1917; 3 Oscars, 10 nominations

Tense, powerful and breathtaking, 1917 is a must-watch movie this year. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards and ended up bagging three namely; best cinematography, best sound mixing and best visual effects.

Skyfall director Sam Mendes delivers a story of WWI soldiers on a mission that’s a technical accomplishment.  With meticulous attention to detail and astonishingly fluid cinematography by Roger Deakins, its technical accomplishments cannot be denied and Mendes puts his audience right in the middle of the unfolding chaos.

There’s a real sense of epic scale as the action moves breathlessly from one hellish environment to the next, effectively capturing our reluctant heroes’ sense of anxiety and discovery as they stumble into each new unchartered terrain.

The April of 1917 in the trenches of the British troops in Northern France during the First World War, two young soldiers, Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), were given a mission to hand-deliver an important intelligence letter across enemy lines to the commander of another British battalion to call off their planned attack on a German camp because they were prepared to ambush them. Blake was specially wired for this mission despite its dangers because his brother Joseph was in that other battalion.

1917 is made to look like one continuous shot, a harrowing nonstop journey through war-torn France in the first modern conflict. It hits a lot of the right notes. In its most effective moments, 1917 conveys this: piles of cratered soil are revealed to not just be scorched earth, but heaps of corpses. A man’s hand, seeking stability, sinks into someone’s rotting chest cavity. Dead horses litter No Man’s Land.

From the very first scene to the last, director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins took us along for what looked like one single take of continuous action as the camera followed Schofield and Blake in what seemed to be real time.

-By Bakhtawar Ahmed