Blitz

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2024 REVIEW! It may well surprise you that so little of the Blitz has reached the screen. It combines two of cinema’s favorite things—that nice place from Notting Hill and bombs. And, one of the many sad takeaways from Steve McQueen’s Blitz—this year’s London Film Festival Gala Presentation—is that there are no bombs, or at least none that explode. I’m not asking for the War Against the Machines here, just the promised kinetics the cast can cower under. 

So, where one expected megatons worth of suspense, there is instead a heavily lubricated, extra-strong, double dose of ‘The Message.’ This is a shame, as the story at root is elegant enough to especially disappoint for so poorly working the film’s setting. 

“…George, a mixed-race boy who jumps off the train … during his evacuation from wartime London…”

We open in September 1940. Elliott Heffernan plays George, a mixed-race boy who jumps off the train in the countryside during his evacuation from wartime London. He wants to return home to Stepney to apologize to his mother (Saoirse Ronan) for not saying goodbye. This should be little use or comfort after she sent him to safety hours earlier. But no matter. This is not the first hollow or unflattering choice made by our cast.

Do not go to this film anticipating a wartime Fury Road with cockneys. We should be so lucky. Instead of a plucky voyage there and back, through night and fire and terrific surround sound, we get a London made of latter day, CGI-smeared talking points, where George and his mum, Rita, have shockingly little bite on any story.  

And again, the lack of apparent appetite for manifesting the apocalypse above London dramatically lessens interest. An opening shot of a loose fire hose dancing before flames seems to intrigue McQueen more than the Luftwaffe during the entire film. So, fine. but he has not eschewed action otherwise. And, bizarrely, and in much the same way that Douglas Adams turned an ICBM into petunias in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, McQueen magically turns every German bomb into a lecture on the racial intolerance of white Britons.