Well-crafted but ultimately feels empty

Rating: 5/10 (30 January 2018)

'Dunkirk' is an unusual animal indeed. It's not your typical 'film' in that it not only lacks, but outright rejects the concept of following a traditional narrative structure in place of aiming more for the sensation of an 'experience'. In other words, it's not trying to be a 'film' in a sense. But it also is, and that's the problem.
Several reviews on this website have implied confusion as to why critics praised this film to such an extent. To be completely fair, I can see both sides of the argument. On one hand, the critics clearly have a point: the film is well-crafted. The shots of the ocean are crisp, beautiful and sometimes moving and the camera angles are often surprisingly well-fitted to the atmosphere of a specific 'scene'. True, the shots during the pilot subplot are repetitive (which leads to the sequence itself feeling stale as a result), but this was intentional (although this does not excuse the staleness in itself).
However, whether the critics like it or not, 'Dunkirk' is a heavily flawed product as well in that it's stuck in an awful valley of confusion. Nolan, in his 'film', clearly wants to break from the well-worn format of the sentimental, character-driven war film and focus more on the conflict and experience of Dunkirk. This would be an admirable idea if not for three major factors:

'Dunkirk''s main desire seems to be to emulate a reel/recording of the real-life event above telling a more familiar narrative, but simultaneously the 'film' feels the need to focus on the POVs of three soldiers in particular within the conflict. And in this decision, Nolan basically shot himself in the foot. If you want to create an account of Dunkirk but also want to include characters for the audience to focus on so you can convey the horror/emotional impact of war, go for one or the other instead of smashing together two contrastingly operational ideas to create a weird limbo where the scale and flow of the account is lost through the character POVs but the characters are too underdeveloped and flimsy due to the opposite creative obligation for the audience to legitimately care about what happens to them, leading to the 'film' itself dragging into oblivion because there is nothing the audience can relate to.

Related to the above, but the scale of the actual Dunkirk event feels heavily cut down (where did the 150 million USD budget go exactly, into filming more homogenous scenes of ships sinking?). There are less than 1,000 soldiers on the beach itself (a 300th of the actual total) and never once is the audience given an idea of the grandiose scale of the real-life Dunkirk. Again, the film wants to be experimental, but is also too fearful to go all the necessary way, so it kneecaps itself and destroys both its potential directions by rolling with them both.

Nolan is an ambitious and creative director, but at times his ideas seem to lack the necessary discipline to make 'Dunkirk' work as a film. It's the George Lucas problem again (to a lesser extent). Lucas wanted to explain the past of Star Wars, but instead belched out the prequels, which were ambitious but a victim of Lucas prioritizing the stuff he wanted to include over what he needed to include, leading to the prequels being historical records with no central plot or characters. I'm not saying directors can't be ambitious, but it's necessary sometimes to control your artistic vision to create a good, watchable film. And it applies here. I understand the real-life Dunkirk may have included similar events, but did we honestly need so many near-identical scenes of boats sinking? Did the pilot scenes need so many homogenous shots? Why is the soundtrack fundamentally a collection of random sound effects? Again, these were both done for a reason, but explanation is not justification. They display Nolan has ambition, but don't improve or enhance the 'film' in itself.

Essentially, I can agree with both sides of the argument - 'Dunkirk' is an example of 'safe experimentation', the kind of film with an impressive exterior and concept that is enough to bolster the egos of the crew and audiences watching but not quite experimental enough to actually challenge either. We need more of the latter category, and 'Dunkirk' would have heavily benefitted from entering this category had Nolan been willing to go all the way. As it stands, we're stuck with an overlong empty montage of beautiful camerawork, interesting concepts and hollow execution.