Christopher Nolan is currently riding on a high with the Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar - the man has made his hits and they've been great at revolutionising either their genres or the film format and have done well at the box office and with critics.
So a man who is a self-confessed fan of shooting on large formats such as IMAX wanting to do a war movie must be good thing? Or is it? Let's dig in.
Twenty minutes into the opening of Dunkirk and the dialogue has been as scant as it comes; Nolan sets it clearly early on that he is interested in a lone survivor story akin to Cuaron's Gravity instead of an epic heart-tugging story Saving Private Ryan.
The premise of the movie sounds cool and there are one or two very heart touching moments. Nolan does a great job creating strong visual images that stay with you like scum on the beach; the look of the soldiers and use of real life planes, boats and ships that makes the audience feel we are in World War 1 territory. Then there's the master Hans Zimmer with a superb and eerie score.
Yet the film is so stripped down narrative-wise. It gives little context of what was happening that led to the Dunkirk situation, who the soldiers are, what makes them tick - instead it looks as if Nolan thought the fight for survival would be so compelling that stuff to do with character development wouldn't be such a big thing.
It does not help that Nolan decides to employ a trick of doubling back on narrative, whereby we get to see the same action but from a different character's perspective. It actually kills the momentum of dread of seeing a day pass by and young men try to outlive it.
Then there is the whitewashing of World War 2. Turning Dunkirk into another white man's war, where the black French soldiers (blink and you will miss them), the Algerian soldiiers (not present), the Pakistani soldiers (not there) and the Indian soldiers (not there) are totally erased from the Dunkirk situation.
Which is a pity, after seeing Wonder Woman that at least tipped a hat to the involvement of the so-called third world in World War 1. The French don't even fare better and are shown only as people who wanted to run, whilst historically most of the French were busy fighting off the Germans, giving the Brits a fighting chance to be evacuated.
Then there's the faceless and nameless enemy. I think Nolan thought that by us watching the movie from the Brit side alone we would get their experience and identify with them more. The opposite happens - the drama lacks an anatagonist with motives for wanting to decimate the Brits.
Yes, I understand that there was an attempt to create to try and create striving to stay alive as the big force of antagonism that the characters have to overcome, but that was driven by the Germans who are given little to no agency. Nolan pulls an Eastwood ala American Sniper, where we are supposed to judge the enemy merely from the protagonist's eyes. Which is a weak idea in case it makes the narrative one-sided.
Nolan has been accused of creating movies that are cold and Dunkirk is his coldest movie thus far. It's an exercise in flag waving that is visually stunning but lacks a truly compelling and moving story.
The fact that it glosses over a lot of facts such as the contribution of other nations to the Dunkirk experience just makes this one of the weakest films from Nolan since Insomnia for me.
Rating **1/2
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* Junk status ** Meh ***It's aight ****almost perfect *****Classic