Technical excellence, but uninteresting and monotonous

Rating: 5/10 (18 August 2017)

Dunkirk is a historical war action drama, written and directed by Christopher Nolan. I have always been a big Nolan fan so naturally I was hyped for this movie. Nolan has knack of taking a genre he has never done before and somehow make it appealing to the masses and intelligent at the same time. A superhero trilogy? Check. A dream heist film? Check. A space travel sci-fi? Check. Admittedly, I am not a big fan of the war genre, but I was still very curious to see how Nolan would tackle it.
The film is unquestionably extremely well-made, and I could see why people would love it and claim it as one of the best movies of the year, but to me it was just far too dull. While the interweaving of three perspectives is interesting, I did not feel any tension during the lackluster action scenes because I did not care about any of the characters since their development was non-existent. A lot of the times, unless it was Cillian Murphy or Tom Hardy, I could not even tell which character was who, complicating things to an already unexciting movie. Hans Zimmer's soundtrack was also a miss, which is shocking because I loved all his previous Nolan efforts. Also for a war movie, it really could have benefited from an R-rating, as the bloodless PG-13 makes things even duller than it already is.
There are a few things I really liked though, namely the sound design when the spitfire jets were descending down the beach, wailing terrifyingly like monstrous banshees. The acting was also mostly well performed throughout by everybody especially Mark Rylance as a civilian going into Dunkirk to save the men. The film's technical excellence cannot be denied, but with uninteresting action and monotonous characters, Dunkirk was just a disappointment. You can say I do not understand the film, but I believe I understood it just fine; I was just not as enthralled as should be to Nolan standards.