The struggle to write a positive review is real.

Rating: 4/10 (22 July 2017)

It's hard to rate and review a movie like Dunkirk. To start off, I knew what I was going into, and yes, the film lacks character development, plot, and dialogue. I know this. I understand Nolan's reasons behind this. After all, I've seen every one of his movies and most at least once and I admire their direction greatly. So I get Dunkirk is supposed to be an intense survival action movie. You don't really need any of those aforementioned elements in a film but you better hope you have done enough of a good job on the other elements holding a film together. So instead of reviewing what we don't really have because that would be unfair, I'm going to review the things we're still given. Also divided into a triptych, because I, too, can be clever.
"1. The Cinematography: 1 hr 46 min 2. The Sound: 1 hr 46 min 3. The Theme: Last hr (as you are struggling to pay attention)"
The Cinematography : Lacking. The camera darted from frame to frame and scene to scene like it was the one shell-shocked. It's not that it was like one of those action movies with shaky camera where you have no idea who is fighting who and what is going on. It wasn't that bad. What I mean is it lacked gravitas. It stayed on each scene long enough for us to understand what was going on but it all seemed devoid of momentum which was strange given it was a survival film. For example, there are air scenes which are just long enough to see the sky and sea tilt on their sides, with gorgeous shades of blue, and then boop - cut to new scene. There is no gravitas because there's no time for it to happen. All the beauty of those particular scenes and other scenes gone and wasted because nevermind -- they needed to fit more disjointed scenes and give us a feel of "air, sea, land." Okay, fair enough, but let me enough the nice cinematography instead of butchering it up.
The Sound : Hans Zimmer is amazing, he basically made Interstellar the bombastic epic sci-fi it was, but the sound in Dunkirk just didn't do it for me. No melody. No distinctness. Boring. I'm not stupid regarding what they tried to achieve here - put a ticking clock in the backdrop and instantly amp up the suspense. It's kind of clichéd and feels cheap. Other people probably think it's a clever use. To me, it's more like film making 101. Boring and kind of insulting. The only thing it did for me was prevent me from going to sleep so at least it served some sort of purpose.
The Theme : I've seen a lot of reviews give Dunkirk flack for lack of character development and a lack of emotions however there are emotions to be experienced in this movie, but I'm not sure if they're anything but grim. The irony of Brexit negotiations going on right now and the rare episodes of emotion in the movie have not been lost on me. Suffice it to say, Dunkirk shows the dark side of human survival. At the end, I didn't really feel like the enemy of the film were the Nazis. The true enemy was people turning on one another. I don't want to give away any spoilers so this is perhaps too cryptic. In a struggle for survival, how do we not lose our humanity? And what if we do? Those are the big questions Dunkirk asks.
In conclusion, while I seemed to have gotten a lot of the intellectual decisions behind the production of Dunkirk, I still cannot applaud its execution. It fell flat. The only semblance of movie magic I am accustomed to from Nolan I got at the end with one of the British RAF airplanes. A rare moment of all three cinematography, sound, and theme combining into something poignant, moving, poetic. But just like that.. it was gone. Marred by the next scene which defied all semblance of events and time and ruined my moment of movie magic.
I am absolutely flabbergasted by Christopher Nolan. I am not sure why everyone's saying this is his best film to date. It pales in comparison to his other movies. It pales in comparison to other war films. Is it because it's the most accessible genre of the movies he has done? The least cerebral? Cue all the typical Oscar nominations and fanfare but Dunkirk can't and won't fool me. Nolan, here's hoping your next movie is not a big gigantic mess like Dunkirk is.
4/10, 1 for each element above and another for that one particular RAF airplane