A film's technical framework, its very grammar, rarely coincides so seismically and totally with its thematic soul as it does in "1917" by Sam Mendes. More than a war film, this is a forced immersion, a cinematic apnea of almost two hours that binds us inextricably to the pace, the breath, and the terror of two young soldiers. The artifice of the single-take (in reality a masterful collage of exceedingly long shots, stitched together by the digital sorcery of Lee Smith) almost immediately ceases to be a simple virtuosic stunt, becoming instead the foundational stylistic signature, the narrative engine, and, ultimately, the very thesis of the work. Mendes doesn't tell us a story about the First World War; he hurls us into its sensory perception, abolishing the safe distance offered by traditional editing.

Cinema has always flirted with the illusion of continuity. From Hitchcock's Rope, a theatrical experiment constrained by the limitations of film stock, to Iñárritu's Birdman, a psychological vortex in an actor's mind, the long take has been used to create claustrophobia and intensity. But Mendes’s approach is different, almost antithetical. Where Hitchcock compressed space, Mendes expands it to infinity. Where Iñárritu followed the caprices of the mind, Mendes anchors himself desperately to the physicality of the terrain: the mud that sucks at boots, the corpses that become stumbling blocks, the barbed wire that tears at flesh. The most fitting analogy, and herein lies its disconcerting modernity, is not so much with preceding cinema as with the language of video games. "1917" is, in its deep structure, a third-person survival game with an escort mission as its main plot. The camera, positioned constantly behind or alongside Corporals Schofield and Blake, emulates a player's perspective, binding us to a real-time experience where danger can come from any angle, yet the view remains stubbornly limited. There are no reverse shots to show us the enemy, no cutaways to give us a strategic overview. There is only the advance, one step after another, in an open-air corridor of horror.

This radical choice transfigures an otherwise archetypal plot—the delivery of a vital message, a device as old as the Battle of Marathon—into something more primordial. The journey of Schofield and Blake becomes a descent into the underworld, a Homeric nekyia in khaki uniforms. The British trenches, with their teeming and resigned humanity, are the last outpost of the world of the living. No Man's Land, a lunar landscape dotted with craters, putrefying horses, and bodies tangled in barbed wire, is Limbo, a desolate realm where death is not an event but a permanent condition of the landscape. The abandoned German trench, with its booby traps and its cat-sized rats, is a deceptive labyrinth. Every stage of their path seems to echo a mythological topos, filtered through the mechanized brutality of the 20th century. Even the river Schofield crosses, swept by the current among corpses floating like mortuary water lilies, takes on the semblance of a nightmarish Styx, a black baptism that both purifies and damns him.

In this hell on earth, Roger Deakins's camera does not merely record; it paints. The film's cinematography is a treatise on light in wartime. The first part is steeped in an oppressive grayness, a milky, diffuse light that flattens everything, rendering the world uniformly desolate. It’s an aesthetic reminiscent of the era’s faded photographs or, pushing further, the devastated landscapes of British war painters like Paul Nash, where nature itself seems a traumatized victim of the conflict. Then, after a narrative breaking point that coincides with the film's only obvious cut, comes night. And here Deakins orchestrates a masterpiece of expressionism. The village of Écoust-Saint-Mein in flames, intermittently illuminated by flares, is no longer a real place. It becomes a theater of shadows, a stage for a macabre ballet where the ruins stand out like theatrical wings and light is an active character, revealing and concealing, creating a gothic noir atmosphere. The silhouettes of soldiers move in a play of chiaroscuro worthy of a maddened Caravaggio, transforming violence into a visual hallucination of terrible, heart-wrenching beauty.

It is precisely in this tension between the hyper-realism of the technical approach and the almost dreamlike abstraction of certain passages that "1917" finds its greatness. The film is obsessed with physicality, with material detail—the spilled milk, the wound on the hand, the bread in the haversack—and yet its progression takes on the contours of an abstract epic about Time. The protagonists' mission is a race against the clock, a desperate attempt to stop a death machine already in motion. The single take thus becomes the visual representation of this time flowing inexorably, without pause, without ellipsis. Every second that passes is a second gained or lost, and the viewer feels it in their bones. War, in this perspective, is not a series of glorious battles, but an assembly line of death that must be sabotaged from within.

Mendes, drawing on the stories of his grandfather, Alfred Mendes, who actually fought on the Western Front, chooses not to delve into his characters' psychology in a conventional way. Schofield (a magnificent George MacKay, whose face transforms from a mask of stoic resignation to an icon of desperate determination) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) are not defined by long dialogues or flashbacks. They are defined by their actions, their instinctive reactions. They are, in a sense, everymen, vessels through which the viewer lives the experience. Their brief conversations—about a medal traded for food, about cherry blossoms, about a funny story—are small, precious islands of humanity in an ocean of dehumanization. The encounters with other characters, often cameos by famous actors (Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong), function like NPCs (non-player characters) in a video game: they provide information, represent an obstacle, or offer a brief moment of respite before the main "quest" resumes its unstoppable course.

Mendes's work fits into a lineage of war cinema that, from Saving Private Ryan onward, has prioritized the immersive experience over strategic or political narrative. But where Spielberg used the handheld camera and frenetic editing to simulate the chaos of battle, Mendes uses the almost unnatural fluidity of the Steadicam to create a different experience: not the chaos of combat, but the uninterrupted anguish of transit, of perpetual movement through danger. The most emblematic scene, Schofield's final run along the front line, with soldiers charging out of the trench and earth raining down from explosions, is the film's perfect synthesis: a lone man running horizontally, against the current of the vertical charge of death, in a desperate attempt to make a message of life prevail over the cacophony of destruction.

"1917" is not a film about heroism, but about perseverance. It is not a film about victory, but about survival. Its technical virtuosity is never an end in itself, but the necessary instrument to communicate a fundamental idea: war is not an event to be observed, but a condition to be traversed. The end of Schofield's journey brings no catharsis, no resolution to the conflict. It brings only the fulfillment of a single, minuscule task, the saving of a battalion. Then, exhaustion. He sits at the foot of a tree, in a pose that echoes the beginning of the film, closing a circle of fatigue and pain. The war goes on; the machine has not stopped. But for one brief, fragile moment, a man stood against the tide and, against all odds, was not overwhelmed. And the camera, at last, comes to rest with him.