Blitz Movie Review: Steve McQueen’s New Film Goes Straight to the Heart!
Blitz Movie Review: Steve McQueen's New Film Goes Straight to the Heart! - Filmyhype
Director: Steve McQueen
Date Created: 2024-11-22 15:15
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Blitz Movie Review: Blitz marks the return to directing Steve McQueen after the success of Twelve Years a Slave and does so with a frighteningly current and intense story. Written and directed by McQueen, the film stars Saoirse Ronan and newcomer Elliott Heffernan, who play the two protagonists of this story. They also star Harris Dickinson, Benjamin Clementine, Kathy Burke, Paul Weller, and Stephen Graham. The film takes the audience back to London during the Second World War, besieged by bombings and the precarious reality of life under fire. With a direction that is very attentive to detail and plays with light and shadow, the film makes us reflect on the fragility of life in times of war, how precarious it is, and the psychological state of the victims of the conflict, placing a nine-year-old boy at the center and observing it through his eyes. We analyze the film in Blitz review.
Presented as a world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival and in Italy at the 19th Rome Film Fest in the Alice in The City, Blitz is the new film written and directed by Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen (Shame, 12 Years a Slave). In all respects, it is his return behind the camera for a project designed for theaters since the tepid Widows in 2018 (in the meantime, he directed the anthology of five television films Small Axe and the documentary Occupied City). And the downward trend seems to be confirmed again with his latest cinematic effort. In fact, in our review of Blitz, available to all AppleTV+ subscribers starting November 22, we will explain better why the long-awaited war movie by the British director and screenwriter his worst film is perhaps, or at least the one that generated the most disappointment during our viewing at the 19th Rome Film Fest. And we will tell you the reasons for our statement in the following paragraphs.
Blitz Movie Review: The Story Plot
In London, in the winter of 1940, death rains from the sky. The Nazis relentlessly bomb the capital of Great Britain, spreading terror, death and misery. Millions of people move under that infernal rain, and among them are Rita and her 9-year-old son George. Rita is a worker who raises alone the son she had with a black man, whose unjust fate we will learn about during the film. George is an intelligent and rebellious child, a character also formed by the difficulty of having a skin color different from that of the majority of people he knows. Completing the family is the wise grandfather Gerald, who has passed on the saving passion of music to his daughter and granddaughter, as a precious legacy for the comfort of the spirit.
After much hesitation, during yet another daring escape to a safe place at the sound of the sirens announcing the bombs, Rita decides to do what almost all the families in the city are doing, also at the invitation of the institutions, at that time: tear out their hearts to give their children a chance of salvation, putting them on trains that will take them to the countryside, where they will be welcomed by families who will take care of them, keeping them safe. George, however, is small and stubborn, and at nine years old he wants to stay in his house, with his mother, to play in his neighborhood, to enjoy his childhood, as he should be entitled to. So, while the train takes him south together with other children, he jumps off at an indeterminate point in the English countryside and begins his daring journey home. Between escapes, adventures, dangers, horrors, rubble, life-saving encounters, and unscrupulous ogres, George’s journey shows us war, misery, and injustice, through innocent eyes which, however, the flame of rebellion and the thirst for a more just life already shines.
She is Rita (Saoirse Ronan), and he is George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan). But in Blitz, we see little of them together because Rita makes the difficult choice to temporarily send George away to escape the massive attacks that are intensifying above the city. However, George jumps off the train that is supposed to take him away from London, where he decides to return by following the railway tracks backward. With this premise, McQueen breaks the film into two parts. In one he follows the mother, who desperately tries to keep together the remnants of her grief while working as a factory worker in a munitions factory, run entirely by women at a crucial moment of the war effort.
On the other, he relies on the perilous journey of George, who takes on the tones and adventures of a modern Pinocchio who encounters cats, foxes, and fire-eaters (Stephen Graham). Here, in this division of the story lies the original sin of Blitz, which lasts two hours flat. It’s simple: Rita’s story is decidedly more insignificant and devoid of real interest than George’s, who is the real protagonist of the film as McQueen intends it. How this clear imbalance emerges is quite sensational, which the screenplay considers in two sections because it is justified in comparison with a third pole, that of Rita’s companion and George’s father, Ife (Benjamin Clementine), a black man who is no longer there.
Blitz Movie Review and Analysis
The undoubted protagonist of Blitz is George, who after running away to return to London, runs into a series of adventures and misadventures that will mark him. His determination to return home is so strong that it pushes him to risk his life more than once, without having the real perception of the danger he is in. But it is through some of these experiences that the film invites us to reflect on very important issues. First of all, George is black with a father he has never known and although he was raised by his mother with love, he has never been fully aware of how others might consider him because of the color of his skin. So in a series of very touching scenes with another character, we perceive the need to discover more about his roots that help him to self-determine. Through his gaze, almost perpetually frightened, we witness the sad reality of war. The precariousness of the days he lives, of the scavengers who have no qualms about the death and destruction that the bombs cause. He finds himself in real danger surrounded by men and women who put their own survival first, even though in difficult times cooperation and compassion are fundamental.
In this, the film invites us to reflect on the difficulty of knowing how to give up our privileges. Part of this reality is also shown to us through Rita’s actions; how at work in her factory there is the seed of the population’s dissatisfaction; with charitable and support organizations for those who live in shelters. The London in which mother and son wander, without ever meeting, is a city on the edge of the spectral with gutted houses and the gray of the smog that mixes with the smoke of the bombings. As often happens, films also communicate with images, and in some cases, the messages arrive with greater impact and this is the case with Blitz. From its opening frame, you can notice the careful combination of images and the absence of sound, which increases the perception of being inside the film. The missiles that whip the air as they fall before impact, the sound of speed, and then the sudden cut right where you would expect an explosion, with the image of a field of daisies. The opposition between an image of destruction and death and that of the thriving life of a field of flowers.
Similarly, there is a chromatic opposition that is found throughout the film; the contrast between the red of Rita’s clothes, which stands out in the gloomy greyness of London and symbolizes the desire to live and regain freedom, and again the incandescent red fire of the bombs. But if on this point the film works very well, as well as makes you reflect on the themes it addresses, the performances of the actors, except the protagonist, are too one-dimensional. Saoirse Ronan certainly does not disappoint, because she manages to convey the pain of a mother as well as the state of anguish of war, but her character is reduced to a few scenes and also short ones where there is little introspection. Even the flashbacks are sparse, to provide the spectators with essential information certainly, but you have the feeling of knowing them too little, dedicating more space to them would have certainly guaranteed a greater identification for the spectators. In any case, in Blitz‘s review, we cannot deny how the film manages to leave something to the viewer, whether it is the seed of hope or a reflection on everyday life, it communicates with its audience, and this is what cinema must be able to do.
How much pain, how much misery, how much fear, how cold, how much dirt, how much injustice, how much hunger do we suffer in war? Not the one fought at the front by trained soldiers, but the one suffered by civilians. Men, but above all women and children, who fight their daily battle in cities under siege, where everything is in short supply and every day you risk your life and live hours of terror, where dangers multiply and scruples disappear, because everyone must survive, but where, on the other hand, that spark that always moves us, which is the force of life, always manifests itself in some way. And where can the strength of life reside in greater abundance, if not in a stubborn child who has decided that the Nazis will not take him away from his home and his mother, because he has a right to his childhood, war or no war?
George’s journey is that of a child Ulysses who wants to return home with all his strength, facing his sirens and his cyclops, finding himself a prisoner of the monsters that the misery of the London slums produces like Oliver Twist, stumbling upon a guardian angel who is also a mentor who, for the short stretch of road they share, guides him not only through the streets of the city but also in the acceptance of an important part of himself. George even happens to save many people from death just like a true hero and thanks to his being a child, finally reaches his longed-for destination, his Ithaca, where, however, just like in the Odyssey, nothing is as it was before. Blitz is not a film that will particularly surprise the public: it has an ultra-classic structure and, let’s face it, in some passages, especially in the second part, it seems a bit rushed because it throws a lot of meat on the fire and does not always manage to get to the bottom of it, as in the case of the racial theme that, in McQueen’s cinema is so important, and cannot be missing in this film either.
But George’s journey, and also his “counter-melody”, with the loving and heartbreaking search for his mother, played by an intense Saoirse Ronan (who in this film also brings out a beautiful singing voice), can reach the heart of those who watch it. The viewer immediately feels involved in the little boy’s ordeals, inevitably reflecting on the horrors that he has to live and go through due to the tragedy of war and the injustices, in which he finds himself, as an innocent, immersed. And we imagine that this was one of the director’s objectives, which is therefore fully achieved. If in the 2023 documentary Steve McQueen recounted the invisible wounds of a city decades earlier tormented by military attacks by Nazi Germany, in Blitz the English filmmaker seems to retrace the search for historical truthfulness and the ode to the resistance of an entire city by focusing his artistic objectives on his London. And so, also as the sole screenwriter of his latest cinematic effort, McQueen creates a new feature film that distances itself from the tones and obsessions that had made his previous works behind the camera recognizable and “raw”.
In Blitz, there is no longer the chilling realism of the prisons of Hunger, nor the disturbing and desperate psychosexual tunnel of his masterpiece Shame, nor the painful whippings and tortured bodies of the award-winning 12 Years a Slave. In Blitz, the metropolis of London is instead tormented between 1940 and 1941, when the air raids of Nazi Germany struck the beating heart of British society and politics, marking a worrying point of no return for the destiny of Europe itself during the world war. But rather than dwell on the military and political strategies behind the attacks and counterattacks, McQueen decides to tell the story of the London Blitz through the double focal point of his two protagonists: of little George (played by newcomer Elliott Heffernan) and his young and strong-willed mother Rita; the first fleeing from a train that would have taken him away from the affection of his mother and grandfather, the second desperately searching for a son who has escaped, at the mercy of the dangers of a destroyed city whose soul seems irretrievably lost beneath the rubble of the buildings gutted by the bombs.
A premise that is certainly effective and stimulating that of Steve McQueen’s Blitz, but which in the end leaves one rather perplexed by the total absence of elements and stylistic elements that had made the style behind the camera of the Oscar-winning director and screenwriter unmistakable, here sadly diluted in a story for the big screen that seems to recall more the good feelings of Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun than the horrors of 12 Years a Slave. The London Blitz is told through the defenseless and curious eyes of George, who from the moment he jumps from the train that would have taken him safe and sound to the countryside, crosses alone a bumpy path in search of his mother and grandfather, crossing a ghostly, inhospitable and dangerous London. In the process of returning home, George will meet some characters, many of them good-hearted and altruistic, others armed with desperation, cunning, and meanness.
A narrative journey that seems to recall in many places the best stories and novels of Charles Dickens (and in particular, Blitz seems to possess more elements in close contact with the famous Oliver Twist), preserving themes, quality, and levels of reading. Too bad, however, that the new film by Steve McQueen is also the most unpredictably traditional and disappointing, in some ways. Perhaps the film presented in Italian preview at the 19th Rome Film Fest and on Apple TV+ from Friday 22 November is the worst ever directed by the British filmmaker, or at least the furthest from the urgencies and objectives of the author of Hunger and Shame. A war movie told through the point of view of a child and his courageous mother that winks at several points to a certainly noble and didactic cinema of childhood, but which at the end of the day turns out to be far too sentimental even for the artistic standards of McQueen himself.
For these reasons, all things considered, Steve McQueen’s new and highly anticipated film is a disappointment on every front. His war movie set during the London air raid during the Second World War seems to deliberately not want to belong to the tones and languages behind the camera of the British director who in previous years we have learned to love and admire for his immediacy and implacability, narrative and visual. Despite everything, Blitz is more on the side of Steven Spielberg and Charles Dickens and is ultimately a film that is too traditional to really leave its mark. The drama of the working class that makes the social chain allows the narration to be able to allow for pauses of air and light, which are then obviously interrupted by the drama of the real situation. Steve McQueen finds his tone in this world of contrasts that not only investigates the Political and war history of the country, but also the social one, and in this aspect lies the greatest richness of Blitz, a story that lays bare and glorifies humanity that persists even amid destruction. For the rest, the film is a fairly canonical and elegant adventure, perhaps traditional, but sincere and overwhelming.
Blitz Movie Review: The Last Words
Steve McQueen’s new, highly anticipated film is a disappointment on every front. Because his war movie set during the London air raid during World War II does not seem to want to belong to the tones and languages behind the camera of the British director of Shame and 12 Years a Slave. In the vein of Spielberg and Charles Dickens, Blitz is a film far too traditional to leave its mark. You can still feel the style, but this time it doesn’t invade like the sequence shots of Hunger and it doesn’t get sucked into the environments like in Shame but rather accompany. You can see it in the scene of the sumptuous reception in a venue with the orchestra playing before a premonitory silence, a high point of a film where this time it is precisely an illusory greater control that makes it artistically explosive starting from the anti-naturalistic use of color. Yes, even in Blitz there is another strong authorial imprint. But this time he finally dreams big without having to shout it and it is first of all great cinema, which can exist despite Apple only on the big screen.
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Elliott Heffernan, Harris Dickinson, Stephen Graham, Hayley Squires
Directed By: Steve McQueen
Streaming Platform: Apple TV+
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three and a half stars)
