A Masterpiece (of Emotionless Boredom And Nolan Trickery)

Rating: 1/10 (21 July 2017)

Crow the critics are about Nolan's latest, "Dunkirk." A stunning masterpiece say many. Masterpiece my ass.
Snookered by the hype and war film fandom, ducats were placed on counter, a ticket for admission passed back. Lights dimmed, anticipation mounted, and... nothing. Nothing. Save lurching between disparate, battle set pieces featuring people for whom little or no empathy exists. Lacking investment in the characters, what remains are merely adequate, bloodless war scenes easily outgunned by the recent "Fury" and, farther back, "Saving Private Ryan." For example, a young boy is killed but we know nothing of him, nothing of his motivation for climbing aboard a civilian, Dunkirk-bound boat at the last minute. We feel nothing for him because he's simply a cardboard cutout.
As the actors barely register emotion, boredom set in and not to be shaken off. The characters move as wind-up toys. There are few actors who bare their soul like Cillian Murphy, here a shell-shocked survivor. As directed, he sleepwalks with the depth of an amateur in a high school production. He's not alone. All the actors turn in measured performances with identical blank looks and monotone deliveries. Particularly wasted is the actor's actor, Kenneth Branagh.
Certainly the bravery and sacrifice of civilian and military in the Dunkirk evacuation is celebrated in "Dunkirk." Thank you. However, this historical action occurred in 1940. Films echo the zeitgeist of the time in which they're produced. It's an odd choice to make a large (bad) film about an evacuation three-quarters of a century past. There's a stink of political agenda afoot in "Dunkirk" that's intolerable. The enemy, unseen in "Dunkirk," lurks and kills from safety by air and ground. Surrounded with backs to the the Atlantic, the very survival of a way of life is in question, as portrayed in "Dunkirk." (Spoiler Alert: The Allies Won The War.) The enemy's attacks are isolated like terrorism. The result is "Dunkirk" weaves a cautionary allegory mirroring religious extremism bent on destroying all non-believers.
Subtle propaganda is dangerous. "Dunkirk" fits that bill. Either that or Nolan is a complete idiot who hasn't a whit of sense. It's a toss-up based on a filmography including the lackluster borefest "Interstellar," and the beyond inane "Inception."
Nolan remains static in his career with "Dunkirk." His films are half-baked, underwritten, detached, and emotion-free. "Dunkirk" plays like a rough cut by a bad director who expects the viewer to emotionally fill-in-the-blanks. "Dunkirk" even lacks the courage of its convictions in being bloodless - there are no graphic deaths. At least Spielberg had the courage to rub the viewer's nose in the stench of death in "Saving Private Ryan." The first half hour of that film is unprecedented in the depiction of carnage (one can almost taste the grit of raining sand from nearby mortar strikes). Nolan sanitizes-for-your-own-protection. Yet he chose a violent topic and punked out; a war movie detached from death is not a film about war. By design, war cannot include gratuitous violence, just insanity - an element also lacking in "Dunkirk."
The wall-to-wall dramatic, but mixed low, score loses its effectiveness and becomes annoying. And, the constant, ham-handed crosscutting between stories further waters this already thin soup by stopping a scene's dramatic momentum.
A short scene in "Mrs. Miniver" (1942) featuring civilian Walter Pidgeon returning from Dunkirk in his shot up runabout says more in the visuals and a few lines of dialogue about the evacuation than the entirety of "Dunkirk." As Trump might Tweet, "Sad!"