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Before Dawn (now streaming on Paramount+) is Australian filmmaker Jordon Prince-Wright’s tribute of sorts to the soldiers of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, also known as ANZACs. The group is famous for its actions on Turkey’s Gallipoli peninsula during World War I, but the writer/director chose to focus on the unit’s participation in the trench war in France, which went on and on and on in grueling fashion. He puts us smack in the mud with a group of Western Australian soldiers, and more precisely, alongside a naive grunt played by Levi Miller – and turns out a film that doesn’t quite stand out among the many, many films of its ilk.
BEFORE DAWN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We open with the first of countless low-angle shots of weary soldiers’ boots tromping through mud. Rats and tangled nests of barbed wire break up the drab ochre shades of clay. It’s been 189 days since Jim Collins (Miller) got here. “If only I’d listened,” he says in voiceover, and we’ll get context for that comment once the film flashes back several months to the Western Australian outback, where he toils on horseback, tending sheep on his father’s ranch. His two ranch hand friends, Legs (Jason Burch) and Don (Ed Oxenbould), pressure him to join them at zero-dark the next morning, when they’re going to sign up with the ANZACs so they can venture to Europe and fight for glory against the fascist Germans. Jim ponders. He’s tired of chasing sheep. It’s boring, and he seems itchy to see more of the world than the dusty outback. His father (Ben Mortley) doesn’t approve – he needs Jim to help him keep the ranch afloat. He also thinks Jim doesn’t know what he’s getting into, a point underscored by cross-cut flash-forwards to scenes of blank-faced soldiers marching past their allies’ graves.
Now we’re with Jim at the beginning of his frontline tenure. He and a cadre of soldiers including Legs and Don need to lay down some wire in No Man’s Land at night. Jim learns from his superior to hold still so the Germans don’t see them when they shoot flares into the sky. They’re spotted by two enemy soldiers. One gets taken out, and Jim holds his bayonet to the throat of the second – and hesitates. It’s just a kid, and you’ll note that Jim is pretty much just a kid, too. Jim lets him go, and the decision has tragic consequences. His friends end up dead. So does the brother of Nickels (Thomas Jeffrey), who writhes in grief upon learning what happened. Jim confesses to a superior officer that his lack of killer instinct – which one might read as noble empathy, perhaps in a different context – resulted in his fellow soldiers’ deaths, and the old gray-mustached man says, “I wish you hadn’t told me that” before writing something else in his report and sending Jim back to the front.
Title cards tally the days Jim has been in this godawful place of filth, death and human depravity: 254 days, 400 days, 773 days, 843 days, from 1916 to 1917 to 1918. On the eve of his departure from home, he was sure the war would be over soon and he’d be back in six months. Didn’t happen. He and Nickels and a few others engage in a rogue revenge mission to take out the men who killed their friends. Jim ducks mortar shells and fills sandbags with heaping shovelfuls of mud. He runs ammo to machine gun nests. He pulls on a gas mask during a chemical attack. He becomes part of a tight group of friends, among whom Nickels, Archie (Peter Sullivan) and Ned (Jordan Dulieu) stand out. Sometimes, he squabbles with Nickels, who secretly suspects Jim is to blame for his brother’s death. Jim hears a man yelling for help in No Man’s Land, and debates whether he should take the risk to save him or listen to Nickels, who insists Jim should stay relatively safe and alive in the trench. The war drags on. They’re cold and hungry and exhausted and grief-stricken and traumatized and they feel like it’ll never end.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: WWI sagas War Horse and 1917 might’ve been a touch gimmicky, but that’s what made them engaging. And you’ll get more insight into the frontline conflicts of the war with Peter Jackson’s extraordinary documentary They Shall Not Grow Old.
Performance Worth Watching: Miller, who broke through playing Peter Pan in the ill-fated 2015 film Pan, is an acceptable lead, but he doesn’t bring much to a character who’s a bit thin on the page. The screenplay should have dug in a little harder on the no-man-left-behind and honest-to-a-fault ideologies of his character, but it frequently loses focus.
Memorable Dialogue: “If only I listened,” Jim laments in voiceover. “I keep saying that to myself. If only.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: I’m tempted to be an apologist for Before Dawn and say that the tedium is precisely the point, that Prince-Wright wants to illustrate how months and months of backbreaking work punctuated by bursts of deadly violence is poison for the human soul, and how war conditions one to have unthinkably callous consideration for human life. The trenches are an endless maze of mud and rats and bones, and the men on the ground seem to have no way to orient themselves. Where are they? In France or in Belgium or in Hell? They exist only in the now and the future is only a vague concept as time drags on and their lives could end at any moment.
But no matter the context or intent, tedium is still, well, tedious. The film struggles to establish a sense of space and location, and outside of Jim, the characters become a generic mass of pale faces under battered green soup-bowl helmets. The dialogue is realistic, but dully pragmatic. The action sequences are energetic and reasonably well staged, but punctuated with corny, pseudo-dramatic slo-mo effects. The conflicts between the ANZAC men tend towards overwrought melodrama. Scenes begin to feel repetitive early in the film. Thematically, Prince-Wright – who penned the screenplay with Jarrad Russell – asserts that the only thing that gets a soldier through the horrors of war is comradery, which is a noble message, but an overly familiar one that turns up in the subtext of almost every war film. Before Dawn ultimately is an earnest, well-meaning drag.
Our Call: The movie just doesn’t differentiate itself from other films of its ilk. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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