When I was twelve years old, I decided, I will never watch a movie again, when there is no female lead, or at least, important female supporting part in it. Because those movies are boring, they miss an interesting script, humor, emotions - and they do not look that good.

I have to say, there have been some exceptions - will tell you another time, which ones - but 1917 is a good authorization for my prejudice: Two guys at war, among a lot of other guys, dangerous situations, tough, muddy trenches, some swallowed tears, a lot of surviver qualities.

End of story. A kind of true story, obviously, as we learn at the end. Because the director´s grandfather was fighting in this First World War and loved to talk about it to his grandchildren, one of them young Sam Mendes.

Okay. Here is a hint - one war movie I still admire as one of the best, without any female lead is Apocalypse Now .

The madness, the drugs, the obsessions and surreal experiences men at war try to deal with, the obvious and the inner battlefields, the impossibility of a normal life after what you have seen - you will find all that in that movie.

Watch Apocalypse Now instead.

Sadly enough, that movie just won some minor Oscars, maybe because it was talking about a war some fifty years later, when the USA kind of did not play the good guy-part. The Vietnam war trauma was still very much in everyone´s head, when the movie came out, end of the Seventies.

With the soundtrack of a band called The Doors: "This Is The End, My Only Friend, The End" opens the three-hour-movie.