A very simple story about 2 English soldiers that must deliver a message to a different company of soldiers to stop those soldiers from walking into a trap set by the Germans. You could compare it to "Saving Private Ryan" [1998] because of the story line, but that wouldn't be fair. "Saving Private Ryan" is a much better movie.

"1917"'s biggest quality is the way it has been filmed. It looks like one long camera shot in real-time, for most of the movie's runtime anyway. This works surprisingly well for maybe half of the movie. Then it gets a little boring because of the weak story and a few clichés.

Who could have guessed there would be a friendly (and pretty) civilian and how many times can you naively trust an enemy soldier? There ain't really that many war scenes for a war movie, many of the soldiers are already dead and rotting when they meet them. Another problem is that having recently watched Peter Jackson's documentary "They Shall Not Grow Old" [2018] it all looks way too clean and pretty. There was nothing pretty about the trenches in WW1.

The movie tries to deliver a message about how meaningless this war really was, but it will mostly be remembered for the impressive camera work.