Saw this yesterday...I thought it was very poor.

It was like Dunkirk in that they didn't develop the characters at all, and relied purely on the visuals to sell the film, which admittedly, were very good. The directing deserves praise, the one shot thing was cool. But the stunning cinematography and directing trickery comes across as gimmicky when it's not backed up by a great script.

At times I thought I was watching the WW1 equivalent of The Revenant. Some moments were just absurd.

There was no depth to it at all.

Also the tokenism was cringy and historically inaccurate. Sikhs and black people would not have been serving in English regiments at the time, it's absurd. I know it's just a movie but it really breaks the immersion and I find it insulting to everyone involved.

They want to be more diverse, why don't they take an actual risk and tell the story of the Sikh regiments who served in WW1, because they did. That would be way better than these fake token gestures

It started getting silly for me the moment the German plane crashed directly on top of them.

What are the chances! And then after pulling the pilot out of the burning wreckage and saving his life, he stabs one of them to death?!

Is the moustache twirling, baby killing German soldier back in fashion?

I take back the tokenism critique after further reading. It seems British army regulations did allow for such a thing to happen, and there appear to be real examples of the intermingling of different races in regiments.

I'll choose to believe Sam Mendes portrayal of that was done with the best of intentions, rather than it been mere pandering.

Also I bet this film was a much different experience in the cinema.

I'm gonna stop posting about this now, but I was disappointed in this after all the good stuff I heard about it.