“Please, mum! Don’t send me away!”
Rita doesn’t want to. She’d do anything for George—absolutely anything. She wants to keep her 9-year-old son safe and sound.
So Rita puts George on a train. To be safe and sound.
It’s 1940, and London teeters on the brink. With much of Europe under its sway, Nazi Germany turns its eye toward Britain, that last real threat to its hegemony on the continent. London and other industrialized cities in England become a nighttime target for the Luftwaffe: After all, it’d be increasingly difficult for Britain to fight if it has no guns, no tanks, no planes to fight with. But Germany chose these heavily populated centers for other reasons, too: to airmail the war to homes and schools, churches and theaters. To terrorize and demoralize Londoners until they would say, finally, enough.
Bombs fall, ripping through its streets and schools and homes. Every night, families seek shelter in London’s few available underground facilities. And more and more, parents send their children away—to waiting surrogate families in England’s countryside, safe from the lethal rain of metal and boom.
Rita’s nights have been filled with the sounds of bombs exploding, the red flicker of fire, the screams and shouts of men and women. Sometimes children. More often than not, she and George and Rita’s own father, Gerald, leave their beds in the middle of the night to find underground shelter—a little protection from the German bombs.
But she can’t keep George safe. Not here.
So Rita takes George to the train station. And George is furious.
“I hate you!” George screams, and he runs off. And when he boards the train, he refuses to even look at her—even as she cries and pleads outside his window.
An hour down the tracks, George feels pretty bad about that. And as a few youthful passengers note his dark skin and call him a dog, he feels pretty bad about himself, too.
So, after the adult watchman leaves the car, he walks to the train door, opens it and leaps out—determined to make his way back to London. Back home.
But if George thinks this leap of desperation, this leap of faith, would be a giant step toward safety, he has no idea of what’s around the bend.
Before the German bombs started falling, George enjoyed an enviable homelife in many respects. Rita did indeed love him deeply and truly, and she always made him feel wanted and safe. Gerald, George’s grandfather, filled a quasi-fatherly role in the house—encouraging the boy to stand up to those inevitable bullies.
“What do we always say about ‘em?” Gerald asks George just before he’s about to be put on the train.
“All mouth and no trousers?” George says meekly.
George has had to deal with more than his fair share of bullies, given the color of his skin and his mixed racial heritage. Kids can be cruel, and certainly racism thrived in London as George was growing up. Even before he boarded the train, George developed a pretty strong constitution.
But George can be generous, too.When he meets three other children on his new adventure—kids who themselves refused to be sent away—he happily shares what food he has with them.
The people whom George meets along the way aren’t always so nice. But one man, a warden, proves to be the perfect companion during a critical night. The warden’s name is Ife, which means “love” in Nigerian (he explains to George). He allows George to accompany him on his rounds (to make sure that Londoners are paying attention to orders to keep their lights off). And when he can, he leads George to a shelter where the boy can be safe for the night.
There, Ife defuses a confrontation between a man of Indian descent and an English couple trying to hang a sheet between their area and his—as, apparently, his ethnic heritage is an affront to them. Ife takes down the sheet without hesitation: “We are all equal members of this country, willing or not,” he announces to the room. He points out that Germany is all about making strong racial and ethnic distinctions, and he hopes that the British could aspire to do better, that “we treat each other with compassion and respect.”
The speech wins George over. And even though he had done his best to minimize or ignore his own African heritage before they arrived at the shelter, now he confides to Ife, “I am Black,” suddenly proud to be so.
We see moments of kindness and courage throughout the film: A man yanks someone to safety from a falling wall; a gentleman defends Rita’s honor; someone risks his own life to save the lives of many others. Historically speaking, the Blitz was one of Britain’s proudest moments. And we see plenty of moments here for which they can be proud.
Before George boards the train, Rita gives him a pendant with St. Christopher on it—a pendant that George’s father gave to Rita years before. The medal is typically used as a symbol of protection and guidance, especially during journeys: It’s a telling symbol in the movie as well, as George certainly could use some protection. He sometimes eyes it thoughtfully. And when someone removes it when he’s sleeping, it’s the first thing he asks for once he’s awake.
While walking with George on his rounds, Ife sings a song consisting only of the word “alleluia,” suggesting that Ife is a man of faith.
Rita volunteers to help at a shelter led by a well-known—and apparently in some quarters, infamous—activist who mentions he’s Jewish. “Some have called me a socialist,” he tells the shelter’s workers and guests. “A communist. A danger to our society. But my ideals are more closely associated with Christianity than with communism. ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.’”
Amid laughter, he adds, “Maybe Jesus was a red.” Then the man says, “May God bless us all and our brave men and women who are fighting for our liberty.”
We see St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background of a shot or two, as well as what looks to be a partly destroyed church tower closer to Rita’s home. A dream-like sequence depicts a subway station filled with the happy spirits of many who died.
It doesn’t appear that Rita ever married Marcus, George’s father, but Blitz tells us that their relationship was more than a fling. In flashback, we see them in an energetic dance club. They (and others) dance suggestively. Marcus pulls Rita into a quieter part of the tavern, where the two kiss passionately. They walk down the street, obviously a couple.
After George is put on the train, Rita reluctantly goes out on the town with two co-workers. Their conversation includes a bit of mild innuendo.
During a night in a makeshift shelter, George sees two people apparently having sex. (We hear some moans, and we see a foot moving up and down to indicate otherwise-hidden sexual movements.) Some women wear low-cut dresses. Rita’s friends flirt with some guys in a bar.
A bomb hits a posh nightclub and kills plenty of people inside. Many are still sitting at their tables, eyes staring vacantly ahead: We hear that their lungs exploded in the blast. Others were torn apart by the explosion. One woman plays with a dismembered arm. When thieves are unable to remove a dead woman’s ring from her finger, one thief takes a pair of snips and (off-camera) cuts the finger off.
In flashback, Marcus is purposefully run into by a man and surrounded by his mates. Marcus tries to walk away, but the assailants attack, and they jostle Rita as well. When Marcus punches a man who threatens Rita, someone hits him on the back of the head with a blackjack. The beating continues until the police show up: The men say that Marcus struck first, and they only were acting in self-defense. The police believe the other men, and they haul Marcus away. (We learn that he was ultimately deported.)
A boy is struck and killed by a train. We learn that a character died during an attack. A man hits a boy in the face before pummeling his own face with his fist. A flood threatens the lives of many people (and we later hear that many did indeed die). We see a corpse in a destroyed building.
A couple of scenes feature massive urban fires, where people’s homes and places of work are engulfed in flames. One fireman, holding the front of a firehose, is knocked unconscious when the water unexpectedly gushes out and smacks him in the face. A man threatens George with a horrific beating, after which he says he’ll throw the boy into a river.
George asks a couple of name-calling bullies if they want to fight. (They decline.) There’s a bit of jostling on an impromptu stage. Rita befriends a girl with a hurt arm and a missing mom. (Some unspoken communication suggests that the girl’s mother is dead.) George sees a Punch-and-Judy show depicting some puppeteering violence.
One f-word and a couple of other profanities (the s-word, “b–tard,” “d–n” and two uses each of “h—” and “p-ss”). The British vulgarity “bloody” is used about 10 times.
Bars and clubs contain plenty of people who drink and smoke. When one of Rita’s friends tries to buy a drink, a sailor offers to buy it for her instead. And after a show of resistance, the friend coyly accepts.
Gerard smokes, as do other characters. There’s a reference to alcohol consumption in a song or two.
Racism is an ever-present nuisance in Rita and George’s life, though both do their best to overcome it. George is mocked and called names. And when he strolls into a walkway fronted by a posh collection of stores selling exotic goods, he sees paintings and sculptures of Blacks: They cower before white masters or snarl with feral, nearly animalistic expressions. Meanwhile, Rita is disparaged for mothering George.
When George is alone in London, someone offers to help him. Instead, George is sent into the clutches of a gang of thieves, where George is pressed into service. He’s made to crawl through a tight hole into an abandoned and bombed-out jewelry store, and he’s ordered to bring back as much loot as he can find. (It’s not the last time he’s asked to steal for the gang.)
When George is trying to talk his mother out of sending him away, he protests that farm animals smell. He has far worse things in store for him. The bomb shelters don’t have restrooms: They have buckets behind curtains. When George tells Ife that he needs to urinate, he’s directed behind one such curtain and holds his nose because of the smell.
A factory worker waggles her rear at her boss in derision. Other workers interrupt a BBC broadcast to demand—during the live show—that the government open up the underground stations amidst the nighttime raids. (The government resists these demands, both because the stations aren’t that secure and because it’s worried that those seeking shelter will interrupt commuter traffic.)
George disobeys his mother’s wishes and the orders of the authorities when he jumps off the train. (He feels quite bad about the former, if not the latter.) And, of course, Rita argues that those authorities should’ve kept much better track of her little boy.
Rita tried to send George into the countryside for his own good. But George wasn’t having it. And his decision to try to find his way back to his mother showed just how dangerous wartime London can be.
Apple TV+’s Blitz feels, in a way, like a voyage into Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Dante’s trip through hell in Inferno, or even like Huckleberry Finn. George’s epic quest is as much moral as it is physical: He encounters someone literally named love, but much of his journey is filled with hate and indifference and despair. He sees the best and worst of what war can turn the most civilized city into. And we see that London was far more complex than the phrase “Keep calm and carry on” would suggest. Some followed the better angels of their natures; others sunk to the very depths of the worst humanity can be capable of.
As such, we should offer a bit of applause that Blitz squeaks onto the screen with a PG-13 rating. We hear some swearing. We see plenty of death. But it could’ve been worse. Much, much worse.
Directed by Steve McQueen, who helmed the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, and starring four-time Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan, Blitz has all the ingredients of a prestige, awards-season drama. The narrative arc is ambitious, the themes powerful, the artistic flourishes impressive.
But at the end of the day, we’re given a rather simple story, really: That of a mother who loves her little boy very much, and a little boy desperate to come home. And while that simple story isn’t perhaps suitable for your own cherished little ones, it reminds us that as cold and cruel as the world can be, we may find truth and beauty in it yet. And the most likely place to find that truth, that beauty, that warmth and goodness, is with the people who love you most.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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