Dir: Sam Mendes; Starring: George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Duburcq, Colin Firth, Richard Madden, Andrew Scott, Mark Strong. Cert 15, 118 mins.

Like a well-drilled regiment awaiting orders to advance, the awards nominations for 1917 have lined up for battle. Last week, Sam Mendes’s First World War survival thriller won seven Baftas, including Best Film and Best Director, while at the Golden Globes it was the surprise winner of Best Motion Picture.

It’s hard to object on a point-by-point basis, simply because every individual technical aspect of the film has been burnished to a brass-button gleam. The film follows two young British soldiers, played by George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman, on a death-defying no-man’s-land scramble to deliver an urgent message that could save 1,600 lives.

It is presented in just two extended, head-spinningly complex tracking shots, though both are in fact stitched together from shorter sequences, and the joins are mostly, if not entirely, invisible.

Many reviews of 1917 have described the film as unfolding in a single continuous take – but in fact there is one very conspicuous and pointed cut after an hour and five minutes, after which the screen remains entirely black for 16 seconds.