YMMV / 1917

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Colonel Mackenzie. In the trailer, his line "There is only one way this war ends—last man standing" is delivered as though he's going to charge ahead with the doomed attack no matter what anyone says. The film has a different context: he says the line after he's called off the attack—and after he's talked rather bitterly about how "hope is a dangerous thing" and Command will just order another attack next week. Is the Colonel spoiling for a fight to win glory and medals, or is he sick of the indecisiveness and slow pace of the war and just wants the thing over with?
  • A subtle detail adds to the question: in the film, the Colonel has a faint but noticeable knife (or bayonet?) scar under his left eye that's missing in the trailer.
  • The German pilot. Did he kill Blake out of cruelty, or was he panicking and in pain after being shot down, crashing behind enemy lines, and nearly burning to death? It's entirely possible he misinterpreted Blake's actions as an attempt to take him prisoner, to say nothing of the language barrier.
• Anvilicious: The film isn't remotely subtle about its message that War Is Hell and how Humans Are the Real Monsters.
• Award Snub: While the film wasn't expected to receive any acting nominations, the fact that George MacKay's acclaimed performance as Schofield was omitted can still feel galling.
• Awesome Music: Thomas Newman strikes again.
  • "Gehenna", the track played when Blake and Schofield reach the no man's land, perfectly conveys the sense of dread one must feel while looking at such a wasteland.
  • "Sixteen Hundred Men" and "The Night Window", played during the Signature Scenes listed below.
  • The eerie yet powerful “The Wayfaring Stranger” cover sung in the trailer and film by Jos Slovick, becoming a borderline Breakout Pop Hit when the film was released.
• Dancing Bear: The single-shot filming style, which most found to make the movie more visceral and engaging (helping to ground a time-sensitive mission in a very real sense of real time), but a minority of reviewers found it to be a needless or distracting gimmick.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: The Schofield/Blake pairing has taken off within the fandom. In complete fairness, we only learn that Schofield has a wife and child within the last few minutes of the movie.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Dunkirk fans since both of them feature the story of ordinary British forces in a World War via an inventive style of storytelling, with Dunkirk invoking multiple perspectives that blend into each other while 1917 invokes the style of a single take. A lesser known fact is that Lee Smith was Editor for both movies and won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for his work on Dunkirk.
• Heartwarming Moments: Schofield finds a french woman with a baby in Ecoust, and they share a moment of peace taking care of the child, after which Scho gives his milk and provisions to the woman.
• Like You Would Really Do It: With the film having already made a Dead Star Walking out of one of its two leads just before the halfway point, most viewers can probably guess there's no way they'd do the same thing again barely even twenty minutes later.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The other 1916 movies. ^explanation The movie's numerical title has led to jokes about how, especially with the movie coming out in an age of film franchises, it's part of an extensive series of films each taking place in a specific year.
    • Claiming that other movies titled with numerical years, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and 2012, take place in the same universe.
• Moment of Awesome: Schofield racing across the battlefield as soldiers go over the top to deliver his message to Colonel Mackenzie.
• Nausea Fuel: Schofield plunges his hand into what turns out to be a soldier's decomposed torso — the same hand that he just sliced open on some barbed wire.
• One-Scene Wonder: Because the film follows Schofield and Blake on a single mission, the big-name actors (Colin Firth, Andrew Scott, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch, Richard Madden) as well as any memorable secondary characters get only a few minutes of screen time. Apart from Strong who appears briefly in a second scene, they all get literally one scene.
• Paranoia Fuel: Crosses over with Nightmare Fuel, especially any scene involving combat where Schofield and Blake can't tell who's shooting at them, plus the scene in the abandoned bunker.
• Signature Scene:
  • The climactic crane shot of Schofield running parallel to the trench as the 2nd Battalion goes over the top so he can deliver his message. It's so impressive a shot that it was used in every trailer.
  • The scene where Schofield wakes up after having been shot in the church in the ruins of the French town. He wakes up, sees that there's a burning building in the background, as well as German flares flying through the air, illuminating the night sky and creating lots of dynamic moving shadows as Schofield traverses the town square. Reviewers and audiences all around describe this scene as being incredibly beautifully shot and one of the best scenes in the movie.
• Special Effect Failure: The shot of Schofield jumping off a cliff into a river to escape the Germans has the actor obviously replaced by a CGI double as Schofield looks less like he's falling and more like he's dangling off a rope.

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