Void, uninteresting, and cold technical vista from Christopher Nolan

Rating: 3/10 (28 July 2017)

Nolan has been a storyteller that build his movie on plot rather than character, as the latter were usually just there to move the story along instead of someone to root for. He tried to build fleshed out character in Interstellar and failed to fully portray a human emotion that ultimately renders them unable to be cared about, although he spent the majority of the film trying to get us to care about the characters. In this movie (Dunkirk) he goes back to his usual 'blank-characters and work on plots more' routine and judging by his track record and the lack of clear star actor in the exception of Tom Hardy (who is underutilized and even he didn't bring anything special) anyone coming in the movie expecting a story with no discernible characters are correct. But, what is very confusing is why did he even bother to set up conflicts for these characters (i.e one of the characters from the arc is dead from falling down a stairs (truly) after a certain Cillian Murphy uncharacteristically goes into rampage while he never hinted that the character have violent tendencies due to his shell shock) that requires us to CARE about them in the first place. Okay the 'french- suddenly-thought-to-be-German-Spies- somehow' opened the door that could save some people including the one who were there in the first frame of the film (AKA the young soldier), and that gives us a reason to care when they tried to get him out of the boat while one of the characters tried to stop him and the other are forcing him on gunpoint? If anything, the only tension and dread moment are generated by the score and camera movement and visual. The dialogue itself are..bad. it's on the nose level of exposition, it's uninteresting, and it's just overall unmemorable. Hans Zimmer is a very good composer. How Nolan approach him to do the scores for Interstellar results in a very beautiful score. But his work on Dunkirk is, to say the least, mismatched. To realize that a man like Nolan who insist on shooting his movie on film roll and practical effect would conceive a mismatched, orchestral score that didn't sound grounded and even has techno beat in it that really did not fit the pictures shown. The score is not even memorable, since there's no recognizable theme that would be associated with the movie immediately (such as 'No Time for Caution' in Interstellar or 'Dream is Collapsing' in Inception) and it seems they approach the scoring beat-by-beat rather than working on a certain mood that wants to be conveyed. The visuals are, granted, is beautiful, while there is some poorly lit shot that clearly wasn't meant to be THAT dark. But, it gets tiring after a while due to Nolan's tendencies to reuse the same shot but just from different angle and different object to focus on (like seriously why do we keep seeing the right side of the cockpit on Tom Hardy's plane, is the left gone or something?). On the plus note, the production design and sound editing are of the highest quality. Wouldn't be surprised if it will receive an award or two in that department. The movie takes the theme of survival as an event rather than a state of emotion. It renders the movie to be stone-cold in it's tense moment and dull in it's calm moment (which there is little of), and become something you'd just behold and hear and hopefully immerse yourself in it. But due to his forced effort to make us care about this nameless character, and other reason that is stated above, this could be the least interesting of Nolan's film. I don't see anyone will analyze it's story or direction or even it's color scheme which is downright limited in the coming time. I don't see it as a classic in Nolan's filmography. I see a list of things Nolan should address and wonder where to improve his next project.