1917 trailer - Colin Firth + Benedict Cumberbatch
- Thread starter Unicron
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Looks good. The addition of some "names" should bring attention...but it's still no guarantee. I swear, sometimes it's like the general public has forgotten WW1 even took place...which is a shame, since WW1 led directly to WW2. But hey...we live in a world where Google won't even put out a Doodle for the 75th anniversary of D-Day (and had to be shamed by people to even put up anything for the 70th anniversary in 2014). Fewer and fewer people care about history as the 21st century moves forward.
I saw Peter Jackson's documentary with the colorized footage and added dialogue of the old WW1 soldiers that came out awhile back. It was emotional for me. These people fought and died by the millions, and their experience needs to be remembered.
I saw Peter Jackson's documentary with the colorized footage and added dialogue of the old WW1 soldiers that came out awhile back. It was emotional for me. These people fought and died by the millions, and their experience needs to be remembered.
It's not a very long film. But it's genuinely "Wow!" inducing when, after about 15 minutes, the old black and white footage suddenly transforms to color, speed-corrected footage instead, with voices and ambient sound. It's so lifelike when they aren't walking around really fast and they add the voices (thanks to the lip-reader they hired to discern what the soldiers were saying). It brings that world into striking clarity. I just wish it was longer....but I understand how hard it must've been to even restore the amount of footage they did.
Watched the trailer of "1917" last night. Looks very interesting-if the reviews are even half-way decent, I'll see it in the theater.
I'll see this when it opens wide in January. It's World War I, it's right up my alley.
Certainly, in the United States, World War I has fallen into a memory hole over the past century, even though it was significant in a number of ways, ranging from the playing of the Star-spangled Banner at sporting events and the rapid decline of German as the secondary language of the United States (my American-born ancestors spoke English and German fluently into the 1920s) to women's suffrage and the Great Migration of African-Americans from the south, moving to northern cities to work in munitions factories, not to mention Wilson's Sedition Acts and the post-war Red Scare.
World War I is kind of glossed over as a thing that happened, in large part because there are no great, mythic stories of American heroism and kick-assery like Pearl Harbor and D-Day and Midway and Iwo Jima thirty years later. The big events that people know about World War I -- the trenches, Verdun, the Somme, the multiple Ypres -- didn't involve the American Expeditionary Force. Belleau Wood is significant to the Marines, but no one else. Meuse-Argonne was in the final days before the Armistice and didn't really amount to much. (Had the war gone into 1919, Pershing's planned offensive into the heart of Germany might have offered more.)
That's not to say that there aren't American stories for Hollywood to tell about World War I -- there really should be a movie about the Harlem Hellfighters, and the story of the wreck of the [i[SS Tuscania[/I] off the coast of Islay (an island in Scotland's Outer Hebrides), when bodies of American soldiers washed ashore in the tide and they were buried under a flag sewn in a single night by four school teachers who only had an encyclopedia as reference is utterly moving -- but no one seems to want to tell them. (I know how I would do a Harlem Hellfighters movie, but I'm a white, middle-aged writer. That's not my story to tell, and I would not presume to tell it.)
Fundamentally, I think the issue, again, for Americans in general, is that World War I is a thing that happened, that we were involved in, but didn't really have anything to do with us and that we made no effect upon. World War I left great trauma in Europe, which is why it is, a hundred years on, still an open psychic wound in Britain. But not in the United States. It's fallen into that memory hole because it left no psychic wound. I disagree with that assessment, but then, I'm a nerd who has strong opinions on World War I.
For what it's worth, my grandfather had a first cousin in the Navy during World War I (he deserted from the USS Mississippi when it was in port in New York City in early 1918), and the husband of another first cousin was shot and wounded in the final days of the war in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Otherwise, World War I seems to have missed my family; in my direct descent, everyone's the wrong age.
I liked They Shall Not Grow Old a great deal, but it didn't affect me in the way I expected it to. I may have gone in with the wrong expectations, but I also found the film emotionally distant. As a portrait of what life was like in the trenches on a day-to-day basis, it was a remarkable achievement. But it also kept some distance from the carnage of the front, because that sort of material didn't exist on film. Plus, there was often little, if any, context for what we were seeing; I was more affected by Peter Jackson saying, in the documentary on the making of the film, that everyone in a particular shot (the Tommies huddling in a road embankment) were dead fifteen minutes later, once they'd gone over the top, than I was by the scene itself in They Shall Not Grow Old. That said, I enjoyed the film, I'll watch it again, and I find it especially interesting as a bookend to Jackson's Middle-earth films, since Middle-earth was shaped and forged in those same trenches.
Certainly, in the United States, World War I has fallen into a memory hole over the past century, even though it was significant in a number of ways, ranging from the playing of the Star-spangled Banner at sporting events and the rapid decline of German as the secondary language of the United States (my American-born ancestors spoke English and German fluently into the 1920s) to women's suffrage and the Great Migration of African-Americans from the south, moving to northern cities to work in munitions factories, not to mention Wilson's Sedition Acts and the post-war Red Scare.
World War I is kind of glossed over as a thing that happened, in large part because there are no great, mythic stories of American heroism and kick-assery like Pearl Harbor and D-Day and Midway and Iwo Jima thirty years later. The big events that people know about World War I -- the trenches, Verdun, the Somme, the multiple Ypres -- didn't involve the American Expeditionary Force. Belleau Wood is significant to the Marines, but no one else. Meuse-Argonne was in the final days before the Armistice and didn't really amount to much. (Had the war gone into 1919, Pershing's planned offensive into the heart of Germany might have offered more.)
That's not to say that there aren't American stories for Hollywood to tell about World War I -- there really should be a movie about the Harlem Hellfighters, and the story of the wreck of the [i[SS Tuscania[/I] off the coast of Islay (an island in Scotland's Outer Hebrides), when bodies of American soldiers washed ashore in the tide and they were buried under a flag sewn in a single night by four school teachers who only had an encyclopedia as reference is utterly moving -- but no one seems to want to tell them. (I know how I would do a Harlem Hellfighters movie, but I'm a white, middle-aged writer. That's not my story to tell, and I would not presume to tell it.)
Fundamentally, I think the issue, again, for Americans in general, is that World War I is a thing that happened, that we were involved in, but didn't really have anything to do with us and that we made no effect upon. World War I left great trauma in Europe, which is why it is, a hundred years on, still an open psychic wound in Britain. But not in the United States. It's fallen into that memory hole because it left no psychic wound. I disagree with that assessment, but then, I'm a nerd who has strong opinions on World War I.
For what it's worth, my grandfather had a first cousin in the Navy during World War I (he deserted from the USS Mississippi when it was in port in New York City in early 1918), and the husband of another first cousin was shot and wounded in the final days of the war in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Otherwise, World War I seems to have missed my family; in my direct descent, everyone's the wrong age.
I liked They Shall Not Grow Old a great deal, but it didn't affect me in the way I expected it to. I may have gone in with the wrong expectations, but I also found the film emotionally distant. As a portrait of what life was like in the trenches on a day-to-day basis, it was a remarkable achievement. But it also kept some distance from the carnage of the front, because that sort of material didn't exist on film. Plus, there was often little, if any, context for what we were seeing; I was more affected by Peter Jackson saying, in the documentary on the making of the film, that everyone in a particular shot (the Tommies huddling in a road embankment) were dead fifteen minutes later, once they'd gone over the top, than I was by the scene itself in They Shall Not Grow Old. That said, I enjoyed the film, I'll watch it again, and I find it especially interesting as a bookend to Jackson's Middle-earth films, since Middle-earth was shaped and forged in those same trenches.
Had the United States stayed out of that war--as we should have done---there is every reason the believe that Hitler dies a failed, drunken artist in a back-alley of Berlin.
Normandy? A place found in history books if not a Michelin guide--and Auschwitz (at best) found in the index of Fodor's
I agree with you. I firmly believe that Wilson's decision to bring the United States into the war on the side of the Allies was a world historical mistake, as it empowered the British and the French to feel that they could dictate the peace in 1919. In early 1919, without the United States entry, the war likely would have ended on status quo ante bellum terms as the three major powers simply couldn't carry on. Germany had offered Britain and France those same terms in late 1916, but the British felt they couldn't accept them after the Somme; returning to the pre-war status quo would amounted to an admission that the war was pointless and the soldiers had died for no reason at all. By 1919, with the French armies mutinying, with the German armies breaking down, with the British weary, they could have walked away. Instead, Wilson put his thumb down on the scales, and that leads us to Versailles and, eventually, World War II.
I have opinions.
There's definitely an argument to be made that WW1 brought about the EUROPEAN WW2 because of US involvement, but I think there still would've been a "Great Pacific War" between the US (probably Britain too) and Japan had we stayed out of WW1. It probably would've started 10 years earlier though. Japan was a jumped-up menace after 1905. A 1931 Pacific War would've been on the cards and I don't think they would've stopped had they knocked out China and the Philippines. The USN has to enact Plan Orange and off everything pops.
So Hitler would've died an angry, failed artist. But a storm would've still been brewing in Asia, ready to explode.
So Hitler would've died an angry, failed artist. But a storm would've still been brewing in Asia, ready to explode.
It's not surprising there's not as much interest in the world wars as the years pass. It's just human nature. With WW1, there's no veterans today that can tell their stories as they've all passed long ago, so there's very little connection between that era and the coming generations. The same thing is happening with WW2, where eventually we'll no longer have anyone that was even born in that era.
Growing up in the 90s, Vietnam was what was brought up about the most, especially on dramatic television.
"On the next Quantum Leap: Sam leaps into a US soldier in Vietnam!"
Cue: The Doors or any overplayed 'Nam music.
"On the next Quantum Leap: Sam leaps into a US soldier in Vietnam!"
Cue: The Doors or any overplayed 'Nam music.
I think there are still plenty of good stories that can be done while set in WW1. I think most of the stories we've seen have been about the pilots, possibly because it's easier and more interesting to do than the trenches. About the only big movie I know of is Passschendaele. But I keep hoping to see a movie about Francis Pegahmagabow, an aboriginal WW1 hero who was one of the allies' best snipers, and quite a badass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Pegahmagabow
The closest thing would be if they adapted Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road for the screen as it's supposed to be inspired by his accomplishments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Day_Road
I don’t doubt there’s plenty of great stories, my point was that there isn’t as much investment in it like later wars like WW2. The best film I can think of based on WW1(that I’ve seen) was PATHS OF GLORY, and that was from 1957, when it we still had a generational connection to it.
As one mentioned above, the American Civil War seems to have kept interest, but I think that’s because not only was it a very unique war for our country but we’re still feeling the effects. For example, the families that have been brought up to revere the Confederates because their great grandpas fought on that side, so they’re taught to have Southern pride and make it seem like they were much more noble than they actually were, because who would dishonor their ancestor by calling them out on trying to preserve slavery? Thus you get very romanticized accounts of Southern heroics played in propaganda movies like BIRTH OF A NATION and GONE WITH THE WIND, as if we’re supposed to mourn the loss of those eras. That’s just one aspect of what lingers of it in our culture today. But I’m going off on a tangent unrelated to this film.
As one mentioned above, the American Civil War seems to have kept interest, but I think that’s because not only was it a very unique war for our country but we’re still feeling the effects. For example, the families that have been brought up to revere the Confederates because their great grandpas fought on that side, so they’re taught to have Southern pride and make it seem like they were much more noble than they actually were, because who would dishonor their ancestor by calling them out on trying to preserve slavery? Thus you get very romanticized accounts of Southern heroics played in propaganda movies like BIRTH OF A NATION and GONE WITH THE WIND, as if we’re supposed to mourn the loss of those eras. That’s just one aspect of what lingers of it in our culture today. But I’m going off on a tangent unrelated to this film.
I'm really glad WWI is getting some proper focus, considering most war films stick with the "better known" World War.
The excellent casting aside, the cinematography is breathtaking...and I just looked it up, of course, it's Roger Deakins behind the camera!
Definitely a must-see on the big screen.
The excellent casting aside, the cinematography is breathtaking...and I just looked it up, of course, it's Roger Deakins behind the camera!
Definitely a must-see on the big screen.
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