Christopher Nolan's most visceral film till date

Rating: 10/10 (19 July 2017)

Disclaimer: Being a lifelong Christopher Nolan fan the review may seem biased to many, but Dunkirk is in so many ways not a typical Christopher Nolan movie.
A few words about the screening: It was 6.45 PM midweek on a Wednesday, booked tickets for the first Australian public screening of Dunkirk in its 70 mm glory. Imax Melbourne went to the extent of reinstalling their 1570 film projectors to project this movie as was intended by Nolan. Dunkirk would be screened in both the 1570 film format and its upgraded Dual 4K Digital Laser systems for the weeks to come.
Christopher Nolan has been making movies mostly centered on the science fiction genre. That is not necessarily a bad thing. The Dark Knight Trilogy, Interstellar and Inception are all deeply steeped in the genre and could be easily classified as Sci-Fi Action films, but very well made Sci-Fi Action films, some of the best in the genre it is created in. Whereas Memento, Prestige, Insomnia and Following could be roughly put into the Mystery genre. All nine films had something in common, the scripts were based out of works of fiction if not original fictional screenplays. Realism is not a genre Nolan operated in. Neither did he make a movie based on war. Operating in a similar genre throughout their whole career is not a trait of a director striving to be one of the greatest in his generation. Nolan tries to become one of the best in his generation with Dunkirk with one of the most realistic war films ever produced.
Dunkirk is a film about the epic struggle of 400,000 British troops trapped in the shores of Dunkirk as a result of a military disaster, probably one of the worst military disasters of all time. With the German troops closing in on them the only way they could save themselves is to somehow cross the narrow English Channel and reach home. As easy as this sounds the reality of the situation prevented the troops from getting home easily. The shallow shores of the beach prevented big ships to land and rescue the troops and the strong tides prevented small boats to be paddled. Nolan decided to narrate the story from three different perspectives inter-cut into each other- land, sea and air. Each perspective spans out over different time periods, the Land narrative plays out over a week, the sea over a day and the air only an hour. As usual with his films Nolan employs non-Linear narrative to tell his story. Editor Lee Smith plays a very important part in cutting between the three narratives to provide a crisp and expectedly perplexing view toward the story. Match cuts are used expertly to bring a visual coherence between the three perspectives. Nolan and Smith is successfully able to provide different vantage points to the same events taking place in the movie making the experience complete. Dialog is sparse in the movie, and character development very thin. The script is only half the size of his previous films like The Dark Knight which were all heavy on character development and narrative momentum mostly built through dialog. This was done by Nolan advertently as he didn't want the characters to be at the center of the action, he wanted the viewer to be. He also wanted to tell the story by what's happening on the screen rather than what was spoken. The same reason made him cast actors who are not famous faces with the exception of Tom Hardy (who had his face covered like he has for most of his films) and Cillian Murphy who played the character of a scared pilot afraid to go back to Dunkirk. He didn't want the audience to relate to the actors as heroes, just feel the experiences they are having being part of this incredible situation. The objective was to provide a visceral experience to the audience which can only be experienced to its intended extent in a theater. The bullets fired feels it's fired at you and you can smell the sea in the drowning scenes. The tension in the film is gripping. Nolan decided to cut the movie around the 100 minute mark because beyond that it would have been impossible to hold the almost Hitchcockian suspense. Hans Zimmer was masterful as always and played a massive part in adding to the visceral experience, the sound of the ticking clock (synthesized by Hans from a recording of one of Nolan's own watches) plays a very important part in the visceral experience. Van Hoytema shoots this mostly using 70mm IMAX cameras, I could only imagine how difficult it would have been for him to shoot using such a mammoth camera from such difficult vantage points. His wide angle shots are expansive and helps provide the scale of despair we were looking at.
Nolan and his production team delivers and hits the ball out of the park with Dunkirk. People walking into the theater expecting a Dark Knight or even an Interstellar may be disappointed as he shifts his genre and objective with this production. Although Guardian's Andrew Pulver's comparison to Kubrick may be a bit premature, but he is definitely on the right trajectory to becoming one of this generation's greatest.