Blitz had its world premiere as the opening film at the BFI London Film Festival on 9 October 2024, and was released in selected cinemas in the United Kingdom and United States on 1 November 2024, followed by a streaming release on Apple TV+ on 22 November 2024. The film received generally positive reviews from critics.
Plot
In London during World War II, 10 year old George is the mixed-race son of a white woman, Rita, and Marcus, a black man who was deported to Grenada. George remains in London after the Nazi bombing has begun. Rita’s father, Gerald, encourages Rita to evacuate George to the country for his safety. He is evacuated from the city amidst the Blitz, but defiantly jumps off the train to return to his mother. George gets on a goods train and meets three brothers. The next morning, George and the brothers escape from the train, although one of them is killed by an oncoming train.
In flashbacks, George is called a bastard by a neighbourhood boy, and Marcus is attacked by some ruffians because he is with Rita as they leave a club.
Rita sings a song on a BBC radio broadcast from the factory where she works. Afterwards, her colleagues protest and ask for the tube stations to be opened as shelters. Rita is criticised because of her son, whilst spending time in a local pub. Jack, Rita’s friend, argues with a man who was rude to Rita.
George arrives in London but cannot find his home in Stepney. George meets Ife, an air raid warden, who cares for him and brings him to a shelter. George wakes up the next morning and learns that Ife was killed trying to help a woman evacuate her house during the bombing.
George is wandering the streets when Jess, a member of a gang of thieves, pretends to help him. Instead, George is threatened to help them steal from a damaged jewellery store and a bombed out club. He escapes from the gang and ends up in an overcrowded underground station.
As the morning nears, the Tube station begins to flood. No one can escape because the gates were locked to prevent further overcrowding the night before. George is able to escape with the help of others. George gets help and the gates are opened allowing people to escape.
George wakes up in a strange bed. A woman is seemingly helpful, but has called the police because there is a missing child notice posted for George. George escapes from the house. In reaching his house, George sees his grandfather has died in the bombing but is quickly reunited with his mother.
In October 2021, it was announced that McQueen would write, direct and produce a new feature film titled Blitz for New Regency, with Lammas Park producing alongside Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner of Working Title Films.[2] In March 2022, McQueen confirmed his next project was going to be about Londoners during the Blitz of World War II and that he had discussed this with Anne, the Princess Royal, as she awarded him his knighthood at Windsor Castle.[3] In June 2022, it was announced that Apple TV+ had picked up the distribution rights. Producers are New Regency's Arnon Milchan, Yariv Milchan and Michael Schaefer.[4]
“The idea behind the whole thing is the story of a child who is trying to get through war-torn London, which has been bombed all the time, and trying to find his mother again. What I wanted to do is, I wanted the grownups – you, me, the grownups – to feel the same sort of disassociation, being completely lost in the world, being illogical, not knowing how to get there, not knowing how to get home, not knowing how to find home, and having that horror, that fear that you’ll never find it again; the horror of these massive bombs coming down. So the only way I could think of doing it was to write music which was so brutal and so absolutely violent.” - Hans Zimmer
While Hans Zimmer has previously ventured musically into World War II with films like Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor, working on Blitz allowed him to look at the era, and a facet of his own family history, in a new way. Zimmer revealed that his mother had been "a refugee in England during the Second World War, and Steve McQueen gave me one direction. He said ‘After you watch this film, you will understand your mother better’", during a Deadline Sound & Screen event. The story moved Zimmer to create a score to reflect the unrelenting chaos and brutality of the blitz: “This score is unmitigatedly horrendous", he said. "It is an absolute horrible score, it’s so dissonant, it’s so committed to this atonality."[12]
Release
Blitz premiered as the opening film at the BFI London Film Festival held at the Royal Festival Hall on 9 October 2024. This was McQueen's third directorial effort to do so after 2018's Widows and 2020's Mangrove, which was part of his Small Axe anthology series. The film was then released in selected cinemas in the US and UK on 1 November 2024, before streaming on Apple TV+ from 22 November.[13]
Reception
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 81% of 179 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7/10.The website's consensus reads: "A surprisingly old-fashioned tale of survival from director Steve McQueen, Blitz's examination of British society under wartime is given a beating heart by Elliott Heffernan and Saoirse Ronan's lovely performances."[14]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 71 out of 100, based on 53 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[15] Writing in The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw scored the film three out of five, and described it as a "well made and unashamedly old-fashioned wartime adventure, heartfelt and rousing and – yes – a bit trad overall", and said that it was "a film about the blitz of 1940 which tries to restate the accepted imagery, the dramatic stock footage and familiar ideas but also absorb revisionist approaches".[16]
Leonard Maltin, reviewing Blitz for his own blog, described it as "powerful and somewhat disarming" and "one of the year’s best films".[17] However, in the Chicago Reader, critic Kylie Bolter, while praising the score, cinematography and some of the performances, said the film didn’t "feel complete or unique".[18]Peter Travers, for ABC News, summarised Blitz as "an indisputably good movie", but concluded that despite "all the elements [being] in place for something extraordinary", it "misses the mark".[19] Critics also praised Yorick Le Saux's "stunningly captured" images for their "stark beauty".[20]
↑ "Blitz Production List". Film & Television Industry Alliance. 10 October 2022. Archived from the original on 15 December 2022. Retrieved 3 January 2023.
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