Blitz’ Movie Review: Saoirse Ronan Stars in Steve McQueen’s World War II Tribute to London

The Apple TV+ dramatic element revolves on a little child and his mother searching for their way back to one other among city bombing.

Steve McQueen’s Blitz presents a densely packed depiction of London at war in 1940, as seen through the eyes of a 9-year-old kid (discovery Elliott Heffernan), trying to make it home to his single mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan), with intricately detailed but broad brushwork. Though it provides comparatively little of the kind of light comic relief that Charles Dickens also excelled at, the film is gently Dickensian in its desire to add misfortune on top of melodrama given the metropolis where it is located. However, none could dispute its timely message on the extent of suffering experienced by common people when bombs strike civilian sites.

Saoirse Ronan’s Standout Performance in ‘Blitz’

Though there is much to admire here—including some bravura sequences, excellent craftsmanship, and a long-overdue attempt to demonstrate that London was more racially diverse than you would guess from watching movies from the time or made later—the drama too often lacks the subtlety that distinguishes the work of the British writer-director at its best. Two hours long, practically to the second, this seems like a project that has been disproportionately clipped, snipped, and tapered to suit an arbitrary running duration.


Had it simply relaxed its waistline, allowing its narrative and characters more breathing space, it might all have functioned better. In-demand actor Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness, shortly to be seen in Babygirl) hardly does more here than make calf eyes at Ronan from the sidelines hints that jetsam may have tossed overboard somewhere along the way.

That limited quality might essentially limit Blitz’s chances as an award candidate and reduce its event-movie appeal in foreign markets. Given how much Brits value all that keeps calm and carry on malarkey, it’s expected to fare better as a theatrical proposition in the U.K., ahead of its Nov. 22 premiere on Apple TV+.

From an auteurist standpoint, the image suits McQueen’s filmography rather perfectly. His most recent projects, particularly the made-for- TV film series Small Axe, with its focus on the Black experience in Britain, and the documentary feature Occupied City, which paired voiceover narration describing major events at specific addresses around Amsterdam during WWII with modern footage of those same sites in the present day, clearly overlapped in terms of issues and themes explored.

Steve McQueen’s Direction and the Clichéd Narrative of WWII

McQueen has clarified in interviews before Blitz’s opening at the BFI London Film Festival that it was very accidental that Occupied City ended up running back-to-back. Still, the two most definitely communicate to one another over the North sea. Both highlight the misery of people living in major cities at the hands of the Nazis and show that, just as the conflict exposes some people’s best qualities, it can also highlight their worst inclinations.

McQueen has said, however, that a picture he came onto while investigating Small Axe—of a Black child in a too-big coat and enigmatically stoic look being evacuated during the war—inspired the decision to anchor the story around a young mixed boy. A ringer for the boy, Heffernan was discovered by McQueen and casting director Nina Gold during a long casting call for George. With his quiet presence and consistent, unabashed stare, the young star takes to the stage well against his more seasoned co-stars, although he has only performed in school plays before.

From their first moments, where we see them cuddling at bedtime as Rita tries to reassure her son about his impending evacuation—a nationwide effort that saw 1.5 million people relocated to the countryside from the cities like London, Liverpool and others that saw heavy bombing from the Luftwaffe—he and Ronan had a clear connection. Not to mention all his buddies, George naturally does not want to be separated from his grandfather Gerald (Paul Weller, the British pop singer making his acting debut here) and his cat Olly (played by feline actresses Zinger and Tinkerbell).


Though it’s not exactly said, George is clearly also rightfully nervous about meeting individuals outside of the city who might not be used to seeing people of color. Not long after he gets on a train carrying hundreds of kids, Lo and behold he is bullied by others. Given the direction things is headed, George decides at great risk to leap from the slow-moving steam train and return to London.

And George’s journey starts now. Though it doesn’t take ten years, his homeward headed trip is as full of disasters, tragic accidents and unplanned acts of charity as the one Odysseus actually traveled. George boards another train and runs across three brothers his age who had the same vision of reversing and returning right back home. After George takes a dare, they ride an exciting journey on the roof that allows composer Hans Zimmer and his group to let rip with a percussive, thrumming score. Once he returns to the boundaries of the Smoke, he has to find his way back to Stepney Green in the East End of town—a journey many a Londoner would find difficult to navigate today absent Google Maps.

Many things happen over a few days. He strikes up friendships with Nigerian immigrant musician Benjamin Clementine, a blackout warden. Having never known the Caribbean father, Marcus (CJ Beckford, shown briefly in a flashback), who was unfairly deported before George was born, Ife’s grace and dignity make him exactly the kind of Black man role model George has been lacking in his life.
But no sooner has George parted ways with Ife, an occasion underscored with additional sorrow, than he joins in with a band of lowlife Cockney looters, led by brother and sister Albert and Beryl. Though Burke hardly works onscreen these days, two of Britain’s very best character performers, Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke, chew up and spit out the scene with delight as performed. Even if their characters are committing horrors like ripping the fingers off bodies to steal rings, they offer a dark comedic broadness to the proceedings that is rather welcome at this stage.

Rita, on the other side of town, is enjoying her own legendary set of Blitz experiences initially ignorant that George never made it to his destination. She is comforted about sending George away by her best friends, Tilda (Hayley Squires) and Doris (Erin Kellyman) while working in a weapons plant. (The lot of them, along with the rest of female workers, are done up in Rosie the Riveter headscarves and utility pinafores; as usual, Jacqueline Durran’s costumes are right on target.) Being the daughter of a pub piano man, Rita gets to perform live when the BBC shows up for a morale-boosting outside broadcast. Ronan soulfully performs a beautiful imitation of 1940s ditties written by Nicholas Britell and Taura Stinson. They go to the pub late at night to have some fun while they can; before the air strikes once more and street chaos results,

McQueen describes how the authorities initially denied people shelter in Underground stations, leading to almost riots at the closed gates when there was nowhere else to hide in during the very beginning of the Blitz. Once they are let in, the masses are just fractionally safer, as we observe when a bomb busts a water main and floods one station in a perfectly performed image of anarchy.


Moreover, a sequence of firefighters battling to extinguish a burning structure with a canvas hose they can hardly control also reflects how terrible those early bomb days were. The close-ups of flames and the desaturated hue evoke the work of documentarian Humphrey Jennings, whose Fires Were Started (1943) and nearly abstract photography is a vital archive of the Blitz. At times, the camera seems to rise as if hoisted on a drone, to scan streets dotted with missing or half-eradicated buildings and flaming wreckage — all of it obviously CGI but convincingly done. McQueen shudders and shakes the camera periodically to produce blurs that subsequently resolve into an aerial view of the sea from the point of view of an airplane or a field of white daisies. With its tricks with perspective and in- camera antics honoring silent film, the method evokes a dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of McQueen’s first works.

Such personal, freeform touches improve Blitz by adding an artistic, astringent rawness to offset the sticky sweet usage of clichés elsewhere. McQueen appears occasionally driven to leave no overused cliché behind. a situation in which someone runs emotionally after a train pulling out a station? See. Young ladies using eyebrow pencils to sketch stocking seams onto their naked legs? Check. Gor’s blimey guvnor only lives once, therefore a right old knees up and sing song round the old piano. Verify, verify, Verify, check.

Almost every moment of unfettered delight must be extinguished with tragedy or at least poor luck in tow. Years later, Rita will present the St. Christopher’s medal—another cliché—that she found in an almost all-Black dancehall to her son. This flashback shows Rita with Marcus. Marcus gets into a fight shortly afterward and is taken off by the cops, never to be seen again.


For my money, the best and most creative episode of Small Axe is their dancing, which together with a later sequence set in the tragic Café de Paris is a sensual flashback to McQueen’s dance-driven Lovers Rock. The way little actually transpired in the previous movie was one of the reasons it was so interesting. The music and the way the characters moved to it, responding to both the sound and to each other, caught the drama, the romance, and the emotional response.

Maximalist to the hilt, Blitz is the whole opposite of Lovers Rock’s minimalist approach to storytelling — dissimilar in every aspect except, maybe, that both films finish abruptly with the dull thud of breaking daylight and bittersweet resolve.

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