A dark, rainy night in Belfast, 1971. Groups of Catholics and Protestants huddle in their hideouts, planning new ways to bomb each other. Some care about their causes. Some just want to mess each other up. Civilians hide in their apartments waiting if the next day might be the one where they're caught in a riot or a bombing. The city is a warzone due to tensions boiled over by political inequalities centuries old.
" '71" is a grim, traumatic exploration of that night from the perspective of a rookie British soldier displaced from his unit during a riot earlier in the day. It is ceaselessly intense, filmed in the contemporary shaky-cam "you're really there!" mode. While it brings nuance to the combatants on all sides, " '71" is ultimately another entry into a crowded stable of war movies that short on story in favor of slavishly underlining the key truths: that war is a hellish, complex reality of which we are all capable.
’71 - 2015 FILM STILL - Jack O'Connell - Photo credit: Dean Rogers Roadside Attractions
Jack O'Connell is a rising star, but in " '71" he's a bit of a cipher. His performance is good, but his character is a point-of-view for the audience and not much more. His lack of compelling character development doubles down on the grimness that pervades the movie and dilutes the complexities of its narrative. Stories are simple things, but they are more than atmosphere and theme. Without a character who grows and changes with the story, we're left floating in what feels like a mess of ideologies, violence and trauma.
Which is what " '71" wants to convey. And it succeeds. But it never manages to make the mess compelling. Director Yann Demange and writer Gregory Burke depict war with slavish, even-minded accuracy, but it only takes the first 20 or so minutes to establish how awful war is. Hell, going into the film, we know it's not going to be flowers and butterflies. Without a central character of real substance, the movie devolves into a masochistic practice of "Oh, wow, I'm glad that isn't *my* culture this year."
" '71" deserves its fair share of credit for dwelling on the topsy-turvy world of the Troubles, but it begs the question: How can filmmakers tell both a compelling story about a soldier in war without succumbing to the ease of making a movie that focuses on how much war is awful at the expense of character? I don't know. But " '71" is a brutal exercise without much to recommend it for anyone but the most ardent war movie fans.