Academy Awards’ Special: 1917

In this version of the Academy Awards, there are two great productions about the war and we predict that one of these two will be the one that takes the award for best picture. One of them is 1917, by director Sam Mendes (American Beauty and Revolutionary Road). This feature film has ten nominations: Best Picture, Directing (Sam Mendes), Music (Thomas Newman), Writing (Original Screenplay) (Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns), Cinematography (Roger Dearkis), Sound Mixing (Mark Taylor and Stuart Wilson), Visual Effects (Guillaume Rocheron, Dominic Tuohy), Production Design (Lee Sandales and Dennis Gassner), Makeup and Hairstyling (Tristan Versluis, Rebecca Cole and Naomi Donne), Sound Editing (Oliver Tarney and Rachael Tate).

The history of the grandparents

This is a story of two young British soldiers in the middle of World War I, more specifically in the trenches of northern France in the spring of 1917. They have a mission and have been chosen because the brother of one of them is in another battalion and their superiors believe that defending a family member can be a motivation for soldiers, who are also friends.

The film's script was written by Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, who debuts as a writer for feature films after being part of the scriptwriter group of the Penny Dreadful series in its third season. The story is based on anecdotes that Sam Mendes's grandfather told him about the war.

This story is also an attempt to give more representativeness to the First World War, since the second, perhaps because it is the closest temporarily or the most impressive, has been for years the leading role of the big screen.

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It has a very broadcast in its entirety male because not even a single woman appears in the film: it stars George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman in the roles of the two soldiers and has the participation of Mark Strong, Andrew Scott, Richard Madden , Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch, among other emblematic British actors.

Another war movie

Although the intention of the director and the writer is to bring something more refreshing to the big screen, it is not enough to change the war (from the second to the first). 1917 feels like another war movie: it's exciting and moving, but it's one of the crowd. There are shots in the foreground that print a new, more exciting tone, because we follow first-hand, as the source of the story, the main soldiers. We see again the issue of friendship and loyalty among soldiers, which already seems more a moral code among men than a touching argument. Everything is very obvious in 1917, so sure the Oscar will take.