Not a movie I'd expect to watch in 2017

Rating: 10/10 (10 August 2017)

There were few films I saw in life in relation to which I thought nothing should be added or removed. I can't decide which is the best movie I have ever seen, and maybe this is just a foolish question. However, I think no movie had never left me with such a clear impression of being a complete work of art as has Dunkirk. I had not watched any of Nolan's prior movies, nor am I familiar with his conceptions of art and beyond. As I left the theater, it didn't seem to matter.
No rating other than 10 would do justice to this movie. This is truly a work of a art. The structure of the movie is brilliant and it's absolutely fundamental to understanding its symbolism. If you miss it, you will not have understood what this movie is about.
I overhead some folks saying it's just another war movie, that is does not provide sufficient emotional attachment to characters, that, all in all, it's a passable, lukewarm sort of movie. It's none of that. Not by a long shot.
Sadly, we've been conditioned by Hollywood to have our hands held by directors and screenplay writers, who abuse narrative and strip cinema of its poetic potential, of its ability to speak and communicate through the poetic discourse, through the magic of images, of camera-work, of subtle symbolism.
We have been led to think that artificial emotiveness, abuse of dialogue and plain narrative, is the normal standard. We've been taught that Spielberg's obvious approach is the golden standard. That, in order to connect with a character, we must learn of his grieving family back at home, that we must see funerals, or be told "beautiful" stories his/her, and so on and so forth.
Dunkirk demonstrates this need not be true. It demonstrates the power of cinema as a unique form of art. It asserts values, it asserts a philosophy, a conception of life, of art, of beauty, of virtue. I wonder if this is the reason why it has received backlash from a significant portion of our nihilist Western society?
"It's just another WWII movie." It's not. I'd chance saying the war is but its setting, its backdrop - and a powerful one, like I had rarely seen on the screens. My interpretation about this movie is that it is about individuals, about individual choices. But it's about human life, too, and hard choices we make. It's a manifesto against nihilism. It purports to show, the way I see it, that the seemingly random actions of individual matter, regardless of their scale. It's the opposite of the Coen brother's philosophy in movies such as No Country for Old Man.
For these reasons, this was not a movie I expected to see. Not in 2017. Not when movies are either so offensively dumb or communicate a philosophy of nihilism or, alternatively, of a romanticized form of determinism, as in Moonlight (2016), or even a pedantic rehearsal of the artsy sort.
This is an authentic, beautiful work of art, and I'm grateful for it, because it tells me that there still is authentic art and beauty. That we have choices. Choices to make beautiful and genuine works of art such as this.