Mendes’s first world war drama, filmed to appear as one continuous take, plunges the viewer into the trenches alongside two young British soldiers to breathless effect

For the opening of his 2015 Bond movie Spectre, director Sam Mendes (who won an Oscar for his first feature, American Beauty) mounted a memorable sequence set amid Mexico City’s day of the dead festival. In what appears to be a single continuous shot, the camera tracks a masked figure through crowded streets, into a hotel lobby, up an elevator, out of a window, and over the rooftops to a deadly assignation. It’s an audacious, attention-grabbing curtain-raiser widely hailed as the film’s strongest asset.

For his latest movie – an awards-garlanded first world war drama that has already won best picture honours at the Golden Globes – Mendes has returned to the lure of the “one-shot” format, this time stretching it out to feature length. Like Hitchcock’s Rope or Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, 1917 uses several takes and set-ups, seamlessly conjoined to give the appearance of a continuous cinematic POV, albeit with periodic ellipses. The result is a populist, immersive drama that leads the viewer through the trenches and battlefields of northern France, as two young British soldiers attempt to make their way through enemy lines on 6 April 1917.

George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman are perfectly cast as Schofield and Blake, the lance corporals enlisted to venture into enemy territory with a message for fellow troops poised to launch a potentially catastrophic assault. The Germans have made a “strategic withdrawal”, suggesting that they are on the run. In fact they’re lying in wait, armed and ready to repel the planned British push. Together, these young soldiers must reach their comrades and halt the attack – a race against time and insurmountable odds.

With meticulous attention to detail (plaudits to production designer Dennis Gassner) and astonishingly fluid cinematography by Roger Deakins that shifts from ground level to God’s-eye view, Mendes puts his audience right there in the middle of the unfolding chaos. There’s a real sense of epic scale as the action moves breathlessly from one hellish environment to the next, effectively capturing our reluctant heroes’ sense of anxiety and discovery as they stumble into each new unchartered terrain. This is nail-biting stuff, interspersed with genuine shocks and surprises. Whether it’s a tripwire moment that provokes an audible gasp, a distant dogfight segueing into up-close-and-personal horror, or a single gunshot that made me jump out of my seat during an otherwise near-silent sequence, there’s no doubting the film’s theatrical impact.

Yet for all the steel-trap visceral efficiency, it’s the more low-key moments that really pack a punch – those moments when we’re confronted with the simple human cost of war. As with Peter Jackson’s monumentally moving documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, 1917 works best when showing us the boyish face of this conflict; the pitiable plight of a young generation, old or lost before their time. It’s a quality perfectly captured by MacKay’s endlessly watchable eyes, which manage simultaneously to project ravaged innocence and world-weary exhaustion – fatalism and hope.

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“Hope is a dangerous thing,” says Benedict Cumberbatch’s Colonel MacKenzie, just one of a number of small roles filled by high-profile actors happy to play second fiddle. It’s a line that mirrors the central refrain from The Shawshank Redemption, another humanist movie tinged with horror that seems to haunt Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns’ script. There are evocations, too, of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, not only in the unflinching depiction of battlefield violence, but also in a plot device that sets soldiers searching for a brother in a desperate quest for redemption. In one of its more surreal (or perhaps transcendent) sequences, wherein a purgatorial night-time underworld is illuminated in a yellow phosphorescent haze, I was unexpectedly reminded of a dream scene from Waltz With Bashir, in which young men rise from the water, like ghosts walking among the living.

Throughout this Homeric odyssey, Thomas Newman’s pulsing score ratchets up the tension, travelling “up the down trench”, through the body-strewn carnage of no man’s land (a forest of wood and wire, bone and blood) and into the eerie environs of deserted farmhouses and bombed-out churches. Occasionally, we hear echoes of the rising crescendo of Hans Zimmer’s Dunkirk score; elsewhere, Newman’s cues are full of piercing melancholia mingled with distant threat.

In a film in which music plays such a crucial role, it’s significant that perhaps the most powerful scene is an interlude of song. Emerging from a river after a baptismal episode of death and rebirth, we find ourselves in a wood where a young man sings The Wayfaring Stranger. It’s an interlude that brings the characters and audiences together in silence, communally experiencing that still-small voice of calm that lies at the heart of so many great war movies.