Sam Mendes’ 1917 Gets Its First Gnarly Trailer

After the one-two punch of directing one of the best and one of the worst James Bond movies, Sam Mendes could do basically whatever he wanted next. He chose to make a grimy, but also beautiful, World War One movie. Here comes the first trailer for 1917, which I’m sure will be one of this year’s big award films. I mean, just look at it:

I think it looks quite good. I’m very fond of the idea that it appears to be a very simple and direct mission movie: go here, do this, or this bad thing will happen. There will be horrors and complications along the way and at no time will the task be easy, but not enough movies focus on a narrow job like this.

Other than that, we’ll have to wait and see. It almost seems inevitable that Mark Strong, Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch would be in this, but I wonder how big their roles really are. It seems like the youngsters are taking this one.

In any case, 1917 will get an award-qualifying run in December, but its main release will be in January. By then, you probably will have heard a lot more about it.