Coming to theaters across the nation soon, there is a powerful World War I picture, shot with the respectable ambition of simulating a single unbroken take. The bad news is, Steven Luke’s cliché-ladling combat picture is not that refined movie (called “1917”). What we have instead is “The Great War,” a start-to-finish inept battleground film set in the waning days of WWI around the Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, so clumsy in its handling of racism within the American Expeditionary Forces that it makes some of the racial mishaps of “Green Book” seem subtle in comparison.
With a bewildering “let’s set our differences aside and work together” attitude throughout, Luke injects the film with a generically sappy score whenever a racist white trooper realizes his bigotry and offers to share his water with a black comrade as a symbol of his newfound decency or a teary-eyed white lieutenant doles out a...
With a bewildering “let’s set our differences aside and work together” attitude throughout, Luke injects the film with a generically sappy score whenever a racist white trooper realizes his bigotry and offers to share his water with a black comrade as a symbol of his newfound decency or a teary-eyed white lieutenant doles out a...
- 12/11/2019
- by Tomris Laffly
- Variety Film + TV
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