A beutiful mess of a film

Rating: 7/10 (21 November 2018)

This is a good war film that I found myself wishing a lot more from. I don't think there is any argument to made about the cinematography of this film, it is flawless. I couldn't ask for better visual execution. The soundtrack is a touch too over dramatic, but it isn't Zimmerman's fault because the film score is doing everything it is supposed to be doing. Again no faults for flawless soundtrack execution. Now onto the items that I desperately wished had been worked on more before shooting this film. Before I go into my critique, let me first reiterate that I gave this film a 7 of 10.
The narrative for Dunkirk is unbelievably disjointed. We follow several stories connected together in a daisy chain scene compilation. While everything looks beautiful, the stories definitely feel repetitive and you will definitely feel some slow pacing. It will also feel slow because a lot of the conflict in the movie is not combat focused. It focuses on a lot of mundane issues that could happen outside of war. This can be seen in an over attentive focus on gas gauges, focusing on a shot of a mainish character taking a dump on the beach while an interesting firefight is happening, walking, more walking transferring the wounded, and small ships sinking. This wouldn't be quite as noticable if you didn't have the soundtrack announcing all these details so dramatically. In fact so much focus in the film is related to survival, one could make the argument that this is a survival movie and not a war film and you couldn't really prove it wrong.
Bringing me to my last point. This movie feels cheap. It really feels like it is a war film on a budget. It feels everybit of 300 actors on the beach and not 300,000. There are no shots that really setup a fair sense of the scale of this ordeal. There just aren't enough ships, there aren't enough aircraft, the town looks immaculate. Not enough to feel like there is any chaos. The war assets they have get juiced to the limit and filmed from every angle. Even the beach looks manicured as if it needs to be ready to be reopened to the public within an hour after the shoot. I understand needing to stay in the budget, but I've never seen a film where they made me actually worry about it going over budget.
In conclusion it might sound like I didn't enjoy this film, which isn't true. It just doesn't live up to the hype. It's a great film to watch as a one time flick. I'd sell it as being visually excellent but a narrative mess.