Blitz

With the Nazi bombs raining down around them, single mum "Rita" (Saoirse Ronan) has to take the difficult decision to evacuate her son "George" (Elliott Heffernan) from the London home they share with her father (Paul Weller). He isn't keen and so jumps from the moving train and tries to make it back home through a city populated by some kindly people and some Dickensian-style villains - and he encounters them both. Meantime, his mum is told of his absconding and as she tries to hold down he job in a munitions factory she must try to track him down. I thought Heffernan delivered really quite engagingly here, as did the rather menacing Kathy Burke with her brief appearances, but the film has a curious sterility to it. We know it's set amidst the random brutality of war, and the narration points out to us that that didn't all come from the skies above with racial prejudice never far from the surface, but it never looks or feels real. Clearly, Apple threw some money at it but the characters are all just too undercooked and there's an inevitability to the story that seems more about convenience than authenticity as it neuters the visceral humanity of the story. That last element isn't helped by a Ronan who seems very much to be going through the motions turning in an adequate enough performance but not one that wasn't being turned in on studio-based television dramas thirty years ago. Dickinson barely features and though it's all perfectly watchable, it's not really very memorable save for a young actor who gives us a knee-high view of man's venality and inhumanity.

Visually striking (costumes, sets, not too much CGI...) and with a great cast who do a wonderful job with the parts they play. I loved the shots of the women working in the factory!

What I'm struggling with is that it feels like it's not sure if it's about a boy trying to find his way home and encounters lots of obstacles along the way... or the impact of racism in London in the 1930s/1940s. I think both would have been excellent and interesting movies but what we end up with is something that feels both too much and too little.

I personally would have loved it if it focused entirely on George and, in trying to find his way home, he learns to more about himself and his heritage. We get some of that, but they're more like side quests that are cut short. I would have liked more Ife! What a sweetheart.

He experiences so much trauma, much of which takes the viewer by surprise, but we don't really see how that shapes him.

There are bunch of points that are clearly supposed to be tear jerkers but they just don't quite land for me.

The score was also pretty wild. Like an experimental horror film. War = horror?

I suppose one could argue that there's no satisfying end in war times.

It was really hard not to be frustrated watching Blitz but unlike a lot of movies that leave me underwhelmed all of the pieces where in place to create something truly great. Even if it's not a bad movie overall my frustration was only compounded by the fact that it never really felt like a Steve McQueen movie for all the wrong reasons. He usually tackles his subject matters with so much nuance and depth but Blitz just gives the sense that he bit off more than he could chew and created something that felt very shallow when all was said and done.

It's hard to call Blitz a complete waste of potential with the amount of truly impressive technical prowess on display. This movie is gorgeously directed and every cent of the budget feels like it was put on screen. I think it's a real shame most people won't get to see this in a cinema because the technical aspects really merit it being seen in that environment. The cinematography is beautiful in how it makes use of all the films distinctive different environments and it ended up feeling like one of the best looking movies I've seen this year. The use of sound in the bombing scenes is effective in just how terrifying they are and it reminded me of great war movies like Dunkirk and 1917 in the best ways possible.

There is so much acting talent in this movie, as there is with every Steve McQueen film, and while a lot of the actors ended up feeling squandered the ones at the centre manage to bring the film most of it's emotional weight. Seeing Elliot Heffernan in this movie can't help but astound me at his acting talent for such a young age. Basically the entire film rests upon his shoulders and he fulfilled that mandate perfectly. He's relentlessly endearing and likeable and for as weak as I found a lot of the writing to be he still managed to consistently tug at my heartstrings. Saoirse Ronan has proven to be quite the chameleon in all her roles and I thought she was great here as well. I thought her accent was on point and the few scenes she actually shares with Heffernan ensured that I fully bought into their connection. I no nothing about Paul Weller as a musician but if I hadn't already known this was his acting debut beforehand I would've been astounded to find that out after seeing the actual film. His performance is so loving and wholesome that I couldn't wait to see more of him on screen that he ended up becoming my favourite character in the whole movie.

The rest of the cast ultimately are let down but the films main weakness however and that is unfortunately the script. There are so many players crammed into the journey that the George character goes on and with their limited screen time they just ended feeling like caricatures. Harris Dickinson is great as a character that I found to be really likeable but not much more. I kept waiting for the moment where he was going to come into his own but it just never came and despite enjoying a lot of his scenes I don't really know what purpose he served. Stephen Graham is one of the most underrated actors on earth but his character did nothing for me. He just comes across as a generic villain who at times felt cartoonishly evil and I honestly felt like his entire part could've been removed from the film and it wouldn't have changed anything. Benjamin Clementine really did end up feeling like one of the best parts of the entire film in which his limited screen time actually allowed him to have a lot more impact. However, there's a scene in here with him that really rubbed me the wrong way in how it felt like such a simplistic take on race and segregation. It's well delivered by Clementine but it just felt a bit unbecoming of a good character and a great performance but also for McQueen as a filmmaker.

I didn't really find McQueen's depiction of this time period to be that successful because it really feels like it's lacking into two key areas; focus and depth. The film ends up feeling surprisingly messy despite tethering itself to the individual journeys on 2 characters. There's a non-linear aspect to the story that felt really awkwardly inserted and it just kept feeling like it was halting the momentum. I think a less-is-more approach would've really benefited the script because like McQueen's last film Widows I think Blitz tries to tackle too much. It feels like the script wants to tell an epic story about London as a whole during this time but trying to deliver all of that through the eyes of one child made a lot of the different characters and locations feel strangely positioned. There's a nightclub scene that has one of the films most effective moments in it but after it was done I questioned its inclusion to begin with as no character we know up to that point appears in that scene. Rather than feeling intimate the film ends up feeling really sprawling and the ways in which McQueen put this story together felt really clunky to me.

Because of the clunkiness I don't really feel as if the film ends up having much to say and it feels like a snapshot of a particular period of period history but without much real examination into it. The depiction of racism felt very hollow to me which is a surprise given how well it's been explored in McQueen's other works. The speech given by the Benjamin Clementine character felt like an over simplification of a complex issue and while the scenes in which racism is depiction are extremely effective it's not really explored in any kind of successful way. I also really did not care for the way the film concluded and it left me with a bitter taste of the film as a whole. There's an outstanding scene in which a tube station is being flooded that was truly terrifying but it ends so abruptly without any real conclusion that it actually kind off baffled me. The film starts with an evacuation and ends in a way that seems to imply that was the wrong choice but everything about the narrative conveys how dangerous this period was to live in so I was confused by what McQueen was trying to say with the final scene. It ended on a note that felt far too optimistic and like the rest of the film before it I didn't think there was much depth to be found.

Blitz isn't one of 2024's worst movies by any stretch but it's certainly one of its most underwhelming for me. I think it's beautifully acted and gorgeously shot but there's just not much going on under the surface. Most of the topics it tries to tackle end up feeling hollow to me and the whole thing came across as simplistic in all the wrong ways. I don't really mind the fact that this doesn't really feel like any other Steve McQueen film but what I do mind is that it feels almost devoid of the things that make his films great in the first place.

It's a story of a young biracial boy and his mother during the German Blitz of London over several days in late 1940. Rita (Saoirse Ronan) is a working-class single mom working in a munitions factory who lives with her musician father, Gerald (Paul Weller), and nine-year-old son, George (Elliott Heffernan). After the Blitz begins, Rita sends George together with a group of children on a train to the safer countryside. George is resistant, partly because of the racism he has faced in the past. He escapes from the train about an hour out of London and tries to return to his home.

The film follows George's spectacular adventures, both positive and negative, over the next several days and Rita's desperation when she learns that George is missing. A flashback to around 1930 briefly introduces George's father, Marcus (CJ Beckford).

"Blitz" features some great acting by Ronan and Heffernan. However, the script and the cinematography are overwrought and unbelievable. Computer-generated imagery makes it seem like half of London is aflame in three days. The script contains many partial stories with inadequate context and resolution. Style is featured more than content, which is a rotten shame, given the quality of the acting.

I cannot find one single flaw with this movie regarding the way it looks, from the costumes, styles, the recreations, the colors, even the effects, it all looks stunningly beautiful and believable to me.

Where I had trouble though was with the story and the length. I had a hard time becoming engaged and I kept checking the progress bar, which is pretty sad because by all accounts I should be loving this kind of movie. Only after George is separated from his mother it kind of lost me. The best moments were when he was with his mother and briefly with Ife, later on. And the brothers on the train, but that ends badly. All in all George is one lucky fella but he sure goes through a lot and somehow miraculously survives. Not everybody does and this movie shows that quite vividly and painfully. That is the other positive about it, it shows the horrors of the blitz and the struggles of regular folk to survive each night, while policemen were trying to turn them away at the entry to the subway.

I was mad at the very cheap trope of the gang of thieves, it's such a Victorian cliche. I mean if I wanna see a Dickens adaptation I will watch a Dickens adaptation.

Saoirse is beautiful in it, but I only found out Harris Dickinson is in it from the credits at the end.