BLITZ (2024)

From British writer/director Steve McQueen, a look at London during the worst of the WWII blitz, with the city being systematically bombed during overnight waves of air attacks by German planes.  The film seen & told largely from the POV of a biracial runaway boy via Dickensian adventures as he tries to find his way home after leaping from an evacuation train, and from his mom, searching the city to find him.  As filmmaking, surprising only in not being surprising, some McQueen fans unhappy with its relative conventionality, but that turns out to be a clever move by McQueen, allowing him to progressively complicate events & situations while neatly upsetting the usual we’re-all-in-this-pulling-together tropes of past tellings, without losing his audience or making social politics the main point of the film.  Agenda-free, it tells the truth before printing the legend.  Technically, some of the CGI effects fail to convince, and a couple of noble characters feel too saintly (they gum up the brisk tone), but McQueen keeps it moving with strikingly fine set pieces (a nightclub sequence & one in an UnderGround station are dillies) and two or three brilliant narrative ellipses that cut out when you don’t expect them to, leaving just enough unsaid to make us participants rather than onlookers.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Double-billing this with John Boorman’s HOPE AND GLORY/’87, his untouchable WWII memoir, is probably unfair.  But it does demonstrate the unique advantage in having your own skin in the game on a child’s POV memory piece.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/05/hope-and-glory-1987.html