Blitz
Blitz sees Steve McQueen torn between telling a rousing tale of 'Blitz Spirit' and delving into the darker impulses of war-torn Britain
Received wisdom tells us the Blitz was a galvanising moment in British history, a period of stoicism, of solidarity, of self-sacrifice. But Steve McQueen has never been one for following orthodoxy. His withering vision of London under fire in 1940, told mostly from the point of view of George (impressive newcomer Elliott Heffernan), a plucky nine-year-old lost amid the carnage, suggests this was far from our finest hour.
There are heroes here, like George’s single mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan), who takes a break from volunteering at a bomb shelter to search for her boy, and Ife (Benjamin Clementine), a Nigerian immigrant who takes George under his wing for a night while on his rounds as a blackout warden, but elsewhere this London teems with violent police, jobsworth underground workers and racists civilians who’d perhaps be more at home on the side that’s bombing them. There’s even a gang of corpse-robbing thieves who seemed to have spilled from a Dickens novel (particularly vivid Stephen Graham as a snivelling psychopath who’s Fagin, the Artful Dodger and Bill Sikes rolled into one).
Unfortunately, Blitz is only this spiky and weird in bursts. As well as a critique of the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' vision of WWII Britain, it also indulges in a fair few of its clichés. It seems like McQueen is torn between his natural impulses to take a sureal dive into the horrors of war and to tell the kind of rousing melodrama that a British war film at this grand scale usually entails.
Released 1 Nov by Apple Original Films; certificate 12A