Impressive, yes—enjoyable, depends.

Rating: 7/10 (4 August 2017)

Christopher Nolan's DUNNKIRK is a war movie par excellence. It is raw, with a simple premise, no exposition needed. The story unfolds entirely through action, similar to movies such as MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. There is little dialogue, but the true nature of each character reveals itself through his (all major protagonists are male) actions.
I appreciate Hollywood making movies like this. Its attempt to depict war in as distilled a form as possible, is a welcome change from the romantic-action- comedy-superhero miscellany we so often see these days. DUNNKIRK is very much "old cinema". There's a sense of purity, with a minimalistic score, an emphasis on practical effects, and lots of wide shots and landscape shots that take their time.
That said, whether you ultimately like DUNNKIRK or not depends on whether you like war movies or not. And whether you can endure the intensity... and the deafening loudness of this movie. I have two problems with DUNNKIRK, and although both minor in themselves, together they spoiled my experience:
First, the sound design is jarring irritating. Yes, director Nolan likes to emphasize environmental sounds and have his actors mumble through muffled masks. But the ratio of vocal amplitude to the amplitude of war sounds (particularly gun shots) is simply off. Nolan has a thing for deafening gun shots, and this time they almost made me want to leave the theatre to protect my hearing. While the difficulty of hearing voices compared to the loudness of the environmental sounds may give the movie a sense of authenticity, it also means that there's extra cognitive effort in trying to understand what people are saying. Nolan, don't make your audience work so hard! And please don't give us tinnitus!
Second (and this one is perhaps more of a personal matter), Nolan should really try once and for all not to actively impress us. His style of cinema so desperately wants to instil awe in you, every image cries out 'do you notice how epic this is?' In recent years, Nolan has one made one great epic after another. And yes, his movies are truly impressive, but I would like to see how he would deal with something more small-scale and subtle.
DUNNKIRK is definitely a must-see, if only to be able to talk about it. But be prepared to be actually thrown into the trenches (or beaches) of war, which may not be the feeling you seek in cinema, especially if you can't deal with noise so well.