A Visually Sumptuous and Yet Sub-par Offering from a Master

Rating: 6/10 (31 July 2017)

Dunkirk could be classified as a war movie, an action flick or a suspense thriller depending on who you ask. For me, it's a melange of the three. The tension is palpable, the visuals astounding and the historical details are for the most part accurate. Of course there are some liberties in the factual accuracy department that have been taken.
While gorgeous to behold and offering a score that steals the show so to speak, the emotional core is rather hollow. It's a snapshot of a military disaster, a wartime slice of life as it were, a realistic but impersonal depiction of a major event during WWII. We as the audience experience it as bystanders. You see this event as the people present would have but far removed. We don't know anything about these characters apart from their immediate circumstances. I know it wasn't the point but that is what left me underwhelmed. It was all about survival but without the individual insight. It's a generalized vision of what everyone saw and felt but it takes away the personal experiences.
The film is short, very short for a Nolan film and tries to weave multiple threads and timelines together. An event of this colossal nature cannot be summarized and this film feels like a summary. It's non- stop action and we don't get to experience the psychological turmoil and trauma, the emotional turbulence and deeper character interactions that would have naturally occurred. Sure there are some harrowing scenes of this nature but they are very few. The score is brilliant but manipulative and tricks you into feeling something that you wouldn't otherwise feel. There is no strong protagonist per se, we experience it through the eyes of everyone in the area. It's ambitious but emotionally distant. We zoom from land to sea to sky, the timeline is so squeezed that we don't feel the any of urgency the characters would have felt. Time is the vital factor, a sense of it's moving slowly and the panic that it elicits is absent even though the score features what is essentially a ticking clock. The visuals and cinematography take focus away from the human element. It would have worked much better as a character- driven miniseries in the vein of 'Band of Brothers' or 'The Pacific.'