Petrificus Totalus

Rating: 9/10 (22 July 2017)

War is horrible. Newspaper reports or TV snippets dehumanize the horror. You browse through the oozing news from Syria or Afghanistan and can pickup your bag to drive away to your work. You settle on your study table after dinner and read first person accounts of the wars raging, as an assignment for your writing course. You feel drowned, but the literary skills of the reportage mesmerize you. You float back to the bed of daily life and snore off to sleep.
In its two hours, Nolan's Dunkirk doesn't let you skip the horror for a moment. Zimmer's sounds in loops make you cringe, wishing hard for it to stop. Hoytema's camera takes you within the gut wrenching inches of imminent death – in land, air and sea. Smith's edit roughs you up just every time you think you got a moment of relief.
You feel trapped with Tommy on the French island. Your only mission becomes to survive the next bullet with Alex, dodge the next bomb with Collins or avoid collision with a sinking ship with George. You root for the lads huddled in the hull of a trawler. You cheer at the sight of the planes at the horizon and then stun freeze upon the discovery of a Luftwaffe fleet.
You forget the side these characters represent, you don't care about your hatred for the colonial excesses of their country – you pray with them to reach a paradisaical home.
After a while, you don't remember that you came for the movie upon seeing 8.9/10.0 on IMDb. The craft of exhibition vies for your attention along with the art of narration. You should be glad to see cinema reach such excellence. Instead, you feel hurt as the three perspectives hit you with the single force of a trident. You bleed plenty, turn deaf after carpet bombing, and yet wish the film to run a bit longer.
You may be disappointed if you are a proud fan of Nolan. The narrative doesn't cover much of space or time. The tale is quite brief and contained. The writer - director uses disturbing details to zoom at the place of war or amplify the moments of survival on your face, with no apologies whatsoever.
You hear a clock ticking. Your pulse races at the synthesized ticking of the wrist watch which, you read later, belongs to Nolan himself. The audacity of a man possessed enough to make time shrink or expand to his wish gets visible in every frame.
It works as well for people not invested in the art of cinema. As an entertainment piece (Alas! I have to call a 'war film' that!), this thriller keeps the uninitiated at the edge of their seats. The story works with its three protagonists finding empathy among the masses. Sans any female role, an all-male cast evoke quite a few non-macho emotions – despondency, entrapment, a single minded zeal to survive – to name a few. Never before have you seen a director celebrate a historic defeat on celluloid.
When the lights of the theater are turned on, you can't rise from your seat. You should be home, but you are left with those who couldn't make out of Dunkirk. Petrificus Totalus, the filmmaker might well have shouted instead of yelling the routine 'cut'.