After watching "1917", I think of a lot of things. Because of the exchange and work, I have the opportunity to stop and go more in the UK. From Oxford, where there are many colleges, to Bath where tourists are crowded, to the streets and corners of London, from the elegant Edinburgh to the desolate Inverness, you can see all kinds of monuments, sculptures or monuments to commemorate the First World War. Parks-I heard that there are more than 43,000 monuments alone.
From the summer of 1914 to the winter of 1918, more than 900,000 British youths died in a foreign land. Nobles and common people, college students and apprentices, volunteers and lads, no matter how different their identities and life experiences are, they all end up as strings of Arabic numerals and English letters on the stone. This is absurd, but what is even more absurd is this war.
The first is the lack of meaning. The so-called world war is the insatiable greed of the Allies, and the ambition of the Allies. Once the guns went off, Europe was upset. Perhaps being a soldier is just being cannon fodder, but in the end you have to figure something out. When the bones of Europe are dead, apart from the two white-eyed wolves of the United States and Japan, no one has succeeded in the battle. "Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism", but what millions of Europeans have earned for it is neither empire nor capital. The last four emperors lost their lives, a large number of capitalists went bankrupt, and countless laborers lost their lives. This is absurd.
Then there is the lack of a bottom line. All wars are inhumane, but in the past, people were still like masters of wars. Since the beginning of this war, people have become slaves to the war. To shape the humanism of modern Europe is to turn people into gophers and stuff them into the trenches, and spend them in the dark together with the opposite; the rationality brought by intellectual enlightenment is to stuff all kinds of materials that command people into rules into a meat grinder; The breakthroughs of the two industrial revolutions were more ruthless machines, stronger artillery, more insidious landmines, and endless patterns of chemical weapons, such as mustard gas, chlorine, phosgene, and benzyl bromide... This is absurd.
Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why there are so many good war films on the subject of World War II, but far fewer related to World War I. During World War II, the United States saved the world, the Soviet Union won awe, Britain and France continued the country, the Chinese used flesh and blood to shape the concept of a modern nation, countless small countries gained independence, Jews found their homeland, Germany and Japan ushered in a change... Soldiers When you die in battle, you may have the will to fight against the axis of evil, or the belief in creating a new world, and those who are low will have the consciousness of dying for the imperial martial arts or national glory. These are the highlight moments that can be made into movies. . And those young people who died absurdly for absurd purposes in World War I? A group of lonely ghosts in vain?
But those World War I monuments all over the UK seem to tell me that it is not the case. When I walked through the day and night of the Western Front with Corporal Scofield in the long shot of Roger Dickens in "1917", I was even more convinced that this was not the case.
When Brekla took over the delivery mission, he immediately questioned its danger. He walked through the no-man’s land during the day and complained about why his comrades brought him. He didn’t have an older brother to save him like Blake. And he hates war, he is a person who exchanges medals directly for alcohol. His skill is not good, his brain is not agile, and because he is in a foreign country, he has suffered many times of danger, and his body is bruised and bruised. This character setting, combined with the shooting technique of the film's long shot, gave me a strong sense of substitution. It seems that I have been sent to the front line, and my extraordinary performance is almost like that. But then I began to doubt my willpower. The atmosphere of the movie is tense. I have the same perspective as the corporal. I don’t know where the danger lies. The ghostly no man’s land, the snipers in the ruins, the short soldiers in the dark, The chase in the burning alley... I suspect that I might have a mental breakdown at a certain point.
But in order to complete the entrustment of his comrades and save more compatriots, Corporal Scofield finally chose to go forward. Whether he was in ruins, ruins, mud, rivers, trenches, or faced with bayonet bullets or shelling, he knew he had to give the letter to a guy named Captain McKinsey to stop his offensive. This is his mission and the whole meaning of his existence throughout the day and night. He called his comrades to push the truck, braved bullets to cross the broken bridge alone, used unskilled marksmanship to fight the enemy in the attic desperately, awkwardly strangled the enemy in the dark, and ran awkwardly, crossing the corpse river and squeezing through the trenches. , Rushing to the front line... I even think I am watching Forrest Gump, but at this time Corporal Schofield is indeed different from the beginning of the film. He has acquired something that does not belong to him but must be carried by him. courage.
At the end of the movie, he completed the task, although the task itself is absurd. First, as McKinsey said, they sent soldiers today to stop us from the offensive, and soon they will send one or two to tell us that Dawn initiates an assault. The only way to end this war is to "the last person dies." ". Second, the corporal may have saved the lives of 1,600 Devonshire soldiers in the spring, but more than 300,000 British soldiers will die on the Western Front in the following summer, possibly including all the people he saved and himself. How many miles did the front line advance? Second, almost everyone except the headquarters will question whether such a dangerous task is to be carried out by only two soldiers? However, in the era of lack of communication technology, the meaning of these big soldiers is "to give a message to the chief." The lives of one or two people are probably only worth so much.
I think the director is aware of this absurdity. There are many scenes in the film that show the cruelty and even nothingness of war. What impressed me most was the white cherry blossoms that were the same as Blake's hometown, which covered the entire river with the wind. The river water was shining with faint blue light, and at the end of the petals, there were pale and mutilated bodies that had been blistered. In this sense, I think that the director's failure to arrange this task (for example, when he rushed to the front line, everyone has launched a charge), may be even more shocking.
If war is the continuation of biological plundering of living space and resources in nature, and is the ultimate destiny that human beings as a living being cannot escape, then the various values that humans practice when burning lives in war are the unique proof that the human species was once unique. "Tragedy is the destruction of the valuable things of life for others to see." War itself is a tragedy, and even in a meaningless war like the First World War, even if the two soldiers finally get nothing, I still see humanity in their heads. The spiritual crown of thorns is the courage that is so great that it has surpassed individual life. The lion faces the group and will only quietly go away; while facing the devil of war, human beings may still have the consciousness of "I am going to die" in the face of the devil of war, even more horribly absurdly than the devil to die.
The monuments in Britain, like countless famous and unnamed war monuments, tombs, and tombs of mankind throughout the ages, are affectionate mourning, silent accusations, and tenacious shouts of fate.
(This article was first published on WeChat public account: Shuying Wuji)
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