Despite sharing very similar overarching narrative themes and only being set a few decades apart, WW1 and WW2 come across as very distinct settings for stories. While WW2 can not wholly dishonestly be presented as a heroic struggle against a group of countries you could easily label as antagonists, absolutely none of the major players in WW1 were there for any heroic reasons.

WW2 was, among other things, a pushback against aggressive, fascist dictatorships and even though the Allies weren’t complete saints, it’s much easier for a writer to paint them in a heroic light when compared to what the Axis were doing. It is much harder to do this for WW1, since none of the participants make for good protagonist material. The whole conflict was every country dogpiling on each other one after another with countless young men paying the price for petty monarchs.

Now, I wouldn’t even call myself an amateur historian, so do not take the above paragraph as good historical analysis and instead please read up from someone more qualified than I.

My point is that narratively, the First World War is the less popular older brother to WW2’s younger, attractive and more successful younger sibling. Where WW2 is an all-star student and captain of the most popular sports team, WW1 writes poignent but disturbing poetry and smokes behind the sports hall.

What that preample brings us to is 1917, a WW1 film about a pair of British soldiers tasked with delivering a message to another trench to help stop an Allied push that will result in a whole regiment of British soldiers from being massacred. The main selling point of the film, which you probably already knew before coming into this, is that the entire film is presented as one continuous take. With the exception of one moment where our main character blacks out, the camera never appears to cut away or fade out, it just keeps rolling.

Not only is this dizziyingly impressive from a technical perspective, as there are many behind-the-scenes stories of the amount of effort the crew went through to keep up this illusion, it does a lot of heavy lifting for the story. You follow these two young men through a harrowing roughly 12 hours and experience every second of their struggle. The camera does not look away from them, so neither can you. This film would have been much less interesting if it had cut away to some generals sitting in a cosy, firelit office to give the audience a pause from the frantic journey of our protagonists. The film’s tight frame of focus is by far its greatest strength and links to what tends to separate WW1 from WW2 thematically. Instead of a grand geopolitical narrative and a fight of ideologies, it’s a personal struggle of two young men desperately trying to survive one of the most harrowing parts of modern history.

One interesting part of this film’s structure, to me at least, is that because this is a WW1 period film there are a many British/Irish A-list stars in its cast. Colin Firth from Kingsman, Richard Madden of Game of Thrones fame, Mark Strong also from Kingsman and both halves of the modern Sherlock-Moriarty enemy-bromance (Benedict Cumberbatch and Andrew Scott) to name a few. However, because the film cannot feasibly include any of them for a decent length of time, they all get roughly 5 minutes of screentime each and serve merely as checkpoints in the plot for our main two. Honestly, keeping their roles so limited was probably the most cost-effective way to include them in the film.

The mention of checkpoints brings me to another observation, that the film shares a strikingly similar structure to a video game. The World Wars are a popular setting for video games, just look at the Call of Duty series for the most obvious example, but the similarities go far beyond that. The narrow focus on a pair of characters, a linear sequence of events broken apart by memorable locations, action sequences and side characters, even finding items that serve an important point later in the plot. All of these are hallmarks of videogames from the earliest days of the medium.

This appears to be incidental on the parts of director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins, who as far as I have read do not mention trying to mimic the structure of a video game for this film. Regardless, I find this extremely interesting. Film adaptations of games have been historically…mixed. Only in recent memory have they been able to find commercial or critical success (very rarely both). Many have cited the reason for these adaptations not working is that the translation between the different mediums is quite challenging. A video game is less effective as a story when you remove the perspective of the player, who is free to interact with it as they see fit. You can even work your story to fit around what the player does and discovers. Unfortunately for film, the audience cannot make changes to the story as it unfolds or get the same feelings as if they themselves are in the story and controlling the character to whom the plot is happening. These are the reasons people generally raise as to why video adaptations to film usually do not work.

To that, I say we simply have not been trying hard enough. Because here is 1917, looking like the most graphically impressive version of Battlefield 1, and it went on to win 3 oscars. It’s so good and yet feels so video game-like that you can fill an entire Google search page of people making this same observation. I would at this point like to give a shout-out to this article from Medium, where the author makes the bold claim that because 1917 is reminiscent of a video game it does not qualify as cinema.

“1917’s biggest problem is its technological achievement, making everything feel like an elongated video game level, and, thus, making it not cinema.“

Semantics aside of what can count as “cinema” in this author’s opinion (he himself doesn’t give an explanation), why is a film not following the same structure as other films inherently a bad thing, or should disqualify it from an entire art form? As I mentioned earlier, 1917’s tight focus on our pair of characters provides a uniquely personal view of our characters, that makes emotional scenes more poignant and action scenes more terrifying. Taking the structure of a video game, intentionally or not, made 1917 a standout in its genre and medium.

All this to say that I do highly recommend 1917. It’s a fantastic technical achievement that manages to do something unique in a very oversaturated genre. Without a doubt the best Medal of Honour campaign I have never played.