More Styles than substance

Rating: 6/10 (30 July 2017)

It's hard to walk into Dunkirk not expecting a masterpiece. After all, it's a gritty, Important, True Story by THE Christopher Nolan, bound to not only redefine the war genre, but obviously say meaningful things about Brexit.* Right?
Sadly, halfway through the ensuing Lord of the Rings length (only two hours? Really? Could've fooled me) deluge of water, fire, yelling, bullets, airplanes, ticking, and the incessant air-raid siren that is Hans Zimmer, it hit me: sheepishly, ashamedly, I was bored - bored! - by Dunkirk. Nolan's objective - I idly ruminated, unfazed by the dreary din of explosions and frowning - is commendable: a war movie that captures the immersive, sensory immediacy of war - disorienting, chaotic, overwhelming, and traumatizing. Unfortunately, his result, more PTSD flashback than film, is such an emotionally hollow sensory overload that the mayhem slides right off. And, evocative or not, this a problem - because war may be many things, but it shouldn't be boring.
Dunkirk's poster calls it an 'event,' and, fittingly, it's more sequence of events than congealing narrative. His characteristic time-toying editing endeavours to graft synchronicity between the Churchillian three prongs of battle (land, air, and sea), and their ensuing subplots. It's a fun conceit, but rendered a bit redundant without a concrete plot or clearly defined, or even discernible characters to anchor to. Instead, we are barraged by furious bursts of combat and sullen pauses in between, which increasingly blur into a nigh-incomprehensible muddle. There are some exceptional set pieces - soldiers frantically stranded under a flaming ocean, or a panorama of rescue vessels creeping over a horizon - but these are the exception rather than the rule in a film chiefly inundated by war tropes already done to death (pardon the fun) - just louder. In the face of such monolithic stimuli, it's a curious experience that a film so noisy and fast-paced can simultaneously feel so plodding and dull.
You can't fault Nolan for attempting such visceral sensory immersion. Still, it leaves one grumbling for the good ol' days when newfangled cinematic trickery existed to support rather than supplant character building and emotionally-driven storytelling. With an overly lyrical title card downplaying the crucial historical scope of the conflict (had the beach been lost, the ENTIRE British army would have been wiped out, drastically affecting the war's outcome), Nolan's nearly wordless humans become tantamount to props - they move in formation, strike poses, and are blown away, with shockingly little emotional impact. Each time a supposedly crucial character met their end, my brain remarked "Oh no - not...that guy!" with almost comical saltiness. Nolan is far from immune from cheese, too, and his preciously few sentimental moments are dropped in with the subtlety of a wanton torpedo (amidst such otherwise staunch realism, Tom Hardy's gas-free Spitfire takedown of all assailing Nazi forces is as much of a middle finger to the laws of physics as... Batman out-swimming an atomic bomb's fallout. Hmm). Paint a war as stirringly as you like, but when you don't care about the participants, it's about as engaging and affecting as drifting off during a high school history lecture.
It's a shame, as the film looks and sounds exquisite, being virtually peerless in conjuring the sheer affective maelstrom of a combat scene. Hoyte van Hoytema's cinematography is simply stunning, sweeping from the intimate, claustrophobic sludge of a wayward vessel full of bodies living and dead, to judiciously nodding to Riefenstahl in his long shot aerial panoramas, studying the milling geographic formations of humans on the beach like a neo-cubist ant farm. Similarly, Richard King's sound editing is startlingly visceral, with each crackle of gunfire or seismic explosion piercing with terrifying verisimilitude. With such sparse dialogue, silent film comparisons would be apt, were it not for Hans Zimmer's nails-on-a- chalkboard musical score - an incessant drone of consistently escalating crescendo (music nerds, envision Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima for two hours) so torturous in its intensity it recalls POW interrogation techniques; an almost tacky vying for fight-or-fight adrenal overload.
Nolan's cast are given such short shrift that, even as they do their best with their fleeting coughs of characterization, we're given so little time to let their performances breathe it's a struggle to give much of a sh*t. Fionn Whitehead and Harry Styles are the worst affected - each show beleaguered dregs of earnest affability amidst their frowns, but, ensconced by a mass of equally bland nameless grunts, they're ultimately interchangeably expendable long before indiscernibly caked in mud. The quietly heroic Mark Rylance and credibly shellshocked Cillian Murphy cough up terse sparks of a (gasp!) emotionally resonant subplot, but just when gossamer strands of brittle chemistry start to form, whoosh - we're whisked off to the next vague, disorienting firefight. Kenneth Branagh speaks his two trailer stinger lines with customary nobility, though Nolan is either a hysterically brazen troll or distressingly oblivious to again(!) subject a marble-mouthed Tom Hardy to a voice distorting full-face mask. Don't call him Deutschland's Reckoning.
It's a struggle to think of any film as sensorially bludgeoning as Dunkirk - and if all you're after is a cinematic kick to the head, you may find it to be somewhat of a masterpiece. Then again, those seeking a heart-pounding adrenal jolt could just as easily hit up a theme park roller-coaster - sadly, Dunkirk has about as much story to tell, and isn't much more memorable. But surely it's the summer's best war movie? Honestly, Wonder Woman might take the prize (yep - shots fired). Nolan wants to leave us with Churchill's proud words in our ringing ears (thanks, Hans...), but instead, we venture to the Bard: "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
*I doubt there's any intentional subtext. But it's dour, vaguely conservative, and feebly nationalistic, so you decide.
-6.5/10