1917 review – Sam Mendes’s unblinking vision of the hell of war

Mendes’s first world war drama, filmed to appear as one continuous take, plunges the viewer into the trenches alongside two young British soldiers to breathless effectFor the opening of his 2015 Bond movie Spectre, director Sam Mendes mounted a memorable sequence set amid Mexico City’s day of the dead festival.

In what appears to be a single continuous shot, the camera tracks a masked figure through crowded streets, into a hotel lobby, up an elevator, out of a window, and over the rooftops to a deadly assignation.

It’s an audacious, attention-grabbing curtain-raiser widely hailed as the film’s strongest asset.For his latest movie – an awards-garlanded first world war drama that has already won best picture honours at the Golden Globes – Mendes has returned to the lure of the “one-shot” format, this time stretching it out to feature length.

Like Hitchcock’s Rope or Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman,

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