Modestly Amazing

Rating: 9/10 (23 July 2017)

This wasn't my favorite of Nolan's movies, and wasn't what I was expecting, but it was not a disappointment. In general, I don't enjoy war movies, even the best ones like Saving Private Ryan. Perhaps that is part of why I liked Dunkirk and part of what makes this historical event the right kind of story for Christopher Nolan to turn into a movie. It's not just massive amounts of explosive battles and gore surrounding "brothers in arms" dying together against impossible odds, or anything like that. Not to say that those sorts of movies are bad, but there are enough of them already. What makes this such a great movie is not the scale of the battle or the odds that the characters are up against, but the scale of the success that it depicts.
The story of national heroism is told through the perspective of several characters, all of whom are vital to its success. None of the characters are perfect, but all of them are heroic in some sense whether by enduring trials or by aiding those who are worse off than they are. The strangest thing about the characters in this movie were how they were introduced. None of them has a "character moment" like those that are usually employed to tell the audience who a character is at the beginning of the story. In this case, all of the characters are distinguished solely by how they act. This points to how expertly Nolan wrote these characters even with very little dialogue and how well they were played by each of their actors.
Although the pacing was not the best in this movie, it did display some very good twists on non-linear storytelling that I'd never seen before. There are three locations/story lines that are introduced at the beginning of the movie: 1. The Mole (1 week) 2. The Sea (1 day) 3. The Air (one hour). Each story is cross cut with the others and they all intersect at a few points, sort of like the inverse of how Amores Perros is structured. A lot of times with non- linear stories and especially some of Nolan's other movies, the events and chronology of the story are difficult to follow. With Dunkirk I never felt lost, in large part because the exact chronology isn't really important. I would go into more detail, but won't for the sake of keeping this spoiler-free.
There was a strange subtlety to how impressive this film was to me. There was nothing flashy, gimmicky, or immediately spectacular about it. But that did not keep it from being a great piece of filmmaking and something that was enjoyable and very engaging to watch. Sometimes things like the dialogue in the Social Network, James McAvoy's performance in Split, the camera-work in Whiplash, or the special effects in Inception stand out as impressive right away. Not so in Dunkirk. Every aspect of the production design, costuming, visual effects, and camera-work was done very well and could definitely be up for Oscar's. But none of them drew attention to themselves, and rather aided the telling of the story.
This may not match up to Inception and Interstellar, and is undeniably new territory for Chris Nolan, but I think he and everyone who worked with him did an excellent job with Dunkirk. I do enjoy his science fiction work most of all, but there was a lot to like here. The world that was created immediately gave me the impression that this was a movie in which any character could die, and that's a rare thing to find in a movie. This made it an emotional movie too, whether by making you share the emotions of the characters or by sharing in their moral struggles or by sympathizing with their plights. The emotional moments were also small enough that I could relate to them rather than being so profound and foreign that their weight was just lost on me.
I would definitely recommend you go see this just because it's a great all around movie. I know that my review has been all in praise of the movie, but it's not perfect. The only problems I had with it were that it wasn't as entertaining as I would have liked and the dialogue was unclear at several points. But fortunately, there isn't much dialogue so this didn't matter so much. In any case, try to go see it or at least rent it once it comes out on video. Overall Rating: 8.5/10.