X
- 2015
- R
- Black Label Media
- 1 h 39 m
- 2015
- R
- Black Label Media
- 1 h 39 m
Summary ’71 takes place over a single night in the life of a young British soldier (Jack O’Connell) accidentally abandoned by his unit following a riot on the streets of Belfast in 1971. Unable to tell friend from foe, and increasingly wary of his own comrades, he must survive the night alone and find his way to safety through a disorientating, ...
Directed By: Yann Demange
Written By: Gregory Burke
- 2015
- R
- Black Label Media
- 1 h 39 m
- 2015
- R
- Black Label Media
- 1 h 39 m
'71
7.5
Where to Watch
Summary ’71 takes place over a single night in the life of a young British soldier (Jack O’Connell) accidentally abandoned by his unit following a riot on the streets of Belfast in 1971. Unable to tell friend from foe, and increasingly wary of his own comrades, he must survive the night alone and find his way to safety through a disorientating, ...
Directed By: Yann Demange
Written By: Gregory Burke
Where to Watch
Top Cast
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 34 Critic Reviews
83
94% Positive
32 Reviews
32 Reviews
6% Mixed
2 Reviews
2 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
Based on 34 Critic Reviews
83
94% Positive
32 Reviews
32 Reviews
6% Mixed
2 Reviews
2 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Swift and exciting, with no taste for the usual war movie heroics, first-time feature film director Yann Demange's film belongs on a short list of immersive, rattling, authentic fictions right next door to the fact of survival inside a war zone.
[An] excellent, tensely controlled thriller.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 149 User Ratings
7.5
83% Positive
124 Ratings
124 Ratings
13% Mixed
19 Ratings
19 Ratings
4% Negative
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 149 User Ratings
7.5
83% Positive
124 Ratings
124 Ratings
13% Mixed
19 Ratings
19 Ratings
4% Negative
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
Great movie. I read complaints about the accents and the fact that you don't know who the "good guys" are. That could only have been written by an American. After I watched it I was grateful that it wasn't produced by or solely for an American audience because it would have been dumbed down considerably. Smartly written and very well acted. A roller coaster of a movie that seemed to never let up. I laud the fact that this film did not take sides and has a nuanced approach to what it addressed regarding the conflict in Norther Ireland. I've read my fair share on it, and it was a quagmire of competing forces that sometimes found the same sides pitted against one another. This movie showed that.
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Republicans or loyalists, Catholics or Protestants – this film is not about political or religious trenches. People died, but it’s more than the bombs, bullets and bodies. The more fascinating damage was done to psyches and souls, and Demange, with ’71, comes for yours.
The setting may be Belfast ’71, but Demange’s sensibility — first-rate suspense coupled with black-and-white politics — is much more James Cameron ’86.
A master class in structure, a meticulously constructed period piece, a powerful anti-war film, and rarest of all, a thriller whose tension and suspense feel genuinely earned.
Last seen in “Starred Up” and Angelina Jolie’s “Unbroken,” O’Connell continues to bring equal measures of toughness and vulnerability to his characters. Despite his good looks, there’s an everyman’s quality to him, which he uses to full effect in ’71.
Demange is a strong storyteller and masks the script’s tendency to nod to every opinion and social division by offering a masterclass in tension as soon as his dramatic bomb starts ticking.
I really enjoyed this film and thought the acting by Jack O'Connell was superb, he played a young inexperienced soldier thrown into a desperate situation excellently. Its a gritty, tense, movie and once it got started I was engrossed until the end. Its a very believable story, and doesn't take sides in the conflict, its more of an anti-establishment film and shows the corruption on both sides.
It has a great story, excellent cinematography and superb acting, I would recommend it.
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In “ ’71,” an excitingly jumpy, finely calibrated chase movie about a British soldier caught behind enemy lines, the director Yann Demange goes from zero to 100 in the blink of an eye. The soldier is played by Jack O’Connell, last seen being brutalized (in more ways than one) in “Unbroken,” the Angelina Jolie biopic about Louis Zamperini. That movie proved a bad fit for Mr. O’Connell, who never put down roots in the character, an Olympian turned World War II captive, because Ms. Jolie couldn’t or wouldn’t let him. By contrast, Mr. O’Connell runs away with “ ’71,” in which his character’s every emotional, psychological and physical hurdle makes for kinetic cinema.
I mean run literally. The movie is set against the sectarian violence in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in a year that opened with the tarring and feathering of several men by the Irish Republican Army. By February, a British soldier was dead as were a number of civilians, and several riots had convulsed Belfast. It’s against this backdrop that Mr. O’Connell’s character, Gary Hook, arrives with a regiment of similarly inexperienced soldiers. Smoke pours from burning cars, some strategically bookending streets like barricades. During the day, children play among scattered bricks that they sometimes hurl at the soldiers (when they’re not lobbing bags of feces instead). At night, the mazelike streets belong to the war and the running people, British and Irish, stoking the flames.
When you meet Gary, he’s a wide-eyed recruit on the receiving end of another man’s fists. He doesn’t talk much. The movie, written by the playwright Gregory Burke, favors narrative devices like foreshadowing and doubling over the usual blabbity blab, an approach that dovetails with Mr. Demange’s talent for elegantly deployed action. The blood that pours from Gary’s face bluntly sets the scene but also foreshadows the river of red to come. Similarly, the obstacle course that Gary and his fellow soldiers soon run, leaping and going belly down in the muck, forecasts the more punishing hurdles to come. Meanwhile, a short, elliptical sequence of Gary and his young brother, Darren (Harry Verity), adds some personal detail even as it presages the later appearance of a second boy.
That may sound too schematic, but Mr. Demange moves so effortlessly and rapidly from these introductory interludes that you may not notice all the parts shifting into gear. He knows when to linger in the moment, too, as when Gary watches Darren at a home for children, a place that, you intuit, the older brother knows inch by loveless inch.
You never learn why or how the brothers came to this sterile holding pen. As the story unfolds, though, you wonder if being parentless explains the seriousness of Gary’s gaze and his mournfulness. His immaturity and the military may explain his reserve, but it’s also a good guess that his survival instincts were honed in that home.
Men and women have been sprinting across screens since Eadweard Muybridge turned his cameras on them in the late 19th century. The silent clowns ran as does Jason Bourne, and, at times, it seems as if the movies were made for ready, set, go, go, go: Buster Keaton bolting in “Seven Chances”; Cary Grant fleeing in “North by Northwest”; Franka Potente racing in “Run Lola Run.” Mr. Demange makes his feature directing debut with “ ’71,” but he already knows how to move bodies through space and the complex choreography that he’s worked out in this movie is a thing of joy. One minute, Gary is ripping down an alley with the camera jostling after him, as if desperate to keep up; the next, he’s careering down a street, the camera now steadily gliding alongside him.
Much of the movie takes place in a single night, which certainly worked for James Joyce in “Ulysses.” Whether or not the filmmakers self-consciously borrowed from that book’s chapter set during one hallucinatory Dublin evening, Gary’s journey into this other night-town is similarly a voyage into the self. In between sprints — he’s soon fleeing a breakaway faction of the I.R.A., led by an eager killer, Quinn (Killian Scott) — he meets several souls who help him out, sometimes a bit too conveniently, including a father and daughter, Eamon (Richard Dormer) and Brigid (Charlie Murphy). What Gary doesn’t know is that the biggest threat may come in the form of an undercover British unit led by a twitchy captain, Browning (a ferocious Sean Harris). The enemy of Gary’s enemy is closing in.
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’71 is a ball of confusion - much like war. This anti-war film is a day in the life of a young British soldier trapped behind enemy lines. With so many characters hunting him down- why, who is fighting for what - and how - is hard to track. And subtitles could save solid performances lost on American ears because of thick Irish brogues. Yet after the smoke clears, first time feature director Yann Demange is a career to follow - his horrific shock and awe moments are more powerful than American Sniper.
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"’71" was written by Gregory Burke and directed by Yann Demange. It stars Jack O’Connell who portrays an accidentally abandoned British soldier during the conflict in Belfast and how he attempts to survive in this hostile Catholic environment as he tries to rejoin his regiment. More than anything, the film seeks to examine the deep seeded hostility and social unrest among the British Catholics and the differences even amidst their own leaders and followers. Unfortunately, the film is weak in this regard and never stays with one character long enough to investigate and understand his or her`respective motivations and beliefs. The film is also burdened by the fact that the thick Irish brogues make it difficult to understand what the characters, especially the key ones, are saying. English titles certainly would have helped.. A loose script and difficulty in knowing who are and who aren’t the good guys makes this movie more of an effort to watch than to enjoy. I give the film a 6.0 rating for the one thing it does do is afford some insight into the circumstances that befell Belfast and how one British soldier spent a night there in the year 1971.
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Awards
British Independent Film Awards
• 1 Win & 9 Nominations
London Critics Circle Film Awards
• 1 Win & 4 Nominations
Berlin International Film Festival
• 1 Win & 3 Nominations
