So as I was sitting in the theater this last week, waiting for my movie to start up in full, the usual string of trailers for the usual kind of fall movies landed on something interesting: a particularly peculiar item that’s been on my mind a lot lately. Namely, it was the trailer for 1917, Bond director Sam Mendes’ upcoming movie about a World War I era race against time for one lowly soldier to save not only his brother, but entire legions of troops against a pending slaughter.,
The thing is, though, that it was sandwiched between the usual sort of World War II era movies that we’ve been forced to sit through pretty much since the war itself was still ongoing. In fact, looking ahead to the rest of the year, you have Midway, the Roland Emmerich-directed movie about the Battle of Midway, shot very much in his Bay-adjacent style as to suggest a markedly better version of Bay’s own Pearl Harbor (2001). There’s also the awards heavyweight A Hidden Life, Terrence Malick’s feature about a conscientious objector in Nazi-controlled Austria. There’s also Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi’s incendiary satire about a young boy whose imaginary friend is none other than Adolf Hitler. And if Google’s to be believed, we’ve got another half-dozen or so WWII-set movies coming out over the final three months of the year.
And yet there’s only one WWI movie, at least as far as I’m able to tell: only one 1917. The next best thing we have coming up is The Kingsman (2020), the rather unfortunate-looking, grimdark Kingsman (2014) prequel that simply seems to be using the time period as a narrative jumping off point to its post-war spy adventure, with essentially nothing OF that war in the meat of the film. And looking back, I can’t even tell you the last major release I saw set in the so-called War to End All Wars. I guess we had the documentary They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) that snuck into theaters last year like a thief in the night (I certainly wasn’t able to see that one in my local theater). I guess there was Steven Spielberg’s War Horse (2011) at the start of the decade, although you’ll be forgiven if, like everybody else, you forgot that that ho-hum war drama existed in the first place (Lord knows I did). Before that was Flyboys (2006), which apparently only exists for history teachers to show in class every so often. Oh, and I guess Lawrence of Arabia (1962) got a special rerelease as a Fathom Event a little while back, although to what degree we can count a nearly sixty-year-old movie is anybody’s guess.
The simple fact of the matter is that Hollywood is not very interested in World War I as a filmic backdrop, which seems really weird when you stop and think about it. For one, war is pretty much evergreen fodder for the film industry, with World War II and the Vietnam war proving especially deep wells to draw from in that regard. It’s not like it was all that long ago, either; sure, it’s a full century at this point, but the early twentieth century is nevertheless recognizably modern to today’s audiences, with the cars, countries and the economy looking especially familiar from our contemporary vantage point. The agreed upon “bad guys” (at least by the conflict’s end) even looking downright formulaic to audiences weened for half a century on the US’ exploits in WWII.
It’s tempting to say that the larger geo-political conflict (of which WWI is merely a part) is far too complicated this far removed in time, that we simply don’t collectively remember the ins and outs of colonialism and the complex treaties between nations as well as we need to in order to make sense of the scenarios playing out in front of us. That doesn’t track for me, however, given that we hardly need a historian’s knowledge of WWII in order to understand movies about it and that Lawrence of Arabia, which deals pretty strongly in turn-of-the-century politics, still plays phenomenally in front of a present-day audience. Most WWII movies, like Midway or Dunkirk (2017), focus on a single battle or military operation, the mechanics of which are relatively straight forward for even the most thoroughly uninitiated into that particular conflict. There’s no reason why the same would not be true for something set in the confines of WWI.
I think the reason is much more simple than the WWI-detractors would have you believe. It isn’t the political complexity of the conflict nor its distance in time nor audiences’ poor understanding of world history that’s predominantly to blame for the dearth of films on the subject. They all contribute to this, yes, but they are peripheral concerns at best. We get movies set in the past (often the much further-flung past), movies just as (if not even more) complex and even movies requiring even greater understanding of history in order to make sense of them. Downton Abbey’s proven to be a massive draw with audiences as both a soap operatic TV series and follow-up film. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) took the late summer crowd by storm just this year. The Favourite (2018) proved to be a crowd-pleasing… well… favorite during last year’s march toward the Oscars.
No, the real reason why I WWI movies haven’t found purchase in the current movie landscape is more a matter of morals than understanding. Vietnam is a popular source of inspiration specifically because it was such an unjust war, because it’s an easy shorthand for anti-war and even anti-US sentiment on the silver screen. WWII, meanwhile, is that last time that the US played the good guys on the global stage: ideologically opposed to the absolute evil of Nazi Germany. WWI, however, is much, much murkier when it comes to concepts of good and evil, right and wrong. It was a conflict of pure politics: that is to say, the platonic ideal of politics. Everybody was more-or-less equally culpable, even the US, who only got into the war properly because it was caught up in illicit gun-running schemes (or did you really think that the Lusitania was sunk for no good reason whatsoever?). WWI is complicated, yes, but complicated in its morality, where we can’t simply identify the US (or any other actor) as being the one to properly root for.
And it’s a real shame that that’s getting in the way of the conflict getting its cinematic due. It is a rich and infinitely interesting period of time that has hardly been touched by the medium, and is fertile ground for exploration and a welcome change of pace from the usually WWII-Vietnam-War on Terror trifecta that has modern movies as locked up as they are. I guess what I’m really trying to say is to go see 1917 when it comes out, because if you don’t, who knows when that war will get a proper film again.
