It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to The Next Petcher Show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film and the way it's shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Tosha Robinson here again with Keith Phipps, Scott Tobias, and Genevieve Koski.

Last week we discussed Peter Wears Gallipoli, a 1981 film about two young Australian men who meet at a race and eventually meet again in World War

1, where they've both volunteered and they both end up in the trenches together.

That film is mostly backstory, and it only gets to the war at the end.

By contrast, Sam Mendez's 1917 doesn't have any backstory at all for its narrative about

two young men in the World War I trenches.

It launches with those two friends, Lance

Corporal's Blake and Showfield, played by Dean Charles Chapman and George McKay, resting in a field

when they're called up to deliver a message to a different unit while on the other side of the

German front lines. That unit has an offensive plan for the next morning, but new aerial

photography says they're walking into a trap, and all 1,600 men in the

unit stand to die if they proceed with their charge. To add to the drama, Blake's older brother

is in that unit. And so Blake and show set off into a no-man's land that was a killing field the

previous day. Peter Rear called Gallipoli a Road to Adventure movie, where the protagonist pair

volunteered for action and seemed to think

it's going to be a lark. But Blake and show know they're headed into potentially fatal danger,

and they find plenty of it, from German tripwires to a downed plane to a raging river,

not to mention plenty of men with guns trying to kill them. Mendez shoots it all as a coordinated,

...