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The Trench is a 1999 independent war film directed by William Boyd and starring Paul Nicholls and James D'Arcy. It depicts the experiences of a group of young. The Trench tells the story of a group of young British soldiers on the eve of the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916, the worst defeat in British military history. Against this ill-fated backdrop, the movie depicts the soldiers' experience as a mixture of boredom, fear, panic and restlessness, confined to a trench on the front lines.
Every year, between five and 10 movies compete for the ’. It’s the most prestigious award that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences gives out every year, announced right at the end of the ceremony. And there aren’t any set rules about what constitutes a “best” picture. It’s the movie — for better or worse, depending on the year — that Hollywood designates as its standard bearer for the current moment.And so, the film that wins Best Picture essentially represents the American movie industry’s view of its accomplishments in the present and its aspirations for the future.Each year’s nominee slate roughly approximates the movies the industry thinks showcase its greatest achievements from the past 12 months. And one thing that’s definitely true about is that, in tone and theme, they’re all over the place.The is also one of the year’s most successful commercially, and one of its most controversial. A has reached the milestone of becoming that country’s first Best Picture and Best International Feature nominee.
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There are three historical dramas:, one that centers on, and one There’s and a in the summer of 1969. The world’s arguably most influential living auteur with eternity on its mind.
And of a celebrated novel rounds out the group.In the runup to the Oscars on February 9, the Vox staff is looking at each of the nine Best Picture nominees in turn. What makes this film appealing to Academy voters? What makes it emblematic of the year?
And should it win?Below, Vox film critic Alissa Wilkinson, international security and defense staff writer Alex Ward, and senior correspondent Matt Yglesias discuss 1917, Sam Mendes’s “one-take” journey through the trenches of World War I.Alissa: I have weird feelings about 1917, a movie I both admire and find moving, yet also find distracting for some of its filmmaking choices. But what I realized while watching it was that I admired it for applying innovative techniques to overcome the audience’s perception of what a “war film” is (like Christopher Nolan’s excellent did) — and, in so doing, felt like it was actively trying to deflate any Hollywood notions of the “glory” of war. (I’m not sure it’s successful in the technique it used — I’ll get to that later — but I admire the attempt.)The other thing I realized is that I don’t really know a lot about World War I, probably because the movies have historically been so focused on two other wars: World War II and the Vietnam War. I think you’re both far more versed in that than I am. So as you were watching, what were your first impressions? And what did you come away thinking about?Alex: The thing to know about World War I, without really getting into the history, is that it was a.
That led to long periods of waiting in muddy, cold, dark subterranean areas before rushes of attacks where troops would face machine guns and other dangerous weaponry. I thought 1917 captured both the dreary nature of life in the trenches and the unsettling danger of being outside of them. The camerawork made me feel like I was the third soldier, seeing every horror, fearing every sound. I was waiting for a war movie to make me feel this in a visceral way, and I thought 1917 nailed it.Matt: Sam Mendes didn’t seem too interested in offering historical context to explain what was going on, but I happen to love World War I history (see Vox’s ) and I think the specific context gives a deeper understanding of some of the artistic choices at work here.As you can see on this map of where the front lines stood in 1916, the German trenches had this kind of weird westward bulge in northern France:That was called the Noyon Salient. Right before the events of the movie, the Germans constructed a whole secondary series of defensive trenches behind the Salient known as the Hindenburg Line, after one of their top commanders. Then they executed a quiet strategic withdrawal called Operation Alberich, in which they fell back from the original front to the Hindenburg Line.The basic idea was that the Hindenburg Line was straighter and they could defend it with fewer troops, which would free up extra men to go east to fight the Russians and knock them out of the war (this worked, leading to the Russian Revolution). The Germans deliberately destroyed everything of use in the Salient, and deported most of the able-bodied men to work in war production elsewhere while leaving women and the elderly behind.
The, “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 upon him as many mouths to feed as possible.”That’s a pretty horrifying concept on Ludendorff’s part, and if you wanted to make a movie about World War I that painted the Germans as the “bad guys,” it would in many ways be a smart thing to focus on.But that’s really not the film Mendes delivered. Even though you see the landscape that was left devastated by German occupation and withdrawal, he’s clearly crafted a film in which war itself rather than the German Army is the villain. That’s very much in keeping with predominant literary interpretation of the war that dominated in the 1920s and ‘30s, which cast it as pointless bloodshed.
By the same token, Mendes’s film reminded me over and over again of All Quiet on the Western Front which won Best Picture 90 years ago in 1930.
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