Real fighting, first-person footage – is this the greatest war film ever made?

Yahoo

a day ago

The lights go down in the cinema, the curtain parts and we are in a dug-out on the eastern front line in Ukraine. 'Are you filming?' asks one soldier. 'Yeah,' replies his comrade, Bors. 'Film how beautiful I am,' the soldier says, blowing a kiss.
Then all hell breaks loose. A Russian missile thumps into the earth feet from the men's position. 'FPV!' screams Bors, raising his rifle to shoot down an incoming first-person view drone. Suddenly a second missile lands, showering the men with mud and debris.
Bors decides to move before another missile strikes and enters a landscape of hellish devastation: splintered tree trunks jut out of the mud. Lightning flashes. Smoke rises from craters in the ground. There is another blast. This time, the Russian missile knocks Bors to the ground, breaking both his legs and leaving him gazing up, in agony, at the sky. 'Don't even think about blowing yourself up,' a comrade begs.
This is the opening scene of 2000 Metres to Andriivka, the latest film from Mstyslav Chernov, the Ukrainian director who won an Oscar for 20 Days in Mariupol and a Pulitzer prize for his reporting from that city under attack.
It would be dramatic enough if it were a feature film or a video game, but this is a documentary, much of it culled from footage shot by soldiers on the front line.
The result is a viewing experience unike any other in cinema, and the closest the comfortable world will come to the terror, agony and mad-eyed courage of the men holding back the army of Vladimir Putin. A masterpiece of story-telling, it's one of the most impactful war films ever made; never before has a European land war, as intense as 1914 or 1939, been captured like this.
An establishing shot filmed by drone shows a narrow strip of forest leading to Andriivka, a tiny village in Ukraine held by Russian forces. The Ukrainian counter-offensive of 2023 is underway and the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade has been ordered to retake the village, severing a crucial supply route for Moscow's forces in the blood-drenched city of Bakhmut.
For three years, the world has watched grim, grainy footage of the war in Ukraine. The battles are fought by nameless men for often nameless places. In 2000m, Chernov reverses the equation: he captures the humanity of the university students, engineers and IT workers who are called upon to fight and die for every metre of land on the way to Andriivka.
The battles take place only a few hours' drive from Chernov's birthplace of Kharkiv, a city he says only remains free because of the sacrifices of soldiers like those he follows here. 'They are the only reason the places of my childhood still exist,' he says.
Distance matters intensely to the platoon. In the film, their battles in the forest over the course of three months are introduced in terms of the distance remaining to reach Andriivka; 1000m, 600m, 300m. But traversing another distance was also on Chernov's mind.
2000 Metres to Andriivka
'I wanted to shoot something that will express how different it feels to be there on the frontline, but at the same time, how close it is to the normal world we all know,' Chernov, 40, says when we speak over Zoom ahead of the film's release.
During filming, he flew from premieres of 20 Days in Mariupol in London to the front line in Ukraine in under 24 hours to embed with the soldiers. 'That transition was so striking and dramatic for me. Like going back 100 years, or to another planet.'
Western audiences might have a sense of the counter-offensive raging to the east, but it is inevitably filtered through scraps of deracinated footage. 'We keep seeing this footage on YouTube, Telegram and Instagram,' says Chernov. 'I can see how people are detached from the violence, watching through their small screens without context, without connecting to the people who are doing it. I want to make sure people don't look at battlefield footage like it's a video game.'
Displaying the same bravery that saw him remain in starving Mariupol for 20 days after Russian forces entered the city, Chernov decided to join the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade on its final push for Andriivka, linking up with Fedya, a 24-year-old sergeant and unit leader tasked with raising the Ukrainian flag over the village.
In his voiceover for the film, Chernov admits that one commander 'tells us we are idiots for wanting to go.' The forest is a death-trap. Russian snipers, mortar teams and drones have wiped out dozens of men, and those sent in are filmed visibly shaking ahead of their deployment.
But Chernov's reward for putting his life in danger are powerful interviews conducted off-the-cuff with soldiers who know they are only ever moments from death, hiding under trees or crammed into dug-outs. Sometimes the camera will lie on the floor while the men open up in a way that would be impossible in the formal sitdown interviews typically used in documentaries.
Throughout the film's 106 minutes, the viewer never leaves the battlefield, unlike spiritual predecessors such as Sebastian Junger's Restrepo (2010), which covered a platoon's deployment to Afghanistan's deadly Korengal Valley, or Mosul (2017), depicting the war against the Islamic State.
And its characters shine through. First, we meet 'Freak', a 22-year-old radio operator who has been tasked with ferrying Chernov and his second cameraman to Fedya. The men realise they went to rival universities in Kharkiv. In between puffs on a Lost Mary vape, Freak breaks into a huge smile as they joke about whether he should move to a separate dug-out. 'We'll get back and settle it,' he says, as a missile lands nearby. 'Who's better.' Then comes the call to move up and out.
'Yes, the film could exist entirely edited from bodycam footage and drone footage,' says Chernov. But he felt compelled to walk alongside the soldiers to bring their stories to life. 'Partially, that comes from my civilian perspective as being Ukrainian,' he explains. 'I'm a journalist, I'm a film-maker… but just having that guilt of not doing enough in my head also pushes me to step in and to be closer to these men.'
Further up the forest we see Sheva, an older man who at first asks not to be filmed. 'I haven't done anything yet,' he says, hunched in a corner of a dug-out. 'Do you smoke?' asks Alex Babenko, Chernov's second cameraman. 'I smoke like a freight train,' replies Sheva, before speculating on what his wife is doing at that moment, and remembering that he has not, as he promised to, fixed the toilet. 'Maybe I shouldn't say that I'll quit smoking [after the war],' he says. 'But maybe I'll smoke just a normal amount, without all these extra smoke breaks.'
2000 Metres to Andriivka
It is a funny, out-of-place exchange, almost ecstatic in its mundanity. And then, comes terrible news. A few months after the battle for Andriivka, explains the voice-over, Sheva is wounded and killed. The laughs in the cinema turn to gulped-down sobs. 'When you talk to someone on the front line, there is always this fear that this might be the last conversation you're having with that person,' Chernov says.
In Sheva's case, these few minutes of film are also the last recording of him alive. At a premiere for family members of the brigade earlier this year in Kyiv, Chernov met with Sheva's wife. 'Every second of it was a treasure,' she told him, and would be too for their daughter and grandson.
The brutal toll of the push for Andriivka colours the film. There are strategic debates about why the counter-offensive failed that Chernov deliberately avoids: was it right to fight so long for Bakhmut? Did the Americans push too hard for a full-frontal assault on hardened Russian lines? Instead, 2000m focuses on the narrow experience of the soldiers, and poses deeper, more existential questions. In essence, the film records a Pyrrhic victory: Fedya raises the flag above Andriivka, but within months that village – no more than a pile of bones and rubble – is recaptured by Russian forces.
Chernov wonders in the film how long Ukraine can keep fighting a war like this, and at least leaves open the question of whether anything can be worth such loss. The death of many of the men featured in the film posed challenges to Chernov, changing the tone of the final product. 'We spent a lot of time thinking, 'How do we do this right? How do we do this respectfully?'' His answer was that the film, in effect, would serve as a living memorial: 'I need to make sure this man will be heard and seen,' he says.
At a funeral for one of the members of the brigade, a crying woman laments that all the country's young men will soon be dead. But 2000m is not a lecture. Fedya himself provides a constant shot of optimism, leading his men into battle with what is, quite simply, an indomitable spirit. 'I think this is the power of cinema, especially for modern audiences who are bombarded with radical opinions and ideologies,' says Chernov. 'It is very important for film-makers to step back a little bit and let the audience decide how they feel.'
A former Associated Press photographer, who has covered wars in Gaza, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, Chernov does have one agenda: to bring the suffering of his countrymen to the attention of a wider, and potentially influential, audience. As we speak, he is hoping to arrange a screening for senior Republicans, a route perhaps to Donald Trump, on a US tour.
Some viewers may be drawn to the film by the ground-breaking technology it employs. To capture the battle at 600m, footage is spliced together from seven different helmet cameras: the effect is immersive to the point of whiplash, a real-life version of the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan. (It was 'simply unheard of even a few years ago' to be able to film something like this, says Chernov.)
But the director also employs techniques lifted from fictional films to lure in an audience that might be more comfortable watching Dune than events in the Donbas. Deep, stomach-churning bass accompanies 2000 metres, scored by Sam Slater, the producer of soundtracks for Sicario and Joker. An insistent, military drumbeat similarly drives the men forward.
The combined effect is one of ferocious, blood-stained momentum. 'The film has a very raw, visual language,' says Chernov. 'But we use all the instruments of dramatic structure, music and editing, to make sure the audience will not walk away. Because we are inviting the audience into extremely tough conditions. We are basically inviting the audience to experience war.'
At a preview screening of the film in London, Chernov was met with a long standing ovation. He is already working on a third film on the war in Ukraine, having taken on the role as its great documentarian, an empathetic eye in a morass of dehumanised news. 'Once this war is over, maybe I'll just make nature films,' he says. 'Very peaceful films somewhere quiet.'
2000 Metres to Andriivka is in cinemas from today
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