Blitz: A Modern Auteur Bombs
Jason Marcaida ‘26 / Emtertainment Monthly Staff Writer
When we talk about modern-day filmmaking masters, I believe Sir Steve McQueen doesn’t always get his flowers. While McQueen’s films receive plenty of critical acclaim and awards discussion immediately upon release (with his most popular work 12 Years a Slave receiving the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 86th Academy Awards), I seldom see McQueen and his stellar filmography talked about beyond the throws of Award Season. Whether it be the turbulent sex addiction dominating the protagonist of Shame, the tragic, oxymoronic pain of a free man made to be a slave in 12 Years a Slave, the tragedy-informed resolve of the women of Widows, or the multi-faceted diversities of experiences and lifestyles found in the West Indian immigrants of London in the Small Axe anthology series, McQueen’s filmmaking shows an affinity for direction informed by the visual arts, in-camera setpieces, complicated characters, and stirring, dramatic narratives.
With this filmography in mind, I was initially surprised to see Blitz arrive to little fanfare. Premiering at the 2024 BFI London Film Festival, releasing in cinemas in early November, and arriving on Apple TV+ on November 22nd, the film made little noise in the online film discourse at all three stages of its release. This originally wasn’t surprising to me, as the streaming landscape that modern film culture is tied to has made this the case with many acclaimed filmmakers. Still, even compared to the weekly release of McQueen’s last project, the Small Axe series on Amazon Prime, Blitz made little impact, no pun intended. Why was that?
Blitz follows the separation experienced by a London mother, Rita, played by Saoirse Ronan, and her son, George, played by newcomer Elliot Heffernan, amidst Germany’s Blitz bombings, and the trek George makes to reunite with his mother. Rita’s time separated from George follows her arduous munitions factory job and her volunteer work at an underground shelter. George’s trek has him traverse through several episodes with a revolving door of odds-and-ends, Dickensian minor characters that color his perilous journey. These two narratives are broken up by flashbacks to Rita’s ex-partner/George’s father, a Grenadan immigrant separated from Rita by deportation.
The film’s narrative is cushy and frustratingly safe. There is a deficit in the height of the stakes in the branching narratives. The danger of George’s trek is immediate, if shallow. He bounces from one dangerous situation to another, whether it be the evacuation train he escapes from, the gang of kids he joins for a short period of time, the black officer who helps George navigate a racist England, or the scavengers that keep George in their company against his will, most of these situations have little rhyme or reason other than to keep George in some sort of tangible peril away from the care of his mother. The most thematically significant episode revolving around George’s brief care under a black, British soldier, Ife, gives time for the film to interrogate the condition of being a young black, British child in a country that has still yet to achieve full racial equality for its black citizenry. Though this vignette enriches George’s trek by examining specific socio-political conditions of wartime England which makes George’s journey more difficult by way of his identity, how George finds himself in and out of this vignette feels unmotivated and random. This quality applies to each vignette of George’s journey, which is made further frustrating by the almost cartoonish characterization of many involved characters.
Rita’s narrative as it follows after her separation from George is largely toothless. Though Rita clearly needs to fill a void in her life created after her son is separated from her, the events Rita is written in don’t highlight this void. Rita’s problems are not as immediate as George’s, and they don’t need to be, but her toil under factory work and the emotional hardship of volunteering in an underground shelter only truly exist to elongate Rita’s agony. Fortunately, the depth of Rita’s character is deepened with flashbacks to her life with Marcus, a Grenadan immigrant with whom Rita falls in love with, and is separated from after Marcus is deported from England. Though these flashback scenes are nothing special in terms of how Rita and Marcus’s relationship develops, their presence and placement in the narrative break up the more monotonous Rita narrative, with respites of joy and tragedy. Nevertheless, despite Rita’s homogenous narrative, Saoirse Ronan’s central performance fills in the emotional gaps left open by the writing, edging out Rita’s characterization as much as possible.
McQueen’s craft is still technically sound, if uncharacteristically milquetoast. Perhaps as a result of a more formulaic approach to narrative, McQueen’s direction doesn’t command an audience’s attention in the ways he has done in prior work. Though there are set pieces ripe for action or tension, McQueen’s approach is less daring, choosing to capture much of this action in coverage, a frustrating approach given the intentionality in the filmmaking of set pieces such as the on-the-ground, in-the-car beginning of Widows, or the atmospheric house party that is Lover’s Rock, or the jogging scene from Shame. McQueen’s directing is only really noticeable in more minor details of more standard scenes; framing might include details that would normally be shown in multiple close-ups, the texture of an object might be emphasized, and a camera might move when a different director might cut. These decisions echo McQueen’s daringness, but they never show it. Beyond McQueen’s lack of daringness, his filmmaking in this film leans into the follies of less inspired WWII fare. His reliance on Hans Zimmer’s by-the-books score during key emotional moments oozes checkmark filmmaking. His decision to shoot scenes such as the attempted firefighting at the beginning of the film is imprecise and sloppy, leaving audiences to understand the facts of the conditions of being bombed, but not the visceral experience. In fact, the same can be said about the general directorial approach of the film: getting an objective understanding of what is going on on-screen, without the viscerality of it.
Blitz is a frustrating film. More than it being standard, end-of-the-year, awards season, WWII fare, more than its bland sentimentality, more than the sum of its associated cast and crew being less than its parts. It’s frustrating for McQueen, a reliably bold filmmaker, to make something so empty. I’ve spent a long amount of time in this review disparaging McQueen, which I feel bad about. I don’t want to egg on the guy. I think he’s still talented, and I don’t think this one mediocre film is a sign of any artistic regression. But this film’s subject matter, married with its director, could’ve made for a compelling statement but will end up as a modern auteur’s least essential work.