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Blitz Movie Review

Blitz is a 2024 war drama film directed by Steve McQueen and starring Saoirse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan. It’s a solid and endearingly old-fashioned, but problematic movie.

In World War II London, nine-year-old George is evacuated to the countryside by his mother, Rita, to escape the bombings. Defiant and determined to return to his family, George embarks on a journey back home as Rita searches for him. Of all the films that Steve McQueen has made so far, this one is easily the most conventional. This is the type of movie that would have crushed at the Oscars a decade or more ago, but not today. It’s the type of old-fashioned, universally appealing historical drama that is difficult not to like.

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Saoirse Ronan is excellent in one of the better supporting turns of the year. Her character is underdeveloped, but she elevated it with an emotionally charged performance. Elliott Heffernan delivered a pretty solid child performance and he’s quite believable as George, who is also underutilized as a character. Of the other performers, only Harris Dickinson is worth mentioning, but even his role is quite small.

I liked the child sequences. Those pleasantly reminded me of Harry Potter and numerous other family films from the UK. They had that pleasant, endearing quality that only British children’s movies possess. But the film was tonally inconsistent as it mixed those very innocent scenes with the more harsh realities of war and they simply did not fit with each other well at all. The train scenes I loved, but the ‘Oliver Twist’-inspired sequence with thievery was way too uninspired. McQueen tried to do too many things in one story, making for a very disorganized and underdeveloped storyline.

Blitz is at its best when it’s focusing on the emotional plight of the kid protagonist and his mother. The movie is undeniably moving at times while also benefitting from a solid score, fine pacing and pretty good cinematography. I didn’t care for the war scenes as those were shot with CGI and looked way too polished and modern for a period piece.

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I also have to mention the elephant in the room – McQueen’s annoying obsession with skin color. He chose to focus on not just black people, but other minorities in an era when London was actually not diverse at all. Filmmakers should try to tell all stories and not just focus on the stories that are about themselves, especially not the superficial stuff that is race. This movie wasn’t different because of that focus on minorities, but it was actually unrealistic, way too skewed in focus and simply unnecessary, especially for WWII when Jews and other minorities had it much worse than black people.