"Dunkirk" Review
*Let me just state right now that I do not enjoy WWII films, and I am not the biggest fan of Nolan's work*
"Dunkirk" is written and directed by Christopher Nolan and is based on the Dunkirk Evacuation that occurred in 1940. This film shows you the perspectives of the same situation on land, air, and sea. Three perspectives. Three timelines. So fancy! Intentionally so, it throws you into the moment. There's very little dialogue (and when there is, it's mostly improvised) and it shows rather than tells. But it doesn't really come together in the end.
Let's start with the characters: On one side, we see people react to gunfire and cope with the hopelessness of the situation but we don't get to spend the time that would've been so necessary for me to empathize with. We follow a young soldier in the first scene but I quickly lost track of where he goes as soon as the movie cuts to a new timeline. It's rather hard to decipher and maybe it would benefit from a second viewing but as it stands, the fact that most of the soldiers are young white men with slick back hair (which is intentional, I know) makes the drama extremely hard to decode. I wasn't even sure who I was looking at for more than half of the time.
Tom Hardy portrays a pilot and he shoots at other planes and I guess that's it for his character. I don't actually know why his character was in the movie to be honest. I don't know what his character motivation was about. What he does in the end would've maybe made more sense if we knew his character more.
Lastly, we follow a group at sea led by Mark Rylance. Unlike the other two perspectives of the movie, every character on the boat makes sense. We don't get the notoriously clunky exposition dialogue that Nolan films have been cursed with; we just get enough from Rylance, Tom Glynn-Carney, Barry Keoghan, and Cillian Murphy to empathize with them. It's dramatically complex and even made me tear up at times. I would've rather just seen a whole movie about these characters opposed to the cluster-fuckery of the other two narratives.
Nolan movies have been a mix bag of editing choices since Batman Begins. Lee Smith returns once again to try to tie different narratives together to form some sort of dramatic coherency between them- think the climaxes of The Dark Knight and Inception, but this time it's extended to a feature length film. There were some really great moments like a torpedo heading towards a ship full of people, or two guys carrying an injured ally across a bridge that has just been blown up. But there were so many times where I was watching something with Mark Rylance and then it cuts to the other characters that I don't care about. Also the ending, is a complete mess (mostly because I was so confused as to what was happening to Tom Hardy while simultaneously trying to figure out if the soldiers in the scene were the same soldiers that I've been following from scene one). There's a beautiful shot that the movie lingers on that made me think, huh, that's a cool shot to end your movie with, but then, again, the drama cuts away to someone else for some weird reason and it made little to no sense to me.
Hans Zimmer teams up with Nolan again and deliver a score that's louder and more obnoxious than the one in Interstellar. At one point it was referencing Elgar's Nimrod but it felt like a cheap knock off of the piece rather than a tribute. They could've just used Nimrod instead. The sound design was loud and immersive. Every gunshot felt like it had weight to it and every explosion sounded devastating. But, similar to Interstellar, the dialogue was impossible for me to decipher underneath the deafening soundscapes and music. Great sound design but terrible mixing and sound editing.
Overall, I liked a third of the movie. It was way too loud and the editing was kind of terrible (though I appreciate the risks that the editing took). I couldn't really empathize with most of the characters on screen and I kind of tuned out mid way through out of exhaustion. It's worth seeing in true IMAX (as was intended) for the sound design and the visuals (particularly the scenes in the air and over the sea). It's probably the best IMAX experience I've had since "Gravity". That being said, Dunkirk isn't a movie that I would watch again.