Commonwealth war graves commission
The city was reduced to rubble and had to be built from the ground up post-war.
Overall, 1917 veers towards historical accuracy but many liberties have been taken to tell the story Sam Mendes wanted to tell. This is often the case.
Take for instance the film’s final British charge.
Once the whistle blows, the British infantry stream over the top in a solid mass with little attempt at unit cohesion. There’s no artillery support either, indicating this attack really would have been suicidal if Schofield hadn’t completed his mission.
In reality, all along the front Officers and Non-Commission Officers would be amongst their men, keeping them together, and guiding the attack. World War One infantry assaults were not simply picking up a gun and running at the enemy as presented in 1917’s climax.
1917 Harkness Discussion Notes
Key Facts from the Three Articles (Verified Word-by-Word)
CWGC Article — Key Information
About the Film:
- Directed by Sam Mendes, 2019
- Follows two British Lance-Corporals during one day in April 1917
- Mission: stop 1,600 soldiers of the Devonshire Regiment from walking into a trap
- Blake’s brother is among the 1,600
- “shot seemingly entirely in one take”
- Main events happen in real-time
- Lead roles cast with relatively unknown actors; supporting cast: Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Andrew Scott, Mark Strong
Filming Locations:
- Bovingdon Aerodrome (Hertfordshire) — replica trenches
- Salisbury Plain — trenches and No Man’s Land
- Shepperton Studios — soundstages for ruined village scenes
- Project announced June 2018, filmed throughout most of 2019
- Total filming took about two months
- Climax scene took two days to film
Real Historical Inspiration:
- Inspired by Sam Mendes’s grandfather Alfred Mendez (CWGC spells it “Mendez”; other articles spell it “Mendes”)
- Born in Trinidad and Tobago, of Portuguese descent
- Fought in Flanders for two years
- Received the Military Medal for rescuing wounded soldiers at Passchendaele
- Often used as a messenger due to short stature
- October 12, 1917: C Company lost contact with A, B, and D Companies; Alfred volunteered to find them
- He found all the units and carried messages for two days
- “returned without a scratch”
- Mendes told Variety he had a childhood memory of “a messenger who has a message to carry through”
- Mendes said: “It lodged with me as a child, this story or this fragment, and obviously I’ve enlarged it and changed it significantly”
Historically Accurate Parts:
- German withdrawal near Ecoust really happened
- April 5, 1917: Germans completed Operation Alberich (note: April 5, but the film takes place April 6)
- Purpose: shorten the line and strengthen the new Hindenburg Line positions
- Germans destroyed “pipes, cables, roads, bridges, tunnels, and even entire villages”
- One goal of Operation Alberich was to keep “as many French and Belgian refugees stayed in the Allied sector as possible” — to burden Allied food supplies
- Ypres was reduced to rubble and rebuilt from the ground up post-war
- Film shows Black and Sikh soldiers
- Western Front had “Hundreds of miles of trenches”
- From Calais to the Swiss border (but not one continuous line)
Historically Inaccurate Parts:
- Sikh soldiers: “After fighting in the brutal campaigns of 1915 at Neuve Chapelle, Ypres, and the Somme, the Sikhs had taken major casualties and transferred to other theatres of conflict”
- “At the time of 1917’s fictional story, no Sikh soldiers would have been in France or Belgium”
- Casualty Clearing Station: “In 1917, as casualties mount, wounded men are taken to a casualty clearing station, just metres from the frontline”
- Reality: CCS would be built in “abandoned buildings, underground bunkers, and even shell craters” far from the front
- “Keeping them out in the open would present unnecessary danger”
- Final charge: “Once the whistle blows, the British infantry stream over the top in a solid mass with little attempt at unit cohesion. There’s no artillery support either”
- Reality: “Officers and Non-Commission Officers would be amongst their men, keeping them together, and guiding the attack”
- “World War One infantry assaults were not simply picking up a gun and running at the enemy”
Trench Life (CWGC says this part is accurate):
- “accurate portrayal of trench life”
- Rear transport trenches were in better condition; front-line trenches more damaged
- Trenches had: “shell damage, puddles of mud, hungry opportunistic rats, and exhausted soldiers”
- German trenches: “deeper, sturdier with large-scale bunkhouses, kitchens, and storage sections”
- “Fighting was only a small part of trench life”
- Soldiers would: “inspecting their clothes for lice, cleaning their boots, scooping mud, and water out of the trench, playing games like chess or cards, reading novels, or simply trying to sleep”
Historical Context of 1917:
- February: German Navy resumed unrestricted submarine warfare
- February 1917 alone: “Over a million tons of Allied shipping” lost
- April 6, 1917: US declared war on Germany
- April 1917: Battle of Arras + Canadian victory at Vimy
- Third Battle of Ypres / Passchendaele: July–November
- “The British Army advanced five miles”
About Commemoration:
- “all the extras playing British soldiers were given a real-life soldier to inhabit”
- “Many of these men would not survive the war”
- Devonshire Cemetery, Mametz holds 153 Devonshire soldiers
- CWGC cares for “1.7 million war dead worldwide”
TIME Article — Key Information
About the Film:
- Screenplay by Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns
- Inspired by “fragments of stories” from grandfather Alfred H. Mendes
- 5 ft 4 in (≈162cm), enlisted at age 19
- Grandfather was really “gassed and wounded”
- Story takes place April 6, 1917
Plot:
- General Erinmore (Colin Firth) orders Blake and Schofield
- To deliver a handwritten note to Colonel Mackenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch)
- To cancel an attack on Germans retreating to the Hindenburg Line
Filming:
- Shot in southwestern England
- Dug about 2,500 feet of trenches
- Military advisor Paul Biddiss, a British Army veteran
- Biddiss has three relatives who served in WWI
- Biddiss taught actors how to salute and handle weapons
- Used period military manuals to create boot camps
- Read Max Arthur’s Lest We Forget, Richard van Emden’s The Last Fighting Tommy, and The Soldier’s War
About Extras:
- Each extra given “about three dozen tasks that were part of soldiers’ daily routines”
- Health issues: foot inspections, using a candle to kill lice
- Trench maintenance: filling sandbags
- Leisure: playing checkers or chess, using buttons as game pieces
- Lots of waiting around
- Biddiss wanted to capture “complete boredom”
About Messengers (Key Point):
- “In reality, such an order would have been too dangerous to assign”
- “When runners were deployed, the risk of death by German sniper fire was so high that they were sent out in pairs”
- “If something happened to one of them, then the other could finish the job”
- “In some places, No Man’s Land was as close as 15 yards, in others it was a mile away”
- “By 1917, you didn’t get out of your trench and go across No Man’s Land. Fire from artillery, machine guns and poison gas was too heavy; no one individual was going to get up and run across No Man’s Land and try to take the enemy”
- “Human messengers like Blake and Schofield were only deployed in desperate situations”
- “Messenger pigeons, signal lamps and flags, made up most of the battlefield communications”
- “There was also a trench telephone for communications”
About Trenches:
- “There was more than one trench”
- Front-line trench, rear support/supply trench, latrine trench
- “There were about 35,000 miles of trenches on the Western Front”
- The Western Front itself was 430 miles long
- Extended from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps
About April 6, 1917:
- February 23 to April 5: Germans moved to the Hindenburg Line and Aisne River area
- About a 27-mile region from Arras to Bapaume
- German version: “adjustment,” “simply moving needed resources to the best location”
- Allied version: “retreat” or “withdrawal”
- April 6: US declared war on Germany
- A few days later: Canadians took Vimy Ridge
- A Canadian general called it “the birth of a nation”
- Eastern front: Russian Revolution was heating up
- Naylor said: “Casualties on both sides are massive and there is no end in sight”
Correction:
- The original article said soldiers used “hot wax” to de-louse
- Corrected to: soldiers used candles to “burn and pop lice”
Smithsonian Article — Key Information
Film Positioning:
- 117-minute epic
- “seemingly filmed in one continuous take”
- Similar to Saving Private Ryan: long journeys, death-strewn landscapes
- Tone closer to Dunkirk: non-linear narrative to build urgency
- Mendes said: “[The film] bears witness to the staggering destruction wrought by the war, and yet it is a fundamentally human story about two young and inexperienced soldiers racing against the clock”
- “So it adheres more to the form of a thriller than a conventional war movie”
Plot:
- A fictional British battalion of 1,600 men faces a German ambush
- Blake played by Dean Charles Chapman (Tommen Baratheon in Game of Thrones)
- Brother played by Richard Madden (fellow Game of Thrones alumnus)
- General Erinmore warns: “If you fail, it will be a massacre”
Sam Mendes Quotes:
- The story came from “fragments” of his grandfather’s tales
- Childhood memory of grandfather telling about “a messenger who has a message to carry”
- “It lodged with me as a child, this story or this fragment, and obviously I’ve enlarged it and changed it significantly”
About 1917 History:
- Northern France, spring 1917
- Doran Cart calls this a “very fluid” period of the war
- Stalemate on the Western Front, but war about to change course
- Eastern Europe: “rumblings” of Russian Revolution
- Kaiser Wilhelm II resumed unrestricted submarine warfare
- This led the US to join the war in April 1917
- Germany “engaged in acts of total war, including bombing raids against civilian targets”
Hindenburg Line:
- February to April 1917
- “newly built and massively fortified” defensive network
- Cart emphasizes: Germans “never said they were retreating”
- “They were simply moving to a better defensive position”
- Shortened the front by 25 miles
- Freed 13 divisions for reassignment
- Preparation for Operation Michael (spring 1918)
- In 1918, Germans pushed “farther to the west than they had been almost since 1914”
- Allies didn’t break through the Hindenburg Line until September 29, 1918
- Mendes’s words: “There was a period of terrified uncertainty—had [the Germans] surrendered, withdrawn, or were they lying in wait?”
Operation Alberich Destruction:
- “anything the Allies might find useful, from electric cables and water pipe[s] to roads, bridges and entire villages”
- Evacuated up to 125,000 civilians
- Those able to work were sent to occupied France and Belgium
- “leaving the elderly, women and children behind to fend for themselves with limited rations”
- Quoting German General Erich Ludendorff: “On the one hand it was desirable not to make a present to the enemy of too much fresh strength in the form of recruits and laborers, and on the other we wanted to foist on him as many mouths to feed as possible”
Battle of Poelcappelle (Alfred’s Experience):
- Part of Passchendaele / Third Battle of Ypres
- July–November 1917
- “some 500,000 soldiers wounded, killed or missing in action”
- Allies eventually captured the village
- But no “substantial breakthrough or change in momentum”
- Cart called it a typical example of “give-and-take and not a whole lot gained”
Alfred Mendes Full Biography:
- Born 1897 in Trinidad
- Descendant of Portuguese immigrants
- Enlisted at 19
- Served two years in 1st Battalion Rifle Brigade
- Sent home in May 1918 after being gassed
- Later became a novelist and short story writer
- Autobiography written in the 1970s, published posthumously in 2002
- Morning of October 12, 1917: company commander received “Should the enemy counter-attack, go forward to meet him with fixed bayonets. Report on four companies urgently needed”
- Alfred had only “a single signaling course” of relevant experience
- Volunteered to find A, B, and D Companies
- He thought he wouldn’t return
- Alfred’s autobiography: “The snipers got wind of me and their individual bullets were soon seeking me out, until I came to the comforting conclusion that they were so nonplussed at seeing a lone man wandering in circles about No Man’s Land…they decided, out of perhaps a secret admiration for my nonchalance, to dispatch their bullets safely out of my way”
- Or snipers “thought me plain crazy”
- He found all three companies, carried messages for two days
- “without a scratch, but certainly with a series of hair-raising experiences”
Critic Quotes:
- J.D. Simkins (Military Times): “War is hideous—mud, rats, decaying horses, corpses mired in interminable mazes of barbed wire”
- Peter Bradshaw (Guardian): “post-apocalyptic landscape, a bad dream of broken tree stumps, mud lakes left by shell craters, dead bodies, rats”
- Karl Vick (Time): “Hieronymus Bosch hellscapes”
Alfred’s Description of Ypres:
- “a marsh of mud and a killer of men”
- “Seeping groundwater exacerbated by unusually heavy rainfall made it difficult for the Allies to construct proper trenches”
- Soldiers hid in “waterlogged shell holes”
- “It was a case of taking them or leaving them, and leaving them meant a form of suicide”
Cart on Leaving Trenches:
- “It was pretty much instant death”
- Threats: “artillery barrages, snipers, booby traps, poison gas and trip wires”
Film’s Goal (Pippa Harris Quote):
- “to make you feel that you are in the trenches with these characters”
Cart on Individual Heroism Missions:
- “not the norm”
- “more of the exception”
- Trench networks were complex: front-line, secondary support, communication, food, latrine trenches
- “very specific means of moving around and communicating”
- “Cart doesn’t completely rule out the possibility that a mission comparable to Blake and Schofield’s occurred during the war”
- “It’s really hard to say…what kind of individual actions occurred without really looking at the circumstances that the personnel might have been in”
Mendes on WWI’s Place in Culture:
- WWII has “a bigger cultural shadow”
- WWI classic: 90-year-old All Quiet on the Western Front
- “The First World War starts with literally horses and carriages, and ends with tanks. So it’s the moment where, you could argue, modern war begins”
Seven Harkness Questions — Answers + Textual Evidence
Q1: To what extent does a historical film have a responsibility to prioritize accuracy over storytelling, emotion, or entertainment?
Core Answer (confidence: 0.85): A historical film has a responsibility to the texture of the era and overall authenticity, but not a strict obligation to accuracy on specific events and characters. 1917 is a strong example because it is rigorous at the sensory level while taking artistic license at the narrative level.
Supporting Examples (Textual Evidence):
Example 1: The production team’s strict attention to detail (TIME)
“In southwestern England, where they dug about 2,500 feet of trenches—a defining characteristic of the war’s Western Front—for the set.” “Paul Biddiss…taught the actors about proper techniques for salutes and handling weapons. He also used military instruction manuals from the era to create boot camps.”
Example 2: Extras were assigned the identities of real soldiers (CWGC)
“all the extras playing British soldiers were given a real-life soldier to inhabit. Many of these men would not survive the war.”
Example 3: The film took responsibility for daily trench life (TIME)
“Some attended to health issues, such as foot inspections and using a candle to kill lice, while some did trench maintenance, such as filling sandbags. Leisure activities included playing checkers or chess, using buttons as game pieces.”
Example 4: But the film did not take responsibility for military procedure (CWGC critique)
“In reality, all along the front Officers and Non-Commission Officers would be amongst their men, keeping them together, and guiding the attack. World War One infantry assaults were not simply picking up a gun and running at the enemy as presented in 1917’s climax.”
Discussion question to raise: The film is rigorous at the sensory level (trenches, lice, boots) but relaxes accuracy at the tactical level. Is this “layered accuracy” itself a reasonable way of taking responsibility?
Q2: Is emotional truth sometimes more important than factual precision in historical movies? Why or why not?
Core Answer (confidence: 0.82): Yes, but emotional truth must be built on a factual foundation. 1917 works because its fictional plot wraps around a real historical core.
Supporting Examples (Textual Evidence):
Example 1: Mendes himself defined the nature of the film (Smithsonian)
“[The film] bears witness to the staggering destruction wrought by the war, and yet it is a fundamentally human story about two young and inexperienced soldiers racing against the clock. So it adheres more to the form of a thriller than a conventional war movie.”
— He admits this is a “thriller,” not a traditional war film. Emotional impact is the core goal.
Example 2: Alfred Mendes’s real experience gave emotional truth a real anchor (Smithsonian)
“The snipers got wind of me and their individual bullets were soon seeking me out, until I came to the comforting conclusion that they were so nonplussed at seeing a lone man wandering in circles about No Man’s Land…”
— The “absurdity and fear of one man crossing No Man’s Land” is a real emotional experience; the film magnifies it through its protagonist.
Example 3: The French woman and baby scene (fictional but reflects real history) (Smithsonian)
“The Germans evacuated as many as 125,000 civilians, sending those able to work to occupied France and Belgium but leaving the elderly, women and children behind to fend for themselves with limited rations. (Schofield encounters one of these abandoned individuals, a young woman caring for an orphaned child, and shares a tender, humanizing moment with her.)”
Example 4: Producer Pippa Harris directly stated the film’s goal (Smithsonian)
“to make you feel that you are in the trenches with these characters”
— This line clearly states the goal is to make the audience feel, not to teach facts.
Q3: At what point does historical simplification become historical misinformation?
Core Answer (confidence: 0.80): The threshold where simplification becomes misinformation is: when viewers leave the film holding a wrong understanding of the era’s causation, scale, or structural reality. 1917 walks this line carefully — some choices are legitimate simplification, others come close to misinformation.
Supporting Examples (Textual Evidence):
Example 1: Legitimate simplification — depiction of German “retreat” (Smithsonian) The film shows Colonel MacKenzie misjudging the Germans as collapsing, which reflects the real confusion of British forces.
“There was a period of terrified uncertainty—had [the Germans] surrendered, withdrawn, or were they lying in wait?”
But Cart emphasizes:
“The Germans ‘never said they were retreating.’ Rather, ‘They were simply moving to a better defensive position,’ shortening the front by 25 miles and freeing 13 divisions for reassignment.”
The film lets the audience misperceive it as a retreat through the British viewpoint — this is legitimate simplification because that was the British perception at the time.
Example 2: Close to misinformation — presence of Sikh soldiers (CWGC)
“After fighting in the brutal campaigns of 1915 at Neuve Chapelle, Ypres, and the Somme, the Sikhs had taken major casualties and transferred to other theatres of conflict. At the time of 1917’s fictional story, no Sikh soldiers would have been in France or Belgium.”
— This is a well-intentioned effort to “correct the whitewashed historical narrative,” but it is wrong about specific time and place. It gives viewers a false impression of WWI’s troop composition.
Example 3: Misinformation — location of Casualty Clearing Station (CWGC)
“In 1917, as casualties mount, wounded men are taken to a casualty clearing station, just metres from the frontline. Medical tents spread out over an open field as surgeons do their level best to aid their injured comrades.” “It is very unlikely, however, that they would set up a major medical hub so close to the front with little to no cover as depicted in 1917. These places were hugely important but vulnerable, so would be built in abandoned buildings, underground bunkers, and even shell craters.”
— This is misinformation because it changes how viewers understand the structural workings of WWI medical systems.
Example 4: Misinformation — normalizing the messenger mission (TIME)
“Human messengers like Blake and Schofield were only deployed in desperate situations.” “Messenger pigeons, signal lamps and flags, made up most of the battlefield communications. There was also a trench telephone for communications.”
— The film makes viewers think human messengers were the main communication method of WWI, which is structurally wrong.
Q4: Should historical films be judged by the same standards as historians and documentaries, or are they fundamentally different forms of storytelling?
Core Answer (confidence: 0.88): They are fundamentally different forms of storytelling and should be judged by different standards. But historical films should not use “I’m art” to escape all responsibility.
Supporting Examples (Textual Evidence):
Example 1: Mendes himself defined the film’s genre (Smithsonian)
“So it adheres more to the form of a thriller than a conventional war movie.”
— He admits this is a thriller, not a history lesson.
Example 2: The film really did make an academic-style research effort (TIME)
“He also used military instruction manuals from the era to create boot camps meant to give soldiers the real feeling of what it was like to serve, and read about life in the trenches in books like Max Arthur’s Lest We Forget…Richard van Emden’s The Last Fighting Tommy…and The Soldier’s War: The Great War through Veterans’ Eyes.”
— This shows the film has a research foundation; it isn’t invented from nothing.
Example 3: But historians left room for judging the film’s “plausibility” (Smithsonian)
“Still, Cart doesn’t completely rule out the possibility that a mission comparable to Blake and Schofield’s occurred during the war. He explains, ‘It’s really hard to say…what kind of individual actions occurred without really looking at the circumstances that the personnel might have been in.’”
— Historians acknowledge that the film’s fictional mission could theoretically have happened. This shows the relationship between film and history is more complex than “fact vs. fiction.”
Example 4: Comparison with All Quiet on the Western Front (Smithsonian)
“The ‘Great War,’ meanwhile, is perhaps best immortalized in All Quiet on the Western Front, an adaptation of the German novel of the same name released 90 years ago.”
— This 90-year-old film also isn’t a documentary, but it is still seen as a WWI classic. This shows historical films have their own traditions and standards.
Q5: How might a film’s historical inaccuracies reflect the values, politics, or cultural concerns of the time in which the movie was made rather than the historical period it depicts?
Core Answer (confidence: 0.92): Almost every “mistake” in 1917 is a product of 2019 values. This is the most interesting of the seven questions because it turns the film’s flaws into material for cultural study.
Supporting Examples (Textual Evidence):
Example 1: Diverse characters — a 2019 political demand (CWGC)
“1917 also depicts many black and Sikh soldiers on the frontline to show this ‘wasn’t a war fought just by white men’.” “The First World War was truly a global conflict, bringing in people and cultures from across the world to fight. Mendes is entirely right to point out this wasn’t simply a white man’s war, but the manner in which soldiers are presented is inaccurate.”
— Mendes’s diversity intent belongs to 2019, not to the real composition of the 1917 army. He uses a 2019 lens to correct WWI’s historical narrative.
Example 2: Individual heroism focus — a modern narrative preference (Smithsonian)
“The kind of individualized military action at the center of 1917 was ‘not the norm,’ according to Cart, but ‘more of the exception,’ in large part because of the risk associated with such small-scale missions.”
— But Mendes specifically chose this individualized narrative. This reflects modern Western audiences’ preference for entering history through the individual. A WWI-era film like All Quiet on the Western Front emphasizes the collective experience more.
Example 3: Mendes defined the film as a thriller (Smithsonian)
“So it adheres more to the form of a thriller than a conventional war movie.”
— “Thriller” is a very modern genre concept. The 2019 film market demands urgency and suspense. 1920s war films leaned more toward reflection and mourning.
Example 4: The asymmetry of WWI vs. WWII in cultural memory (Smithsonian)
“As Mendes bemoans to Time, World War II commands ‘a bigger cultural shadow’ than its predecessor”
— Mendes’s choice to make a WWI film is politically conscious — in 2019, he is trying to bring WWI back into cultural view. That choice itself belongs to the time.
Example 5: The grandfather’s “fragment memory” as a key narrative frame (CWGC)
Mendes said: “It lodged with me as a child, this story or this fragment, and obviously I’ve enlarged it and changed it significantly.”
— “Grandfather’s stories” is a very 21st-century narrative device — entering history through family memory. This “intergenerational memory” framework is itself a product of modern culture.
Q6: Can a historically inaccurate movie still reveal meaningful truths about a society, era, or human experience? Explain.
Core Answer (confidence: 0.90): Absolutely yes, and some of 1917’s fictional parts deliver the essential truth of war better than historical fact could.
Supporting Examples (Textual Evidence):
Example 1: Multiple media outlets saw the film’s atmosphere as a real recreation of war experience (Smithsonian)
J.D. Simkins (Military Times): “War is hideous—mud, rats, decaying horses, corpses mired in interminable mazes of barbed wire” Peter Bradshaw (Guardian): “post-apocalyptic landscape, a bad dream of broken tree stumps, mud lakes left by shell craters, dead bodies, rats” Karl Vick (Time): “Hieronymus Bosch hellscapes”
— Three critics all believed the film captured WWI’s atmospheric truth, even though the specific plot was fictional.
Example 2: Alfred Mendes’s real description supports the film’s atmosphere (Smithsonian)
“Alfred deemed the area ‘a marsh of mud and a killer of men.’ Seeping groundwater exacerbated by unusually heavy rainfall made it difficult for the Allies to construct proper trenches, so soldiers sought shelter in waterlogged shell holes.” “It was a case of taking them or leaving them, and leaving them meant a form of suicide.”
— The film’s sense of “nowhere to go, must go forward or die” reflects the real feelings of real soldiers.
Example 3: Cart’s description of leaving the trenches (Smithsonian)
“It was pretty much instant death.”
— The scenes of Schofield running across the battlefield in the film really do capture the WWI truth that “leaving the trench means death,” even though the specific mission is fictional.
Example 4: The film’s depiction of civilians is fictional but reflects real policy (Smithsonian)
Erich Ludendorff: “On the one hand it was desirable not to make a present to the enemy of too much fresh strength in the form of recruits and laborers, and on the other we wanted to foist on him as many mouths to feed as possible.”
— The scene where Schofield meets the French woman and baby is fictional, but Ludendorff’s cold-blooded words prove this abandoned-civilian situation was real.
Example 5: The film’s core goal is “to make you feel” (Smithsonian)
“to make you feel that you are in the trenches with these characters”
— The film’s goal isn’t teaching but transmitting experience. This is a legitimate form of truth.
Q7: Should filmmakers ever change or omit uncomfortable historical realities in order to make a story more compelling or accessible to modern audiences?
Core Answer (confidence: 0.78): Filmmakers can change realities, but should try to avoid omitting them. 1917 preserves the core brutality of WWI, but it really does omit some structurally uncomfortable truths.
Supporting Examples (Textual Evidence):
Uncomfortable truths the film PRESERVES:
Example 1: The futility of war (Smithsonian)
“Although the Allies eventually managed to capture the village that gave the battle its name, the clash failed to produce a substantial breakthrough or change in momentum on the Western Front. Passchendaele, according to Cart, was a typical example of the ‘give-and-take and not a whole lot gained’ mode of combat undertaken during the infamous war of attrition.”
— Passchendaele is mentioned in the film’s background without whitewashing its futility.
Example 2: The randomness of death (Blake’s death in the film) Blake is stabbed by a German pilot he had just saved — this kind of death is both meaningless and ugly. The film doesn’t give the protagonist a heroic death.
Example 3: The rot of trench life (CWGC)
“shell damage, puddles of mud, hungry opportunistic rats, and exhausted soldiers sheltering and snatching sleep while they can.”
The film does not avoid the filth and despair of the trenches.
Uncomfortable truths the film OMITS:
Example 4: The truth that Sikh soldiers weren’t on the Western Front was omitted (CWGC)
“After fighting in the brutal campaigns of 1915 at Neuve Chapelle, Ypres, and the Somme, the Sikhs had taken major casualties and transferred to other theatres of conflict.”
— The more uncomfortable truth: colonial soldiers were used as expendable resources by the British Army and reassigned after heavy casualties. The film shows diversity but avoids the exploitative structure behind that diversity.
Example 5: The restricted role of the British West Indies Regiment was omitted (CWGC)
“the British West Indian Regiment sent 15,000 men from the Caribbean to Europe to serve but their roles were restricted to support and logistical duties.”
— The film puts Black soldiers on the front line, but the fact is most Caribbean Black soldiers were restricted to logistical roles. This is a structural fact of racism that the film omitted.
Example 6: The reality of medical systems was more cruel (CWGC)
“These places were hugely important but vulnerable, so would be built in abandoned buildings, underground bunkers, and even shell craters.”
— The film putting CCS on the open ground is prettified. Real CCS were in dark, damp underground bunkers where wounded men died slowly — that’s more uncomfortable, and the film avoided it.
Example 7: Communication methods were simplified to human messengers (TIME)
“Messenger pigeons, signal lamps and flags, made up most of the battlefield communications. There was also a trench telephone for communications.”
— The real WWI was a technological war (telegraphs, telephones, carrier pigeons). By focusing on human messengers, the film omits the dehumanizing layer of technological warfare.
Summary: One-Sentence Stance + Strongest Evidence per Question
| Question | My Stance | Strongest Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Q1 | The film owes sensory truth; it has freedom on plot truth | Extras assigned real soldier identities (CWGC) |
| Q2 | Emotional truth must be built on factual foundation | Mendes self-defines as “thriller” (Smithsonian) |
| Q3 | Simplification becomes misinformation when it changes viewers’ understanding of structure | Inaccurate CCS location changes viewers’ understanding of medical systems (CWGC) |
| Q4 | Different genres need different standards, but none escape responsibility | Cart doesn’t fully rule out fictional missions (Smithsonian) |
| Q5 | Almost every “mistake” reflects 2019 values | Diverse characters as a 2019 political choice (CWGC) |
| Q6 | Fiction can deliver bigger truths than fact | Three critics all saw the film’s atmosphere as authentic (Smithsonian) |
| Q7 | Changing is fine; omitting is not | The fact that colonial soldiers were restricted to logistics was omitted (CWGC) |