Such an imposture

Rating: 4/10 (10 January 2020)

The good: cinematography; metaphysical tone; some beautiful, artistic sequences.
Now the bad. - It's not thrilling, as someone says. - It's inaccurate, because there are a couple of moments in which soldiers do idiotic things no soldier would ever do (such as running away from the fire instead of sheltering behind houses). - It's quite ridiculous in the stripped down depiction of the beach: a couple of thousands of soldiers, ten vehicles, three planes. You know, the real thing was 100 times bigger. - Charachters have no background, and are not charachters in a true sense. - The dialogues have always been the worst part of Nolan's movies, and here are no better: naive, and full of exposition. - The storylines are even worse: what the heck with that young guy on the boat? Why should I care? The feeling is that Nolan is making up some easy-gripping situations, and mashing them together with no real structure or motive in a pandering movie. - The editing and the pace are a complete mess. The movie is quite boring, and having those split timelines is a clumsy and confusing attempt to add some value where it's missing. But the result is even worse, because you don't have just a dull story, now you have a dull and messy story.
Now the huge fault of Nolan and the critics praising him is that they are stripping cinema down to something very simple, very unintelligent, packed in something else that pretends to be artistic and witty. That's an intellectual crime. There's a whole generation out there that believes Nolan is the greatest director ever, while he can be very millenial with this supercifial and pretentious approach. Gimme Private Ryan every day. It's not so much artistic and not so much fake-intellectual, but it's accurate, cares for details, it's spectacular, it's thrilling, has a real structure, real emotions, and real characters.
Ps: I forgot the music. Amateurish attempt, again, to inflate the value of prolonged scenes by the use of annoying sounds, which span continuosly across several scenes with no hint of matching the editing. Some will say it's art, I say it's an easy way to fool the audience and aggrandize the mess.