‘Blitz’ Review: McQueen’s Grandest Vision Yet

War movies are as familiar to cinemagoers as popcorn, Coca-Cola, and Nicole Kidman’s AMC intro, but Steve McQueen’s newest film, “Blitz,” takes on this genre with a fresh, if somewhat muddled, twist. “Blitz” follows George (Elliott Heffernan), a young boy who has been sent away from London by his mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan) during Germany’s WWII bombing campaign. George escapes his train to the countryside and attempts to get home, but he is swept into a set of harrowing experiences that delve into the underbelly of war-torn London.

Steve McQueen — the director behind “12 Years A Slave” — takes on the war film with a unique perspective, bringing technical excellence and obvious passion to the project. Yet “Blitz” ultimately lacks the emotional core that its grand narrative desperately needs.

“Blitz” is overwhelming. Bombs rain down on London, British society is trapped in chaos, and it’s easy to become detached from the horrific scenes. However, the performances at the core of the film help to ground the narrative. Saoirse Ronan notably puts her all into the performance of Rita, a young mother worried sick by her son’s escape. Ronan’s performance balances joy — viewers get glimpses of her passionate singing, dancing, and pure love for her son — with deep pain — she cries in grief for her lost child and anger at Britain’s racism toward mixed-race children. Elliott Heffernan also brings complexity to his role as a confused and scared child, and his performance is even more impressive when one considers that he is only eleven years old.

The anxiety of war in “Blitz” is accentuated by the film’s excellent soundscape. Hans Zimmer — whose own mother lived through the Blitz — builds an eerie, screeching collection of music that emphasizes the fear that WWII ingrained into daily life.

In an interview with NPR, Zimmer recounts a conversation with Steve McQueen: “ I said to Steve, look, the only way I know how to do this is to write maybe probably the most unlistenable, most horrific and terrorizing score possible because I want the grown-ups to feel the way a child would feel.”

Zimmer achieves this effect perfectly. The music makes the images of fire, bombs, and broken buildings feel all the more horrifying and leaves the audience on edge at every moment. McQueen places Zimmer’s anxiety-filled music both at moments when the plot is heart-pounding and during beats where nothing is happening, which emphasizes how fear was integrated into everyday existence during WWII. The sound team supplements Zimmer’s music beautifully, and sonic elements like fire, train engines, and water build their own roaring symphonies that complement Zimmer’s work. On every level,“Blitz” impressively leverages sound to its advantage.

McQueen also utilizes “Blitz” to make some of his most impressive historical set pieces to date, which combine special effects and set design to beautiful effect. “Blitz” is meant to encapsulate the range of perspectives that were affected by the war, so viewers are taken from factories to decadent night clubs to subway stations serving as bomb shelters. One memorable sequence takes the viewer on a swirling trip through a nightclub, which is then silenced by the whistling of a dropped bomb.

The set design (Anna Pinnock) and costuming (Jacqueline Durran) are stunningly splendid and contrast sharply against the simple, impoverished world that George and Rita inhabit. The final shot of the movie, which looks out over a bombed and burning London, is also eye-catching and uses CGI to realistically expand the historical horizon. The film’s set design and special effects place the viewer into an incredibly realistic version of the past, which makes the narrative’s events seem even more relevant.

Yet, among the epic set pieces and special effects, McQueen’s vision seems to lose track of its deeper purpose. “Blitz” tries to be an encyclopedic, Dickensian vision of WWII London that looks at the Nazis’ bombing through the eyes of historically underrepresented groups. Viewers see how immigrants, minorities, women, children, the disabled, and the elderly grapple with the conflict while also navigating a society not built to protect them. McQueen tries to make the predictable war drama something more than a rehashing of Britain’s strength in the face of conflict, injecting commentary on the city’s underbelly of racism, prejudice, and cruelty.

Yet, in attempting to be so expansive, “Blitz” ultimately fails to give every part of its narrative sufficient weight. The movie wants to be a swirling portrait of a city in chaos, but it also wants to be a heartfelt mother-son story and the portrayal of a young boy accepting his identity, but it never does any of these threads complete justice.

Steve McQueen has taken viewers from the antebellum South to Northern Ireland to New York City through his films, and it feels appropriate that he has brought his grand directorial vision to London’s capital. “Blitz” revels in all that McQueen excels at — beautiful visual sequences, exceptional sound design, and historical plots — but it fails to land emotionally. McQueen’s film is epic, awe-inspiring, and ambitious — and, at the end of the day, it doesn’t leave much of an impression.

—Staff writer Hannah E. Gadway can be reached at hannah.gadway@thecrimson.com.