I am Embarrassed for Nolan!

Rating: 3/10 (22 July 2017)

We saw Dunkirk on opening night, I was excited, I'm a huge WW2 buff. The incredible human drama at Dunkirk has mostly been overlooked by Hollywood. So July 20 has been on my calendar for a while. Boy did I fall for the hype!
I must say something positive first... great war footage! I loved the spitfires! Knowing that Nolan shot this move with only a few post effects is impressive. The scenes inside the ships were fantastic.
Now, onto the sad truth as I see it. I wish the producers would have spent some of the $150 million on a script. I didn't know you could shoot a historical period movie with a steep budget and not have one. It's as if this was just a big historical re-enactment of the Dunkirk rescue and the film crew said, hey, we should grab a couple of decent actors and throw some cheesy lines at them, we'll make a movie! There was an old-timer from the business that once told me, "if you've got a great story you can shoot your movie thru banjo strings on black & white film".
I got the impression that Nolan was hell-bent on shooting realistic war footage and he fell in love with those shots and scenes, forgetting that the audience would appreciate a plot. There are so many interesting plot twists from the actual event. We never really saw anything from London, France or Germany where most of the strategy was planned. Nolan focused on the beachhead and the channel. The realism was quite good, but too long and confusing.
The sound track had many problems too. The mix was hot, if you wanted to listen the sparse dialogue, good luck. For some reason the director chose to loop this maddening drone sequence throughout the movie. It was so obvious it had to be intentional. I was hoping the version we saw was just an advance copy with a rough mix, nope. One last thing, I'm not sure the average movie goer will appreciate the way Nolan repeated scenes. Apparently the footage was so good from 4 different angles we should show all of them, back to back.
I get it, great film makers take chances. There have been many examples, especially in the indie- film world of masterpieces that tried risky new techniques, sadly, Dunkirk isn't one of them.
To wrap this up... I'm glad I saw Dunkirk. I think most WW2 buffs will see it no matter what anybody says.