There is an undeniably old-fashioned quality to Steve McQueen’s World War II drama “Blitz” on AppleTV+ — a rather unexpected one for the director of “ 12 Years A Slave ” and “ Shame .” “Of course!” you might think — the film is about the 1940s. Yes, but it spiritually whisks us back much further than the Nazis’ month of bomb attacks on the United Kingdom.
McQueen’s movie is practically Dickensian. “Food, glorious food!” stuff. “You’ve got to pick a pocket or two!” “Blitz,” loosely gripping, doesn’t tap into our collective idea of what a war film is so much as it does the youthful, perilous journeys through the 19th century Britain of “Oliver Twist” and “David Copperfield.
” However, where Charles Dickens tended to home in on class structures, McQueen tosses race into his more contemporary mix. Sometimes with effectiveness, sometimes with a mallet. The writer-director’s main character, George (Elliott Heffernan making a touching debut), is a biracial boy from the East End, who dangerously treks solo from the English countryside all the way to London to reunite with his mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan), a wartime factory worker who loves to sing.
Like many parents, she’s made the difficult choice to send off her son to the safety of towns far away from the coasts, which were being hit hard day and night by the German Luftwaffe. But lonely and bullied everywhere he goes, George jumps off the train and riskily attempts to return to.
