Good but far from great

Rating: 7/10 (9 May 2018)

Christopher Nolan's dramatisation of the British rescue of servicemen, stranded on the north European coast, is a good film.
It shows us the scope of the mission by focusing in on three elements. One is the land-based situation and, in particular, the efforts of a single young man to get off that beach and onto a boat to England by any means available. Another is what happens to just one of the small boats which took part in the rescue as it leaves Weymouth on its way to the besieged beaches. And the last concerns a Spitfire pilot, doing his best to protect British forces in the Channel.
We therefore have the spectacle and scale of Dunkirk, together with 3 stories which are small and intimate enough for us to identify on an individual level. There are sequences which, if not so graphic, are nearly as harrowing as the D-Day landings in Saving Private Ryan and, by crosscutting between the segments, the tension is kept at maximum level throughout.
And that is one of my criticisms - I'm not one of those who thinks Christopher Nolan can do no wrong, by the way, The editing is sometimes a bit too fussy for its own good - it's not always clear where you are, whether you've switched narrative strand, or whose viewpoint you're supposed to be following. And this is exacerbated by the fact that weather conditions and time of day switch. One realises that filming a sea sequence means you can't always wait for the sun to come out, but do we have an understandable continuity glitch, or do we have a deliberate editing mismatch?
My other major criticism is of the music. I understand the music choice - insistent, discordant, all-pervasive, featuring a clock ticking throughout most of its running time to crank up tension and to create a dramatic effect when it stops - but dear heavens, it was like being assaulted. I don't think there is a moment in this film without music, and it's loud and overpowering and, with a couple of exceptions - when they factor in a taste of Elgar at particularly uplifting moments - it's not much fun to listen to. I hated it.
But there are those moments - the arrival of the small boats and the final fate of the Spitfire, for instance, which genuinely choke you up. Well, me at any rate. My Grandad was in the navy on one of the ships at Dunkirk, and one of the people rescued by his ship was a soldier who went on to marry my Mum's cousin - we found this out much, much later when they moved to be near my Mum in old age. So there is a personal resonance for me as, I imagine, a lot of Brits.
This is a good film. It is (in my view) too flawed to be a great film, but you can say that of much of Nolan's work.