Did you know the edible banana is sterile?

Rating: 5/10 (11 April 2019)

I remember sitting in the kitchen as a child, eating a banana and suddenly wondering where the seed was that would make another banana tree. I asked my mum and after a moments hesitation she pointed to one end of it and said, "Think it's there, within the skin." Of course she was wrong because all edible bananas are seedless. There're sterile.... Which conveniently brings me onto this film.
I'm sorry, but it misses the mark I'd expected from Christopher Nolan. I won't go into the story-line but if I did, it wouldn't matter because really there isn't one worth mentioning. All right, look, basically, it's about a group of boy band members with non military style haircuts trying repeatedly to get from Dunkirk to England. Our main character starts by needing a poo (literally) that he never actually gets round to and ends up back in old blighty sitting in a time travelling train (that was made in 1978 and miraculously taken back in time to the 1940's). That's pretty much it. Famously, there are no computer generated special effects used in this movie, and probably because of that point, it's just not right. Dunkirk itself feels deserted, not a place where 400,000 odd troops and additional civilians have been corralled. The beaches look clean, bereft of disregarded machinery and smack of directorial orchestrated choreography. Have a look at the Dunkirk portrayed in the film Atonement for what must be a more accurate setting of the sheer organised chaos of the Dunkirk beaches. For me, the film never really recovered from that feeling of sterility. For example, when the "armada" of civilian ships turned up to save the day there were all of 12 in shot, hardly a heart warming representation of the 850 or so that actually arrived. I watched it to the end (I'm paid to watch films in a quality control role) and found a couple of redeeming features. The last few minutes of the film I found beautiful, so much so, I played it repeatedly. A mix of imagery, Edward Elgar music and Winston Churchill's "Fight Them on the Beaches" speech. The other thing I found interesting was the editing, which is not chronologically sequential (a bit like his earlier masterpiece "Memento", but not as overwhelming).
Oh, the music. You know that sometimes you can tell when Hans Zimmer has been inspired? Well this lacks inspiration. He uses increases in tempo to add tension to a scene. That's okay maybe once in a film, but repeatedly? In my book that shows a bit of laziness and fatigue. The Elgar piece at the end is really the only time it was a pleasure and worked with the imagery for me. All in all a disappointing 5.