The Guns Of ‘1917’

It was called “the war to end all wars,” and one can easily understand the reasoning. After all, how could any future conflict compare? It was a tragedy that played out on the world’s stage. Costing the lives of 13 million civilians, nine million soldiers, and millions more as a result of genocides and the war-related Spanish flu pandemic.

As we all know, World War I, which lasted from July 1914 to November 1918, was not the final world conflict. Fewer than thirty years later, another world war would begin and would have consequences that far outweighed the original. It seems that humanity would rather repeat it’s mistakes than learn from them. 

Nonetheless, the Great War was one of the deadliest conflicts in all of history. In 2019, Sam Mendes directed a film that provided a glimpse into life in the trenches. It brought to life the horror show of the battlefield and the mixed feelings of the men who struggled to survive.

Titled 1917, the movie follows two British soldiers, Blake and Schofield, who are ordered to navigate across no-man’ s-land carrying a message warning another regiment to call off their attack. What appears to be a German withdrawal is, in fact, a deadly trap. Adding urgency to the assignment: Blake’s older brother is an officer in the battalion. He and 1,600 other men will likely die if Blake cannot stop the attack.