many, many shots that seem literally impossible. I do not understand how these images were photographed. I can't tell if the camera is a steadicam or a drone, but I can tell you that either would be equally impressive, based on what is put on film. Equally impressive is what the actors are able to accomplish in some very, very long takes.
Wilber - This is vastly superior to Dunkirk. It's like Dunkirk + The Revenant. More of an adventure movie than a war movie.
The one critique I can agree with is that the score can be a bit much. On a few occasions, the music swells based on the magnificence of what you're seeing on screen rather than character perspective. Weirdly goes against the film's whole approach.
Minor spoils?
The movie does feel like one single shot, but it is obviously not. There are 2 or 3 spots where the screen is entirely black. In total, probably a dozen points where they could have hidden a cut. And I'm sure there are more, perhaps assisted by CGI, when the camera swoops behind an object etc.
Thanks for the second opinion, as our tastes have overlapped in the past. I'll tentatively put it back on my list.
This is a must read for anyone who's seen the film (huge spoilers in the article):
'1917': Why Cinematographer Roger Deakins Should Win a Second Oscar for His Tour de Force (https://www.indiewire.com/2020/01/1917-cinematographer-roger-deakins-oscars-1202200197/)
Turns out they used:
– Steadicam (Trinity)
– A cable wire, remote-controlled from a vehicle
– Hand-held with stabilized camera
– Drone
In that order, it seems? [Minor spoils ahead.] There are tons of shots that absolutely could not have been captured with a steadicam, going over bodies of water or treacherous terrain, unless the camera operators were flying on hoverboards. It really feels like "the eye of God" or something. These are impossible camera moves that David Fincher would have done with CGI a few years ago. I was thinking drone, but in those single takes the camera both sweeps over something impossible and gets right in characters' faces with great precision. So maybe those are the cable wire shots? I don't even know. I certainly couldn't tell from the filmmaking, because every shot feels stabilized in the same way.
Looks like they created a stabilization rig with the camera on a gimbal in the middle with handles on either side that could be carried by camera operators and then hooked up to a crane or jib arm on the fly. My guess is that there's also much more digital trickery being used to splice different segments of shots together than you would even suspect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMBnvz-dEXw
That is some next level stuff. Every bit of that planning and trickery pays off in the final product, in my opinion. I'm very glad they decided to go for a super-stabilized image as well.
The "screen goes black" moments I mentioned are all highlighted in that clip, I think. There are not many. I'm curious how many of the "path behind an object" moments are also cuts; Deakins hints in the Indiewire article that it might be fewer than we think.
It should be noted, that video has footage from every major setpiece in the movie. And the trailer is extremely spoilery, so don't watch that. I was very fortunate to go into this unsullied, not even knowing about any of the cast.
Aaaaand I'm discouraged again.
QuoteOne of the most important lessons I learned in film school came during the first week of a class called "Directing the Camera." We'd been provided with an interrogation scene from a recent thriller and told to restage it ourselves. A trio of swaggering hotshots strapped their cinematographer to a wheelchair and filmed their contribution as a dazzling single take during which the camera zipped and zagged in circles and figure-eights around the performers. It was a complicated, extremely difficult shot that earned applause from some members of the class. But the students failed the assignment because they were unable to answer the only question posed by our wily professor: "Why did you shoot it that way?"
See, the kids hadn't engaged with the material at all. No thought was given as to how the story would be most effectively presented, rather they were worried about impressing their instructor and knocking the socks off their new classmates, no matter that all this visual razzle-dazzle distracted from the dialogue and ran counter to the purpose of the scene they were shooting in the first place.
I thought about those students a lot while being bored out of my mind by the preening virtuosity of "1917," an exhausting technical exercise in which director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins have meticulously arranged a sprawling WWI battlefield adventure that spans 24 hours and dozens of miles with hundreds of extras and explosions to look like a single, unbroken shot. It's an astonishing feat of planning, logistics and digital trickery that I'm sure will make for marvelous behind the scenes featurettes on the upcoming Blu-ray special edition and is one of the most enervating experiences I had in a movie theater last year.
This seems to be the most common knock against this film.
Source (https://www.wbur.org/artery/2020/01/08/wwi-1917-sam-mendes-review)
Wow. That is a PROFOUNDLY bad take on this movie. The camera doesn't "zip or zag in circles" or "do figure 8s" or anything of the sort. It really just feels like a floaty "god's eye view," and the cinematography is notable for how strongly stabilized the camera is, as I was saying earlier.
There are certainly a few flashy shots, but... the most contrived camera movement I can think of has the camera floating over a large puddle as the characters traverse the edge. Which is just a stable tracking shot. That's genuinely as flashy as it gets. In the most visually spectacular and flashy scenes, the camera movement is not pushing the drama at all, it's just going straight in a line.
In this case there's a very clear and easy answer to "why did you shoot it that way?" Following these characters in such a focused, unified, unbroken way has a very strong effect on how you experience their journey. For some people it's too weird/intense/off-putting. It definitely has a specific effect that a lot of people won't like, and I understand that. What I don't understand is responses like the one you quoted. Ugh... too much style! Why don't you make your movie like everyone else does?
Not to be over-dramatic, but I genuinely feel like 1917 pushes the medium forward.
The problem is, the majority of the reviews I'm seeing boil down to "I had a strong emotional reaction to this movie" or "I didn't have a strong emotional reaction to this movie." And the thing is, neither of those are wrong. Nor are they predictive of whether any other individual will have a strong emotional reaction to the movie.
to treat seriously the idea of pushing the medium forward, i'll buy it, but i don't take it as a transformative step, it's evolutionary, and the art house of this was Victoria, also Birdman but i never saw that
I saw Victoria and liked it but didn't feel it was groundbreaking. Kind of the same with Birdman. So what's different about 1917? Hard to describe. Maybe it's the extreme focus of following a singular thing from beginning to end. Whereas the other examples are meandering and experimental. 1917 feels like a realization of the potential.
Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on January 11, 2020, 11:49:23 PM
Not to be over-dramatic, but I genuinely feel like 1917 pushes the medium forward.
... how? this technique has been attempted/implemented several times over. its effectiveness on you and its fans notwithstanding, what about this makes it an advancement of the form?
I think the medium-pushing thing that 1917 offers is a hyper-focused, narrow-perspective journey from point A to point B, with a combination of emotional and (especially) physical peril that can only be attempted with the technology they employed here. I would love to see more movies like it; I'm not aware of any that exist.
I really don't think those things can be said of Birdman, Victoria, or Russian Ark. Like I said in my last post, those are pretty meandering and experimental by comparison, whereas 1917 feels like a finished product where the one-shot gimmick is more of a necessity; it feels like it's needed to tell this story properly.
I don't think I've seen any other one-shot or pseudo-one-shot movies, though, so there might be one I'm not aware of that does what 1917 does. If there is I would definitely watch it.
Quote from: samsong on January 06, 2020, 07:12:58 PM
apart from the undeniably impressive technical bravado, which loses its narrative efficacy about a half hour in anyway...
it's a pretty bad movie. i have a feeling it'll win best picture at the oscars.
With a hug of condolence to Jeremy, I'm Team Samsong on this one.
Just got back from a screening and had these random thoughts
during the movie. (I had plenty of time to ponder what I was watching--as I wasn't very engaged in the goings-on):
"This feels like something Disney Imagineering would put together for "World War I--the Ride."
"Jeez, when you take a powerful tool like the oner and make an entire film with it--it strips all the power and impact from it and essentially turns it into Steadicam Porn."
"Why am I completely unmoved by [redacted]? That seems vaguely important and should evoke something emotional from the audience, no?"
"When the [redacted] is about to [redacted]--why not just run
perpendicular?! (This happens a lot in film.)
"Why would they choose to intentionally avoid the
single most powerful tool in the Cinema Tool Chest--the fucking
cut--to tell a story?!"
Sadly, I think Sammy is dead-on with his Oscar prediction.
I'm with you, to an extent. The "one take" gimmick seemed like it hurt the movie rather than made it better. Numerous times it felt like they artificially condensed events in order to make the running time. When they get their mission, one of them mentions it'll take several hours to get there, yet less than two hours later, it's mission accomplished - even though they blacked out for several hours. I really think this could have been a much stronger film if it had been handled more conventionally - and retained the one-shot aspect for just the set pieces. It would have been a lot more impactful in that case, just like the one-shot in Atonement. Is this really Best Picture?
Quote from: polkablues on January 12, 2020, 01:40:14 AM
The problem is, the majority of the reviews I'm seeing boil down to "I had a strong emotional reaction to this movie" or "I didn't have a strong emotional reaction to this movie." And the thing is, neither of those are wrong. Nor are they predictive of whether any other individual will have a strong emotional reaction to the movie.
This. ^
Much has been made of the one-shot technique used in
1917, and I pretty much expected Deakins to accomplish this feat with expert artistry. What I did not expect was that this film would be one of the most moving emotional experiences I've ever seen. War movies have become a dime a dozen. It seems that every year a new one comes along to impress audiences with stories of bravery and conviction in the face of adversity. It's the age-old hero's journey. If anything, this is the "gimmick" used to get people in the seats. After all, research has shown that humans are drawn to heroes from early stages of development.
I have to admit, I spent the opening minutes of
1917 in deep fascination with the one-shot experience. As the camera tracked the two young soldiers making their way to the General's office through crowded trenches, I was looking for any hint of a cut. However, shortly after they received their orders, I began to feel a deep connection to the characters and their quest. It felt that every second mattered and there was no time to rest despite the exhaustion and danger that opposed them. This tension is what makes the film extraordinary. When the film reaches its final act, there are several scenes that pack a staggering emotional wallop (basement, forest, and battlefield), and because of the "real-time" feel, it seems as if they happen almost one right after another leaving no time to catch your breath. Even though the hero's journey is nothing new, this storytelling combined with the immersive experience of it all takes it to another level.
In the end, this film left me dwelling more on its themes of humanity and mission than any of its technical achievements (which were impressive nevertheless).