At the risk of sounding a bit heartless, Blitz can feel at times like a greatest hits album. The film opens with a plain text definition of its titular event, after which it proceeds to depict just about every major scene or trope of wartime Britain in steady succession, with one quick detour into a misplaced Dickens novel. Director Steve McQueen’s knack for recreating history with contemporary flair means that watching Blitz is never a dull experience, but there is a creeping sense throughout that this is all material we’ve seen before, repeated without much in the way of new perspectives or innovations.
The film follows George (Elliot Heffernan, in his screen debut), a young mixed-race boy partial to frowning at any and everything that comes his way. Taking place over the course of two days, the story sees George's mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) persuaded with much reticence to send her son away for the duration of the war, while she remains in London with her father (Paul Weller). Rather than accept his exile to the countryside however, George jumps off his train not an hour outside of London, and embarks alone on a long and perilous journey home.
From here, McQueen adopts an episodic format to paint his tapestry of war-torn London, as George’s various misadventures see him reckoning with issues of race, criminality and death on a staggering scale, but each of these serials is as fleeting as it is thin. There is scarcely a moment in this film afforded the space to breathe, as the script cuts rapidly between George, Rita and various flashbacks to their time together with little rhyme or reason, never resting for sufficient time on any of its half-dozen social topics.
Rita’s panicked search for George comes through largely unscathed for its linearity (with a debt owed to Ronan, here just to remind us how much she can pack into a single look), but George’s arc gets far too tangled in McQueen’s grand knot of narrative threads and stitches, to the effect that it’s not clear what, if anything, the film is actually using him to say. The boy is of course repulsed when faced with racists and thieves, but as the flashbacks continuously demonstrate, none of these are new revelations to him or us. It’s all very cursory, to the point that even a third act life-or-death sprint through streets of fire can only palely imitate more substantial suicide runs in the likes of 1917 or All Quiet On The Western Front.
That is not to say that the film is without its moments of profundity; for me, there were two properly affecting beats positioned at the top and tail of the film. These exemplary sequences (both of which strip away most of the dialogue and supporting cast - not a coincidence), serve as more abstractly elemental depictions of the war through parallel motifs of fire and water, capturing through montage what McQueen continuously struggles to do elsewhere in his parable-heavy script.
Blitz is not without its strengths; being a Steve McQueen film, there was always going to be a hard floor in terms of quality, but it is an uncharacteristically scattered production, struggling to take shape as anything more than a box-ticking recreation of modern history’s most familiar iconography. The ending in particular suffers for this, hitting you over the head with easy emotions before pulling out to reveal a final image as grand as it is sterile. It’s a film of big pictures, but I don’t know that it has all that much to say about any of them.
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