A powerful, dark film that does not allow time to breathe

Rating: 8/10 (22 July 2017)

Through Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan makes us live all the intensity of the events of Operation Dynamo. A powerful, dark film that does not allow time to breathe.
First of all, even if Dunkirk is a war film, do not expect the classic scenes of the genre. No great battle scenes where hundreds of actors kill each other. but minimalist clashes focused on few fighters. No dripping heroism either like the American cinema as the secret. But the staging of a furious will to survive. Dunkirk is the story of 400 000 men trapped on a beach waiting to embark for England, while the German army tighten its grip on them, at every moment. We imagine without difficulty the growing anxiety of these men and the phenomenal stress to which they have been subjected. And that's clearly this feeling that Christopher Nolan tried to send us.
Indeed, everything in this movie, from filmmaking to musical compositions, give suffocation feeling. Colors are dull and dark. Dialogues are short and not many. The filmmaking is jerky. Music (signed Hans Zimmer!) is stabbing. All of this creates an oppressing ambiance which truly press on the spectator.
This oppression feeling is reinforced by the fact that at no moment, along the film, we can see the enemy. Always, his presence can only be guessed. He is there and is coming.
This film, like his glorious predecessors Apocalypse Now, or Full Metal Jacket, is a diving into the world of the soldier at war, where death is omnipresent and where struggle for survival can lead the best to the darkest choices.
Nolan succeed here, to create with brio an atmosphere of the most suffocating and to keep the spectator panting all the way. A good movie, which will leave a trace, but not recommended to asthmatic people.
PS: even if from an historical point of view the film is correct, i regret that the sacrifice of french soldiers, without which the operation would not have succeeded, wasn't mentioned.