10 War Movie Plot Twists That Nobody Saw Coming
2. Blake's Death - 1917
If one had to pick a main character between the pair of George Mackay's Will Schofield and Dean Charles-Chapman's Tom Blake in the early goings of 1917, it is fair to say that the latter seems the more likely of the duo.
Not only was Blake the more outwardly personable of the two soldiers, but he also possessed an emotional connection to the film's central mission. He and Schofield are charged with carrying a message calling off a scheduled attack that would jeopardise the lives of nearly 2,000 men - amongst them, Blake's elder brother, Joseph.
In any case, there was somewhat of an intrinsic expectation that the film's two lead comrades in arms would at least make it to the end of Sam Mendes' epic, amplified by the prominence of the pair in promotional material for 1917. As such, watching said expectation suddenly and unexpectedly go up in flames around the film's halfway mark likely comes as an almighty surprise.
In a desolating development, Blake is mortally wounded by a German pilot after he and Will pull him from the wreckage of his own burning plane. Mackay's private dispatches the wounded aviator but it's too late - Tom bleeds out soon after, eliciting heartbreaking promises from Schofield that he will write to his mother and complete the mission.