Almost everything I want to say about this movie, I can't say at the risk of sounding overly cliché. But all those things people say about how immersive this movie is... It's true. People saying how good the cinematography is... Uh, yeah, it's Roger Deakins. Of course it's going to look gorgeous.

There are three things I was most impressed by, though:

- I pride myself in being able to figure out when a movie uses something to hide a cut in order to make a shot seem like it was done in one take. Starting out, I thought I'd make a game of pointing out all the hidden cuts I could find. I actually found very few of them, partially because they did an excellent job of hiding them, but mostly because I became so engaged with the movie that I stopped paying that any attention.

- The blocking is masterfully done! The way we constantly see the camera move from in front of actors to behind them matches perfectly with what the scene requires, and paces each scene very well. It makes me wonder just how this was shot to make it flow so smoothly together.

- It's difficult to think about just how much gets lost from cutting thousands of times in a movie until you see _1917_. I'm not saying every movie should be made like this one, but I don't think this movie would have worked nearly as well if it had been edited normally. Every frame is brimming with detail, and it manages to always have the camera at the right angle looking at the right thing. The cinematography is perfect, essentially.

I so, so, so wish I saw this movie in theaters instead of brushing it aside as an artsy gimmick in a genre film with which I'm not well acquainted. It doesn't matter if you like war movies or not, if you like movies at all, you'll be sure to enjoy _1917_.