Dullkirk

Rating: 5/10 (21 July 2017)

If I was in charge of marketing for a big budget movie, do you think I could get the score on certain websites to stay high and a lot of good reviews to remain near the front of the review board? Could I wine and dine the reviewers for top magazines and tell them why the movie is so great and make it easy for them to spin it that way? Possibly. Looking through the reviews on IMDb I seem to have 10 start reviews repeated multiple times, while unfavorable reviews only appear once.
I enjoy real creativity and originality, interesting plots and witty or smart dialogue. I've loved Christopher Nolan's previous movies for these reasons, but they are absent here in Dunkirk. But there are other things to enjoy in true story movies which tell of overcoming things when the odds are stacked against you and triumphing in adversity: in these movies you can hope to get some emotions of pride, admiration, wonder: perhaps even a lump in the throat. But, perhaps deliberately, Nolan avoids these big moments (thinks they are cheesy?). The problem is they are not replaced by anything else to elicit any feelings. This combined with the lack of background and development of characters meant that, for me anyway, the movie was emotionless and therefore pretty dull. Others have likened it to a docudrama on the History channel,but there is really almost no information conveyed about the history, so it wouldn't be a strong contender in that field either.
The only real originality I saw was telling the three stories on different timescales with them all converging at the end, but nothing about this impressed me and it just seemed more of an expedient so that the short (real time) story of the spitfire could be interlaced with the other stories. Others seemed to find this confusing, I didn't really find that a problem I will be very surprised if this movie doesn't become one of the biggest flops of the summer, if not all time: great marketing and spin can only go so far.