An attack on your senses

Rating: 9/10 (18 July 2017)

Back in high school i wrote an essay on what happened at Dunkirk. And i was especially intrigued by Hitlers major blunder to not attack the beach with his tanks. If he had done so, the outcome of world war 2 could have been very different. It was one of the biggest mistakes Hitler ever made, and we should probably be quite happy about that.
When i heard Nolan was going to make a movie about this, i was afraid he would paint the wrong picture and not tell the entire story. Nolan is good at bringing in nuances in his films, but i was still afraid he might forget about the French and the Belgians. And focus entirely on the British.
Turns out, this movie is not at all what i expected. This is not the kind of movie you go see to get a history lesson. Nolan does not go into specifics on what led up to this point in history, and the movie has no character buildup. The movie starts where many other films ends their second act, right in the middle of the action. What this movie does is to focus on the share terror of war, and we see it from the viewpoint of the trapped soldiers on the beach of Dunkirk. Awaiting their fate, totally surrounded, hundreds of thousands of them.
The movie tells three main stories. One on land, one at sea, and one in the air. And it jumps forward and back in time, so you feel you lose total control. And that is exactly what this movie needs, this is all about not being in control. German planes do regular sweeps, dropping bombs on the beaches. Planes and u-boats bombing and torpedoing the English warships. And the allied soldiers just standing there, with nowhere to run, they are basically just target practice for the planes. Who will survive? What would you do to try and survive? How would the consequences of your actions afflict you and your fellow soldiers?
All these questions are at the very core of the film, it is all about survival in the darkest of times, and the movie is carried by Hans Zimmer's hypnotizing score which feels like a psychotic hymn that drills into your subconscious and attack your senses with brute force. It is accompanied with ear deafening sound effects that pound your ears until you feel very unsettled. The imagery presented here are outstanding, with lots of wide open shots in insane resolution. Never have i felt a movie so claustrophobic, using so many wide and open shots. This movie is indeed best viewed on a huge cinema screen.
War is hell, war is chaos, and rarely has it been displayed better than in this film. Nolan has again showed that he can master almost any type of storytelling, and this time he even wrote the script himself. There are times in the film it feels like it might get a bit too sentimental, or that the film overly focuses on a few things that i feel i didn't need to be told again and again. But not before i start to get those feelings, it drags me back in with yet another pounding action scene.
This is like nothing i have ever seen before. It is a war movie told in an unusual way. The movie doesn't have much dialogue, most of this movie is expressed through the eyes of the characters. And the terror in those eyes when the German bombers comes diving down for another sweep, making the most terrifying screaming noise, speaks louder than words. There aren't really any main movie stars in this film, it's the event itself, and the terror of war that is the primary character. And with the great cinematography, the loud sound effects, the pulsing music score, and the intense battle sequences, you feel like you are right there, on that beach. And that is probably the last place you would ever want to be. It is an intense thriller packed with suspense from the very first frame to the last, it never let's go.
This will be a strong contender for many movie awards this year, and it's one of Nolan's best movies so far. That is saying something indeed, the man has a habit of making quite good films.
Highly recommended