Blitz (2024)

Superb Wartime Drama - Blitz review by GI

This is a highly enjoyable and watchable wartime drama made more so for its traditional styling as a British film that you'd see made in the 1950s. Director Steve McQueen delves into the culture of London in 1940 often with quite big broad strokes but manages a film that is rich and well structured. The narrative is centred around the story of George, a young schoolboy who is mixed race living with his mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and his Grandad (Paul Weller) in Stepney. He's never known his father who was deported after an incident before George was born. Being of mixed race George faces the casual everyday racist slurs from other children but is much loved by his family. Rita, who works in a munitions factory, takes the heart wrenching decision to evacuate George away from the city as the German bombing increases. George is far from happy and decides to jump the train and make his way home. The film is essentially his journey where he encounters people good and downright bad in trying to get back. In these encounters McQueen has drawn in big slices of the cultural life of London involving class, black/white, criminal and the traditional held view of the working class Londoner sucking up the horrors of the blitz including the initial refusal of the authorities to allow shelter in the Underground stations. Ronan is as good as always although her character is a little one dimensional; Weller is calm and assured as the Grandad who loves his grandson. Especially interesting is Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke as nasty criminals who rob from the damaged properties and the dead themselves. The images of the burning city are fantastic and the story grabs you really well throughout. A thoughtful, traditional British wartime drama that is all the better for being exactly in that vein.