BFI London 2024 | "Blitz" Is Made-For-TV Filmmaking On The Big Screen
7/12 ForReel Score | 3/5 Stars
Blitz, the latest offering from Steve McQueen, aptly premiered as the Opening Night Gala film at the BFI London Film Festival - a deliberate move on his part to release the movie in the city with which it concerns itself. It paints a picture of London during the Blitz - and indeed, many shots are stunningly painting-like - centred primarily around Saoirse Ronan’s Rita and Elliot Heffernan’s George.
Ronan continues her accent journey around the British Isles, effortlessly slipping this time into an impeccable Cockney dialect, but it’s our central star, 11-year-old Elliot Heffernen, who holds the film together. Focusing a movie around a child-star is always a risky move, and many films have been ruined by an unwatchable central performance by a minor. But there’s no such issue here as Heffernen is able to switch effortlessly between gutsy and terrified, delivering both with ease depending on the scene’s demands. The supporting cast are solid, although it can be hard to believably deliver dialogue in such strong East End tones without sounding like a production of Oliver! The film isn’t entirely successful in this respect; things do feel a little hammy at times.
Image courtesy of Apple TV+
The filmmaking is strong across the board, Hans Zimmer's music being an expected highlight. He’s scored the piece like it’s a horror, all scratchy strings and swelling violins as bombs rain down on London town. There are several genuinely effective scenes of the Blitz itself in action, but the intensity of Zimmer’s score isn’t always matched by what’s on screen; it’s a shame McQueen didn’t lean more into the unnerving terror of the attacks. There’s a chilling, creepy horror to be made within this setting, but Blitz is not the film to do it. Similarly, a frustrating number of scenes begin with sirens blaring and crowds looking frightfully skyward, before cutting immediately to the aftermath the following morning. Budgetary constraints are likely the reason behind this decision, but it doesn’t help the issue of the film feeling Made-For-Television rather than Big Blockbuster. The opening scene being an out-of-control hosepipe feels almost laughably inconsequential. One or two more big set-pieces would have done wonders.
There are some moments of dialogue that are so on-the-nose it’s hard to believe they’ve come from the same pen as the writer of Widows or Hunger or Shame. McQueen clobbers his audience over the head with his themes without an inch of subtlety, and the film veers dangerously close to Sunday Night Drama as a result. There’s something quite old-fashioned about the entire thing, especially when taken in the context of more modern World War II offerings such as Dunkirk or 1917, both of which feel like they could only have been made in the 21st Century; Blitz feels like it’s from the 1980s.
Which is not to say the themes McQueen is bringing to the table are not of importance - they absolutely are. The film serves as a bitter reminder that even when London was being bombed into oblivion, Britons still found time to be racist. Some of the bigoted lines spouted towards our central characters are very deliberate echoes of modern-day Daily Mail talking points. It’s depressing to witness - have we really developed so little as a society in the 80+ years since the film’s events? McQueen is raising an exceptionally valid point with Blitz: racism is so deeply embedded into British Culture that we may never fully be released from it. Perhaps we can forgive the lack of subtlety with which McQueen delivers his messaging; perhaps he needs to clobber his audience over the head with it.
The film is certainly entertaining, but in the grand scheme of great World War II epics, Blitz is unlikely to find itself on any such list. It’s a solid addition to the McQueen canon, and a film that he clearly needed to make, but hopefully his next film will be closer in quality to his previous efforts.