‘Blitz’: London Review

Dir/scr: Steve McQueen. UK. 2024. 120 mins.

The bombs are falling on London, as the title of Steve McQueen’s drama for AppleTV+ indicates. Caught in the crossfire are nine-year-old George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan) and his mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) as McQueen’s disjointed screenplay roams from set-piece to set-piece, all connected by their two-day separation. Lavishly conceived, crookedly executed, Blitz tries to cover a lot of bases: it even shoehorns in a startlingly unsubtle examination of racism as the missiles explode. Although it is satisfying as a spectacle, and even rousing in parts, McQueen’s Blitz ultimately lacks the legendary Spirit Of.

  Blitz ultimately lacks the legendary Spirit Of

Billing this film as a child’s-eye view of the Luftwaffe’s reign of terror on England’s capital is dangerous territory: John Boorman’s Hope And Glory is a hard act to follow, even 40 years on. McQueen takes a different tack. Rather than view a bombed-out London as a land of magical opportunity for a naive young lad, Blitz presents bi-racial George as sad, defiant or scared, but mostly mute. That’s a heavy load for a young, inexperienced actor to carry and it’s not helped by Blitz’s jerky episodic structure: just when the viewer has a chance to gel with his character, the narrative breaks and jumps away. Apple has scaled back theatrical plans to limited release in the UK/US on November 1 ahead of a November 22 streaming debut. Blitz should perform best in its home market, where it opens the London Film Festival.

Steve McQueen, whose last film, the four-hour art documentary Occupied City, also dealt with the Second World War, has delivered entertainment to Fox before with the crime caper Widows (2018). With a reputation as a serious visual artist whose films including 12 Years A Slave have won Oscars, he seems uncomfortable with the demands of the spectacle he has written into an essentially schematic screenplay. The film can feel distracted, missing the light to go with things that are very, very dark. Singalongs by the piano – George’s grandfather is played by The Jam’s Paul Weller – aren’t enough when the subject matter tackles forced family separation, fire, flooding, child death, mass murder and racism. 

With a shoot that commenced in 2022 when streaming services were feeling more flush, Blitz – which benefited from the UK’s high-end TV tax credit – is impeccably realised. Production designer Adam Stockhausen rises to the challenge of wartime Stepney Green in London’s East End towards the end of 1940, where George is about to be sent to the countryside to escape the bombing. George’s father is not around and his mother Rita doesn’t want him to go, but he is no longer safe in a city which is being reduced to rubble as its citizens take shelter in Underground stations and bomb shelters at night. 

Angry with his mother for sending him away, George jumps from the train and tries to find his way back home. At the munitions factory where she works, Rita misses her son and tries to find him. McQueen then laces a string of incidents and set-pieces into this basic structure, which has as much of a signalled ending as it had a clear start. 

Blitz takes in the night the Cafe de Paris is bombed, with a gang of thieves led by the cartoonishly Fagin-like Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke snapping fingers from corpses to secure their diamond rings. McQueen also dramatises the bombing of London Bridge, and an underground station which suddenly floods as its inhabitants take shelter. George wanders into all that – a miniature Forrest Gump of the Blitz – but he also finds himself adrift in a street called the ‘Empire Arcade’, a tribute to colonialism with its gurning Black statues. George, confused about his racial identity, is found there by a Nigerian warden named Ife (Benjamin Clementine). They sing a chorus of ‘Allelujah’ together, Ife delivers a sermon in tolerance to some British racists in the underground shelter and George declares ‘I am Black’ before Ife’s life is cut short off-screen (with a scissors presumably, as he’s entirely cardboard, although the production did draw him from a real-life character).

Meanwhile, Rita works in her munitions factory, sings for the BBC, and tries to distract herself by helping out at an air raid shelter run by a self-described Jewish dwarf named Mickey Davis (Leigh Gill), another one of the real-life heroes of the Blitz.

McQueen has taken the decision to ladle in some flashbacks and fantasy sequences on top of all this, and if there’s one thing the Blitz doesn’t need, it’s dream scenarios. What could be explained with dialogue and nuance — Rita’s relationship with the boy’s father, George’s encounters with racism in the East End of the 1940s – are given fleshed-out sequences which are only there to explain things which could be easily self-evident. They add a heavy weight to a film which already has a lot to bear, and a slight actor to carry it. (Impactful though she is, Ronan’s role is support, and other billed actors such as Harris Dickinson or Hayley Squires are very much cameo in nature.)

Blitz excels in terms of world-building and costuming, Stockhausen joined by Jacqueline Durran and DoP Yorick Le Saux in conceiving and lighting this twilight-lived world to great success. Even the post-production effects are seamless, a tough ask for a period piece. Blitz shot partly in Leavesden Studios but also used Hull for locations, and there will be few who aren’t entranced by these dazzling recreations of a time barely remembered now. A score by Hans Zimmer occasionally threatens to overwhelm, mostly when McQueen dips into arthouse mode, but keeps a respectful and impactful distance.

Blitz’s edit is deliberately blunt: less of a weave than a series of jumps. It exits on one of them, leaving behind the impression of a film that wants to say more but can’t express itself through all the plenty. Oddly enough, in trying to capture a time that was wracked by scarcity, by the idea of make-do-and-mend, by the plucky spirit of the men and women under the might of the machines, Blitz just fires far too much heavy artillery.