1917: The Game: The Movie

1917 is very very weird. Not because it is a movie about the horrors of war. I respect that theme, but we have many of those, and 1917 certainly is not the best of them. Depicting both the scale of the carnage of World Wars and the personal level of each individual atrocity are often diametric goals, and 1917 doesn't break new ground at either of those ends. It's good if you just want *more* of that, but not unique.

What makes it unique is, well... it's not a movie.

There is a certain type of videogame that's become increasingly popular, that never provides a gap in the story flow. Cinematics are all done with the game engine. You don't end one level with a boss and portal or helicopter and then start a new one in a different zone with a "Welcome to Green Hills Zone 1" sign, but rather you continuously flow from one room to the next with smooth transitions, so that it all feels like one uninterrupted ride on a lazy river. Black Ops, Brothers, Journey, Inside are all examples. (Yes these sometimes have loading screens, but you are meant to feel that your character did not skip over anything. Open World games could be like this, but it's single player games that can manage the linear on-rails aspect of this story.) They're also slightly surreal, as you see a world change radically and develop in your 120 minute session of sitting in front of the screen with no time skips.

These stories make somewhat more sense for the videogame format, as after all you are inhabiting one person and so just sticking with their point of view is more "realistic." It doesn't feel real to play, just because that's not how we are used to stories by this point, but it does feel hypnotically surreal and is kind of its own genre at this point.

1917 is just one of those games. There's not interactivity, but the story flows much, much more like Black Ops or Inside than any other movie. There's an obvious comparison to classics like Before Sunset which also do the "one continuous take on two characters" type of story, but for those the dialogue and the relationship between the characters is the focus. Whereas for 1917, and the videogames, the *environment* is the focus. We're using this third-person-limited view to explore several epic scene-pieces, and the awe as you slowly come upon them.

1917 does this very, very well. To use the word "beautiful" is an understatement. It's like if the grandest fantasy saga videogame that is drunk on using its new level of graphics to depict every tree and broad horizon, was advanced thirty years. That's what this movie looks like: the storymode of a videogame from thirty years in the future, showing you the beauty and horror of a countryside in the middle of war.

(The plot doesn't help either. Since it wants to talk about a global scale war, but also how one soldier on one mission can make a difference. And you have colorful NPC's who pop up for three minutes to advance your quests, say a couple memorable lines, and then never appear again.)

You should absolutely watch it for the aesthetic experience (on as large a screen as you can manage.) You should also play Journey, for pretty much the same reasons. Those two experiences will be much more similar than comparing it to any other movie.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

I thought it was actually Billy Flynn, and am amused that whenever I typed that in a search it still showed me the correct movie.

Not a ton to add to this movie, but I will say some things. I've been watching the Ken Burns Vietnam documentary, and recently read Redeployment, so "soldiers returning home from an unpopular war and having trouble fitting in" is a recent theme.

To anyone familiar with that genre, this does not cover a lot of new ground. "Soldiers used to watching a marketplace for any sudden movement, or to being in a firefight, will suffer bad reactions to a fireworks display at a football halftime show! Conservative viewpoint represented: our soldiers are doing their best and deserve our support and civilians can't imagine the things they do. Liberal viewpoint represented: it really is a hopeless war and many elites who attach themselves to The Troops are as bad as any hippie who throw insults at them." Etc etc.

I do appreciate how... pathetic everything is. They aren't at the Superbowl. They're at a NFL game of a football team that never even makes the playoffs. They can't get their movie sold, but are surrounded by Hollywood agents trying to and failing. It's a ritzy version of American decadence, but it's also a very hollow one.

Frankly the stars like Steve Martin, Astro, and Kristen Stewart feel out of place in this movie. Without them the other actors genuinely seem like "normal people out of their depth and trying to stay afloat." Joe Alwyn uh... really does seem like someone close to an emotional breakdown because he has no idea what he is doing. (Chris Tucker can stay, because uh, Hollywood C-list is the point of that guy.)

Vin Diesel is great because the problem of so many movies about a squad with a fallen comrade is that they are just a faceless memory or a number. Oh yeah, some people died, that is sad, but it's just a narrative trope and statistic. But with someone of his star power and charisma, you really *feel* the hole of his absence in the timeline without him. Where is Vin? We are different and lesser without Vin. It doesn't come close to the magnitude of the loss of a comrade, but it is the *direction* of that loss.

Now, the only thing anyone seems to have to say about the movie is the filming speed. Ang Lee experimented with 120 frames per second for recording this, and that was near universally panned. Easy to dismiss as both a failure, and irrelevant to the message. I certainly doubted Ang Lee intended this result.

The high frame rate used in the film drew some criticism, especially the decision to use it in a drama film. David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter said "the technical innovations took me out of the drama just as often as they pulled me in." Dan Callahan for TheWrap felt that some of the characters were "so super-clear that they look like a cut-out with scissors from a glossy magazine" and said "the extra-clarity 3D in this Lee movie often looks weirdly like something shot on videotape in the 1980s."

And yet.

You see the irony don't you? In a movie full of mockery for patriotic citizens who want to know so much about "what was war like", but who flinch from the actual emotions of the veterans, it's hard not to think about our obsession with immersion. (See the Prometheus thread.) The consumer wants to be immersed in the "most realistic story" of the troops, but once they are given anything close to that, they walk off awkwardly. They didn't like what they got. They're the cheerleader saying "but how could we run away? You're going back to the front, right?"

That narrative uncanny valley is very much like the filming resolution. "No, wait, this is too good. It doesn't look as good as the crude fake. Go back."