'Blitz' Fails to Fire Up a New Way of Looking at World War II

Longing, survival, and the thin line between destructiveness and compassion course through Steve McQueen’s Blitz, a displaced family drama that compromises on the British filmmaker’s stark and arresting style for a film that’s too eager to win you over and lacking what makes his films unique. Set over a few intense days in a London under siege, Blitz stars Saoirse Ronan as Rita, a single mother and factory worker whose young son George (Elliott Heffernan) is evacuated from the dangers of 1940 London but after escaping from a train ferrying him to the safe countryside, George begins a perilous journey back to his mother’s arms in the hopes that two lost, lonely souls can find peace in the ruins of London.

Starting in late 1940 and ending just before America joined the war (a period recognized as a low point for Britain’s prospects in WWII), the Nazis targeted British naval and industrial hotspots in deadly nighttime raids. It was an intense period of immediate change. However, the harrowing displacement, claustrophobia, and urban desolation have been co-opted over the years by British traditionalists as a symbol of British resilience under extraordinary circumstances.

Whether it’s in response to global pandemics or government-enforced austerity, the “Blitz spirit” mantra of keeping calm and carrying on has been fetishized by Britain’s least imaginative thinkers as something moral, upstanding, and symbolic of what the country is like. This is, of course, a revisionist fantasy, not least for the fact that during the time of the Blitz, things were tangibly worse for every segregated, impoverished, sick, or marginalized member of British society – even without the Nazi bombs falling from the sky.