"Dunkirk--The Ride"

Rating: 5/10 (6 August 2017)

Diving right into the midst of the trapped soldiers at the film's beginning, with only a short on-screen paragraph or so of written explanation of the historical facts behind what we viewers find ourselves experiencing alongside the soldiers and citizens who came to their aid, Christopher Nolan's "Dunkirk" is more of a pure and simple "you are there" experience than I expected. At the end I felt I knew almost nothing of the characters involved: the closing credits make it clear that none of the individual characters portrayed in the film are based on actual soldiers or townspeople who went through the real-life event--they are all fictional. I later read that Nolan based them on composites of real people's stories. He also was quoted as saying he hoped the film would inspire viewers to research the actual people who were there. This left me appreciating the technical skills of the filmmakers involved, but also left me surprisingly uninvolved emotionally. As I exited, I realized I felt like I'd just been on a very long "Dunkirk--The Ride" experience at a Universal Studios-like amusement park rather than just having seen a full-length film that fleshed out what the soldiers and townspeople went through. As a "ride," it was too long and bruising: I saw it in a THX large-screen-format house at a multiplex, and you felt the bullets landing and explosions' reverberations from the subwoofers and excellent sound system, but after awhile I found my mind wandering to the technical aspects of that sound work rather than being involved in the film's story progression. Dialogue is almost non-existent, and some of it is lost in the sound mix and unintelligible--probably as intended by Nolan to again give you that "you are there" feeling. For me, it was an unsatisfying ride, but I noticed some people in the auditorium applauded at film's end--my gut tells me they likely knew much more of the history of Dunkirk and filled in the blanks left for the rest of us not as well-versed in the history.