JOURNEY’S END
Director Saul Dibb
Cert 12A 107 mins
This film is based on the 1928 stage play by R. C. Sherrif.
Set in a dugout in Aisne in the Spring of 1918, it powerfully portrays the tension and fear endured by the infantry officers of WWI. It recounts the experience of a young lieutenant (Asa Butterfield, known for his role as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) posted to the front and hoping to be reunited with an officer, Captain Dennis Stanhope (Sam Claflin), he had known and admired at school.
However, on arrival at the front, he finds that the older man is in a state of breakdown and alcohol dependence due to the constant deprivations of trench warfare and the pressures of commanding men under fire.
Final straw
The relationship is strained as idealism and cynicism confront each other. Stanhope’s only consolation seems to be drawn from the integrity of his fellow officer Osborne (Paul Bettany), who is tragically killed in a trench raid in which the younger subaltern has his first taste of battle. This loss is the final straw for Stanhope, whose unit is subsequently devastated by the German Spring offensive of that year. This is a most compelling portrayal of the personal side of a mass conflict in which statistics alone can blur the more intimate dimensions.
It is not an anti-war story as such, more about the sensibilities of the human spirit well conveyed in a highly engaging drama and all the better for not being ‘Hollywoodised’.
Fashionable platform for atheism
Following the tragedy of the so-called Great War, the conflict became a fashionable platform for atheism and a cynical anti-imperialism. However, the general state of European Christianity was in decline long before the war broke out. Edwardians were already departing en masse from the evangelicalism and piety of the Victorians as the liberal theology of the German universities took its toll.
This theological breakdown made it that much easier for the emerging liberals with no heart for God to absolve themselves and shift the blame to the Establishment. However, far from driving men to atheism, every war should be a reminder of our fallen state and the need for the redemption graciously offered by and in the one who is ‘the Prince of Peace’.
