British Film Fest 2024 Review - Blitz
Images courtesy of The British Film Festival.
Steve McQueen’s sweeping war epic Blitz, which he wrote, directed and produced, is clearly a labour of love - but unfortunately the film feels bloated and disjointed during its 120-minute run time.
Set during World War II, Blitz follows nine-year-old George (Elliott Heffernan in his first film) who is sent unwillingly from East London to the safety of the English countryside by his mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan).
Shortly into his journey, George leaps from a moving train and begins a perilous journey back to his mother and grandfather Gerald (Paul Weller), but when he arrives back in London, he finds himself on the opposite side of the vast, bombed city. As he struggles to find his way home, he comes face-to-face with the dark, racist underbelly of London.
George’s experience of being sent away from his family is not unique. In fact, the film’s opening slides solemnly details that 1.25 million people, more than half of them children, were evacuated from London during the German Blitz in the 1940s.
But unlike other war epics which proudly preach of wartime heroism and resilient unity led by a white perspective, McQueen puts a young black boy front and centre of the film, illustrating the class and racial divide across a war-torn London.
McQueen drew inspiration from a picture he discovered while researching his miniseries Small Axe, which showed a small black boy dressed in an oversized coat and holding a large suitcase.
Envisaging what happened to that boy eight decades ago, McQueen’s imagination has run free with an array of possibilities, which at times feels like the film’s undoing.
As the lost boy tries to find his way home, the film itself starts to feel disorientated as an abundance of characters are introduced and then aborted in a flash, including benevolent air-raid warden Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), as well as Beryl (excellently performed by Kathy Burke) and Albert (Stephen Graham) who briefly force George to join their Dickensian band of thieves.
Meanwhile, in the 24 hours after she put her only son on a train, we see Rita working in a munitions factory, performing a musical number for the BBC, drinking at a bustling pub with her girlfriends, and signing-up as a volunteer at an air-raid shelter.
Redundant flashbacks and a litany of senseless musical numbers incoherently stop us from engaging in George's perilous adventure.
The simplistic beauty of George’s adventure is that the destination is clear, with little suspense to the outcome of our little hero’s journey. As the saying goes, the journey is more important than the destination, which makes it a shame that Blitz feels more like a scrapbook of contrived wartime escapades.
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Blitz played in select cinemas as part of the British Film Festival 2024 (6 November - 8 December 2024), and is now streaming globally on Apple TV+. For more info, click here.