Visual Expresion Vs Character Expression

Rating: 7/10 (26 August 2017)

If we valued the expression of motion picture to be the cult climax of visual connotation, Dunkirk would be a solved masterpiece. I personally felt no indicator of time or pressure to feel lost in the story in the whole run time of the film. Nolan uses high angle shots to explore this open fantasising and still rather unexplored area of time in history on screen. The sound track that booms the planes war flight delivers the chill of placing you in sand on Dunkirk. But the characters delivering this story and map out the foundation of the war frame and harness no power to connect personal emotion to screen.Do we ask the question then, should Nolan have used characters to deliver the story along the way to develop that connection on screen with human emotion or was it passive enough to allow the cinematic expense of "war in action" to be enough? If we pulled out any of the boys acting in this piece and placed them in octane drama and asked them to deliver more dialogue, they would drown in ordinary mundane common muck. True Harry Styles cannot really be faulted for this first time big screen appearance and his ability to act should be credited accordingly. However if human emotion is the way to value cinema then this film just lacked that simple connection to make you fight for someone or better yet, the British soldiers that were fighting for the time they lived in.