I recently tried watching the 2019 film 1917 on the plane, and couldn’t finish it. The movie was a boring play-by-play montage of “horrors of war” tropes. 1917’s self-imposed artistic trick of showing every frame of the film as if it was recorded in one continuous shot didn’t help either, the “one shot” effect actually made it worse. I literally felt like I was watching someone else play a video game. Video games are fun to play, but boring to watch as a spectator. I realized 1917 is just like Saving Private Ryan, it starts with a contrived excuse for the main character to wander around the battlefield and see various bad things, some of which are statistically unlikely to happen to one guy, especially all within a few hours of each other. It’s video game logic that’s tedious and immersion breaking in a movie. After further thought, I realized 1917 is the extreme but logical conclusion of war movie tropes going back decades. At this point, we might as well fire everybody in Hollywood and just watch movies generated by AI. The tropes are so routine even a computer can string them together just as competently as a person. I have decided this particular war movie trend started with the 1976 movie Apocalypse Now, and will explain why.
