Dunkirk's protagonist is anyone but Time

Rating: 10/10 (9 August 2017)

What some people are saying about not being able to care much about the characters says more about people than about the movie. And I believe that for two reasons:
One is because we are so accustomed to the storytelling coming from the literary conventions (a journey, three acts etc) that we got addicted and now can't enjoy other proposals as much as we could.
And two is that the film is a narrative experiment in which Time is the main character and master of the destiny of all there. If there was a human protagonist, this would require more film time to focus on his dilemmas and would eventually break the triptych logic of the narrative. Thus, the only way for the experiment to work was to not privilege anyone on the screen but Time itself, something the soundtrack is practically literal about.
In other words, Nolan did not focus on an arc because he wanted to show that the collective and its cooperation is more important than the individual issues of whoever it is. That's why in my opinion Dunkirk can be considered a deeply humanistic film: while the enemy has no face, the hero has many.