Shockingly basic and simplistic, especially from an acclaimed auteur like Steve McQueen, someone who hasn’t sheered away from digging to deep and uncomfortable places in the past. In a sense this feels like his big mainstream effort, it’s this prestige, Spielbergian war drama that’s easily palatable for the masses. It constantly hints at interesting directions (e.g. the position of women or blacks during this time period), but ultimately it makes all of these annoying Oscar baity choices that just turn me off as a viewer. The characters remain quite underdeveloped throughout, we don’t spend enough time with the mother and son to care about that relationship (which is kinda the point of the movie) and the directing can be awfully cheesy at points (the ‘we have to unite as people’ speech, the kids on top of the train, the cartoony overacting by some of the adults, Saoirse Ronan throwing away her work gear dramatically while she walks to the camera to look for her son, all the singing and party scenes which only feel like they’re in there to artificially lighten the mood). Still, besides some of my issues with the blocking and staging, the rest of the filmmaking is probably it’s biggest selling point. The set and costume design are fantastic, some of the cinematography is exceptionally well done (especially all of the big scale money shots during the third act) and there’s great attention to detail to the sound design. It’s not enough to make the end result stand out in this saturated genre, but it does give me hope that McQueen could potentially make a great crowdpleaser with better material in the future.

4/10