In director Sam Mendes’ new film “time is the enemy”, or so its publicity billboards suggest. To the mix, I would throw countless Germans, giant rats, bomb cratered quick sand, and all the other deadly obstacles one can imagine crossing No Man’s Land in the spring of 1917. That – so far as plot goes – is the score as Lance Corporals Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) are tasked with delivering an order to halt an advance that, unbeknown to its cut off commander, would see yet another foreign field remain forever England…
As if the massacre of their countrymen (all 1,600 of them) weren’t high stakes enough, Mendes and his co-writer, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, number Lance Corporal Blake’s brother among the doomed Tommies advancing into the deadly German trap. Much like Sam and Frodo traipsing through the dead marshes of Middle Earth, Blake and Schofield ascend their dug out for the apocalyptic wastes of the front line and their unexpected journey begins. As time ticks on, they must hop trenches, shimmy barbed wire, outrun collapsing mineshafts. This is a Mordor of quite a different imagining – not a Nazgûl in sight.
