Roughly a century before 2019, when the film, 1917, was made, the Great War, or what would subsequently be renamed, World War I, was raging in Europe. Incredibly, soldiers had to live in dug-out trenches for years. It is no wonder that the war would bring the Spanish Flu to both Europe and America. In 2020, roughly a century after that flu, the coronavirus pandemic was occurring globally, yet without any war to have incubated that virus. By 2020, Europeans and Americans alike could not have imagined what life must have been like in the trenches. The film’s finest contribution, I submit, is in capturing that context, which in effect does a great deal of the story-telling. The film is thus a good illustration of the role that context can play in story-telling in an audio-visual medium such as film.
The full essay is at "1917."
