A Technical Achievement in Filmmaking Devoid of Any Depth or Emotion

Rating: 5/10 (26 July 2017)

Make no mistake, from a technical perspective Dunkirk is an absolute achievement in filmmaking. Shot in portion on IMAX and completely on film, it's a visually gorgeous movie with breathtaking cinematography of dogfights in the sky and battles at sea. The sound effects and mix are possibly the best I've ever heard in a film! The gunshots are and loud, frightening, and realistic and every scene with a plane closing in sounds as if it i flying right above the audience making for an all the more immersive experience. And as always, Hans Zimmer delivers another excellent and powerful score that is one of the best I've heard in a film in quite sometime.
Yet, Dunkirk makes the same mistake that many technical and visually impressive films do, it forgets to give us any reason to care about what's going on within it's craft. Nolan has made a film that is strictly about the event that took place and has chosen to tell it in an unconventional non-linear structure with three different areas of the event taking course over the span of a week, day, and hour. By within a few minutes dropping us into all the chaos unfolding and not stating the structure aside from brief "One week...etc." cards in the very start, it takes a little bit of time to fully grasp the way the story is being unfolded and difficult to get into during the first act with things moving at such a quick pace . The biggest issue with Dunkirk though is that there is nothing to get invested in. I'm debating whether to even say this movie has any characters because none of them have any depth, personality, or background. This is a film where we are suppose to be rooting for the survival of these people, yet aren't given any reason to care about them other than the fact they are soldiers fighting the enemy. As the film progressed, I found myself not wanting to see where the actual story would progress, but instead hoping that there would be something else I could appreciate visually or technically to keep me from losing complete interest.
Another big issue is that Nolan desperately wants this to be a grim and horrific portrayal of war. However, this is difficult to do when the film is restricted to the boundaries of a PG-13 rating. This is the perfect example of a film that needed an R rating to fully be effective in what it was trying to do. Take films such as Saving Private Ryan or the recent Hacksaw Ridge in which the battle scenes become borderline horror films due to not just their suspense, but brutality and graphicness. Not that Dunkirk needed to be a Gibson gorefest, but it's portrayal of war feels all too tame and can't deliver on the level of suspense that's built up in the scenes proceeding it.
That isn't to say the film isn't without tense scenes, one in particular where soldiers are hiding in a ship that is being shot at for target practicing is particularly nerve-wrecking as well as the climax and the ending are also very well done. As for the acting, there isn't a bad performance here, but with little dialogue or much to do other than look frightened the cast isn't given a lot to work with to show off much. Tom Hardy's role could have been played by any other actor and it wouldn't have changed a thing which can be said for most of the cast here.
For a film that has openly taken pride in how experimental, unique, and going against what is norm in Hollywood, Dunkirk ends up being exactly what Nolan has been criticizing. It's a complete exercise in spectacle that's trying to get a pass with it's unique style and filmmaking techniques to excuse it's lack of depth and emotional core. I can appreciate Nolan for taking a different approach to a war film and it certainly showcases his talent as a director, but just because it's different doesn't automatically make it good and without any real depth, characterization, or emotion only further provides evidence of his weakness as a writer. If the film had been trimmed down to 30-40 minutes and released as an IMAX feature it would have been much more impressive, but the film itself is an empty exercise in technical achievement that's in it's own way a new breed of cynical filmmaking.