I can't believe this was Nolan.

Rating: 3/10 (16 December 2017)

As a huge fan of Nolan, of his movies, his personality, his approach to cinematography, I can't believe I'm writing this review as it is. I've read a lot of other reviews, I knew that something might be "weird", but what I've seen is beyond any hope.
First of all, I think Nolan has tripped over his own ego. Now, I love parallel cinematography. When it is established in a rich movie, when you care about the characters and the plot - yes, watching Inception is a breathtaking thrill, watching Dark Knight is a constant surge of action and Interstellar is just a heartstopper with tears for the cast. This is all good and reasonable. However, when the movie is shot like a... I'm sorry, this is the only thing that comes to mind: Empire at War cinematic mode, where the game camera closes to a random character and shifts every 5 seconds, giving you some cinematic feel to what's going on - it doesn't work. So much in fact that the only movie I can compare Dunkirk to in terms of "nothingness" - is Gravity, and this movie I hate with passion. It's almost like a scene that is cut from 10 angles, forcing the screen to flicker while you watch a simple action. The movie doesn't revolve around stages of the evacuation, it doesn't have beginning, all the steps and the outcome. Everything happens in less than a day, as far as I'm supposed to believe, really fairy-tale like. And this whole tiny action is shot from multiple irrelevant angles. With the shots changing so frequently that you not only have issues following through, but you also couldn't care less about what's going on. What was supposed to be "bloody war" turned out into a bigger video game than Hobbit.
Secondly - characters. Oh, I've read about that, I knew they would be lacking and I've tried to embrace that desperate perspective that they are all "meaningless" in a war. But it doesn't happen. See, if you establish a character, you either follow through or you dispose of him. Yet the four major characters that we are supposed to follow - are absolutely god-protected invulnerable heroes... without a speck of interest in them. In fact, the most developed character in this movie, the one with the most lines, most acting and most care - is the owner of one of the civilian boats that go on to the rescue. Him I quite enjoyed, and if at least half of the cast were built likewise - this movie wouldn't be such a disaster, pun intended. He had an origin story, where he appeared from, he had various impacts on the plot, lots of character interactions, his moral and spirit was established, his skills and precision. But that doesn't apply to everyone.
So, who are these characters? It begins with a bunch of... someone, who clearly is absolutely clueless about the situation, with the main character's key objective is to relieve himself. Yes, that natural call is apparently very important to capture on camera, because it will be repeated later at least once(unsuccessfully, apparently) and for the rest of the movie he, I suppose, will be walking with a pantload of compost. But why do I say clueless? Because we have no idea, "absolutely" no idea who are they or where do they come from. We just see that they are seemingly dressed as soldiers, yet they walk around like it's Fallout 4... no, wait, I take it back. Fallout 4 is much more suspenseful. So, when the random gunfire occurs, it just "takes away" all the faceless "whowasthatagain"s with zero blood or anything remotely reminiscent of gunfire animation, people just DROP DEAD like it's a B-rated 1950 with 0 special effects. Now, I confess, I wasn't shot in real life. But I'm pretty sure they weren't head\heartshot by snipers, and a gut or shoulder shot doesn't just force you drop dead. Realism is not a goal of Dunkirk, it seems. Anyway, the protagonist survives, finds a french trench... I mean, a french barricade, introduces himself as "English" and that's about it, he enters the next zone - the beach. All in all, this whole scene is so terrible that I remember the gruesomeness, the intensity and the grotesque of Downfall. A child there could navigate the streets better than these... "whoweretheyagain"s.
This same character later... kind of befriends someone, they try to sneak onto a ship by carrying a wounded person, whom they found to be still alive, yet forgotten. This goes on for some time, and in the end, the ship just gets blown up, and the second major character, the Admiral or somezit, just has to accept that the ship will sink with all the wounded. This immediately brings a serious question to mind - "why the hell did they even try to save the wounded"? It was mentioned that a single wounded person takes space of seven men. So grouping them on a boat that might just get blown up randomly - isn't a very reasonable, much less humane option. Anyway, some time around that, we are introduced to the third key character - Tom Hardy. He is flying with a couple of planes, one of which will just fall and sink without any explanation, moving on, the other will also fall and sink, but with some explanation which suggests that these "brilliant spitfires" apparently had the build quality of a toy plane. Tom Hardy, in turn, will shoot like a stormtrooper for the most part of his half an hour flight, a lot of attention will be centered on how he hopelessly fails to save "anyone". But, yes, in the end he manages to finally shoot that Heinkel when it's a clear frontal shot. Hell, he shoots just like me in first-person shooters! I was desperately hoping for some cliched, yet heroic sacrifice of him ramming something, but... no. Instead he flies to Dunkirk on what apparently is long-ended fuel(very reminiscent of Gravity's oxygen scene, even if he is shown to switch to a reserve tank). His floating along Dunkirk beach with his rotor STOPPED is... I don't know. It's like Nolan can now direct Ridley Scott movies, Star Wars and Transformers. All the franchises killed by inconceivable stupidity. I'm no expert, but a cartoon shot from Looney Tunes or Madagascar 2 comes to mind that, when the rotor damn stops - the plane falls down. It's not a kite, it's a huge metal contraption that weights quite a bit. So, instead of properly falling down, like every other plane in the movie, he, against all the rules of aerodynamics, not just glides along the beach, but also manages to fly up and shoot some incoming Messer or something. Not sure I was supposed to care about that. How did he end up? You don't want to know, trust me.
In the end, I'd like to mention music. Again, I've read good and bad stuff about it, but I knew that, technically, there are two types of scores: a Hans Zimmer score and ... not a Hans Zimmer score. What I heard was jawdropping. Throughout the whole movie there wasn't a single memorable tune. That "evergrowing" motiff, that "heart\run imitating" motiff and, of course, the clocks ticking. Wow. I can understand when a b-rated composer just tries to fill the movie with cheap suspense, but for Hans Zimmer to go down this road of "nothingness"... I guess Nolan straight ordered the good Zimmer to do as blank of a soundtrack as he could, because this is what the movie needed...and very much deserved. But for Zimmer's professional track, it has to be a very embarrassing flop.
Dunkirk was said to be a 2-hour long action from start to an end. Yet it started as a doozy and ended as a melodrama. With shots throughout having about as much action as that fence-climbing scene from Taken 3. Ouch. And for anyone wondering, I watched it with DTS sound on a 24-bit chip with 24-bit Sony headphones on an extremely crisp amoled screen. So, no, I didn't miss any sound effect. I heard 3D sound with all the depth that it had. I was also not distracted by screen size or color reproduction, it was an HDR experience that may have made a "few" scenes worth something, but, ultimately, did not point out any brilliant cinematography. Maybe I needed to watch it in 4K home cinema or some IMAX, but the former is a bit out of my budget for movie entertainment, while for the latter, the reviews say that the whole thing is too loud to properly enjoy. What I do know is that the previous Nolan movies were masterpieces that did not require ANYTHING to be fully enjoyable. Much like watching Wonder Woman made me want to re-watch The First Avenger, so, after Dunkirk, I feel like I need to revisit the better days of Nolan, when movies were packed with action, cinematography, special effects and a soundtrack to remember.
I sincerely hope that this flop would be just that - a flop. Everyone makes mistakes by either trying something new or trying something new while horrendously convoluting what they always do. Nolan used to be the CDPR of movie industry. If he learns from this experience, I'll forget Dunkirk ever existed. But if he doesn't, he'll probably become another Ridley Scott. An old director with zero inspiration that keeps shooting the only things he knows how to shoot and whose movies are overrated AF.