Well Made, Not For Everyone

Rating: 6/10 (23 July 2017)

This movie is an audiovisual masterpiece, and I am not one to throw the term "masterpiece" around loosely. The cinematography is flat out excellent, as is to be expected from Christopher Nolan. His skills are unmatched when it comes to playing with one's perspective. There's one angle in the film where you see a soldier climbing up the bow of a ship, and the camera sticks with the ship in such a way that it isn't until the last moment that you realize that the ship is in fact capsizing at the very same moment this man was hoping this ship would be his salvation. A single camera trick did so much more to convey the terror and hopelessness of war than a million war movies. It's this kind of camera-work that I simply do not see any other director performing and certainly not to this degree.
The audio is equally stellar. Most sounds that you take for granted in a war film: bullets firing, bombs exploding, planes flying and the like stand out in spades here. They all have such a weight to them that each individual example of them stands out in a way that is normally impossible, given the desensitivity to war that we have after scores of Michael Bay atrocities. The sheer brilliance of the cinematography and sound design drastically limits how low my rating can realistically be.
But despite those positive points, my rating is indeed lower than most people's. There's a disconnect between this film and myself, and it is this: it can be the most visually pleasing film on the planet. It can have unrivaled sound design, breathtaking action and peerless cinematography. If the movie (especially one marketed as a war-time drama) fails to make me care about what's on the screen, then it's not a ten-star film. And this movie did very little to make me care.
The first time a plane flew over head with a deafening roar and dropped bombs on thousands of desperate and defenseless men who want nothing more than to just go home, it was powerful. The first time our battered and bruised heroes (or at least the closest thing this film has to heroes) think they are on the brink of finally getting a break, only for a surprise attack to dash their hopes, it was devastating. The problem is once you have adjusted to the brilliance of the direction, and slightly different versions of the same events occur (bombing attack, plane dogfighting, submarine attack, sinking ships, etc.) a second, third and fourth time, it begins to feel empty.
The problem is simple. The film focuses so much on telling so many different stories that it doesn't take enough time to give us a reason to care about any of these characters. What is their story, who are they, what is their defining attribute, beyond the fact that they're on the good side, why should we want them to survive, what is their freaking name? When someone in this film comes so close to escape, only to meet an unfortunate end, my thought eventually became: "well that's a shame, but it'd probably impact me more if I knew anything about this dude. He could be a terrible person. Maybe he left his wife and kids. Maybe he runs a dogfighting ring. What if he doesn't even use his turn signal when he drives? Wait, did they even have turn signals back then? How much longer is this movie? 40 minutes? Crap."
Defenders of this movie will say that it doesn't focus on individuals in order to focus on the real main character: the war. They'll say that the point of this movie is simply to tell the true story of this harrowing historical event, and that's a valid defense. But the problem is: do you know what you get when you just tell the story of a historical event verbatim, without taking the liberty to add the character and drama necessary to make it fun and relatable? You get a textbook. A documentary. And the problem is that it was marketed as a movie. If it was marketed as a documentary, it would be one of the greatest of all time. As a movie, it's one of the longest hour and 46 minutes I've spent in a theater. If it wasn't for the visual and audio fidelity, this film would be more at home at midnight on the History Channel than in a movie theater, and there's nothing wrong with that. I like history documentaries. I just wish I knew that's what I was spending $12 to see.
Traditions exist for a reason, and traditional filmmaking dictates that films have characters. Characters that grow. Characters you understand to some degree. Characters with motivations and backstories that make you want to go on a journey with them. Instead, this film is just a series of events. A series of unfortunate events to boot. And if that's what you want to see, I'd instead just recommend the Series of Unfortunate Events book and Netflix series. At least those have interesting characters (maximum sass).
Despite all my bellyaching, I do recommend you see this film, particularly in the theater. For one, outside a theater, it loses about the one thing it actually has going for it: the excellent audio experience. But also, because I am in a very strong minority so just from a statistical odds perspective, you'll probably like it. This review exists for two reasons: one, to get expectations in line. Do not expect a traditional movie here. This is a collection of oft- repetitive occurrences held together by excellent direction, nothing more or less. But it's extremely well made. And two, so some of the more pretentious defenders of the movie can see that someone can get the point of the film and still not particularly like it. Opinions, man.