Saoirse Ronan and Paul Weller’s new Second World War drama Blitz has been hailed as “incredibly moving” and “emotional”.
Leading lady Saoirse, 30, who plays Rita in the new film, has “struck a chord with viewers” in this gripping drama.
The Apple TV+ film Blitz, directed by Oscar winner Steve McQueen, details a group of London natives in the midst of aerial bombardments during the international conflict.
Blitz, a moving drama set in September 1940, follows the stories of a group of Londoners during the events of the bombing of the British capital in World War II.
Some of the characters in this fun and absorbing film have distilled the precious Blitz spirit into something bitter.
For example, while everyone else is removing the barrel, there is a criminal gang at work, stripping the dead of their jewelry.
McQueen’s focus is a family of three in the East End. Single mother Rita shares a semi-detached house with her nine-year-old son George (impressive newcomer Elliott Heffernan) and her father Gerald (played by musician Paul Weller in his screen acting debut).
McQueen, whose own parents also came from the West Indies, by all accounts, was inspired to create this story by a single wartime photograph of a young black evacuee.
Blitz, Saoirse Ronan (pictured) and Paul Weller’s new drama about the Second World War, has been hailed as “incredibly moving” and “emotional”.
Leading lady Saoirse, who plays Rita in the new film, has “struck a chord with viewers” in this gripping drama (Elliott Heffernan pictured)
Race and racism loom large. But at its core, it’s an old-fashioned adventure story about a spirited boy who becomes enraged when his devoted mother reluctantly decides he should be evacuated and is unconvinced by his empty rhapsodies about the countryside. “Cows and horses smell,” he says.
A little later, he jumps off the train taking him to safety and embarks on his arduous odyssey home.
Blitz is a chronicle of that return journey, which unsurprisingly, for dramatic purposes, is fraught with danger.
Yet McQueen still cleverly subverts our expectations, evoking The Railway Children (1970), when George boards another train and befriends three young brothers who have done the same, only for tragedy to halt our own sentimental journey. .
There are also clearly deliberate echoes of Oliver Twist, when a sort of Nancy figure presents George with Bill Sikes’ version of this story, played by Stephen Graham, with Kathy Burke as his grotesquely painted accomplice.
His gang of thieves is supposed to have a real basis.
Throughout, McQueen skillfully weaves reality with fiction.
The aftermath of the Paris Café bombing (which actually occurred in March 1941) is meticulously recreated, and there was actually a vociferous campaign by Londoners to be allowed to take shelter in tube stations, which clearly leads me to Paul ‘Going Weller underground.
The Apple TV+ film Blitz, directed by Oscar winner Steve McQueen, details a group of London natives in the midst of aerial bombardment during the international conflict.
Blitz, a moving drama set in September 1940, follows the stories of a group of Londoners during the events of the bombing of the British capital in World War II.
Some of the characters in this fun and absorbing film have distilled the precious Blitz spirit into something bitter.
Blitz was released in theaters on November 1. The film opens spectacularly with a firefighter knocked unconscious by a runaway hose, and then there’s a brilliantly orchestrated scene in which a subway station floods.
McQueen’s focus is a family of three in the East End. Single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan, left) shares a semi-detached house with her nine-year-old son George (centre) and father Gerald (played by musician Paul Weller in his big-screen acting debut).
The so-called ‘Modfather’ is boldly but perfectly cast as a wartime East End grandfather, and looks exactly like he could be Ronan’s father.
She is also wonderful, as she always is, as a mother desperate with worry.
But it is on Heffernan that the credibility of the story rests, and his young shoulders carry the burden comfortably.
The other thing McQueen has to get right – and does – is the particular tumult and trauma of the London Blitz.
The film opens spectacularly with a firefighter knocked unconscious by a runaway hose, and then there’s a brilliantly orchestrated scene in which a subway station floods.
Blitz was released in theaters on November 1.
