Because of all of that, when I first heard that Christopher Nolan was making a WWII film, my reaction was "Ugh, no. Why?" If it wasn't for Nolan's name attached to it, I wouldn't be looking forward to Dunkirk at all. He is one of the best working directors right now and there's no director I trust more to helm a $100+ million production. That means, when it comes to Dunkirk, the big question is what wins out: my love of Nolan's work or my fatigue of WWII films?
The short answer is Nolan.
Let me set up the film real quick before breaking down why Nolan makes it work. Dunkirk is about the rescue of the many, many thousands of soldiers trapped on Dunkirk beach during WWII. With nowhere for the troops to go, German aerial assaults are slowly picking all of the soldiers off and destroying the larger rescue ships. So, the British Navy turns to recruiting civilian vessels to cross the English Channel and rescue the troops instead. The film breaks this into three smaller stories: The Mole, the Sea, and the Air. The Mole is the story of the troops on the beach. The Sea is about the civilian vessels coming to rescue the troops. The Air is about a couple pilots trying to shoot down the German planes that have been making rescue impossible. I won't bother giving you character names or anything like that, partly because I don't know any of them, but mainly because they aren't all that important. Dunkirk is more of a military mood piece than a traditional narrative. The three stories weave together and add new perspective to prior events. It's light on dialogue, opting instead to just experience things. Many of the conflicts aren't over-explained. Tom Hardy as the pilot in the Air has to worry about running out of fuel and not getting shot down. Mark Rylance and company in the Sea are worried about surviving the journey into dangerous waters. The soldiers in the Mole are finding any way they can to get on a boat home. Had Nolan tried to get any more plot than this across, it would've been too dense.
You can read as much depth into the characters as you want. Nolan sometimes has problems with his characters being a little plain or unnuanced. That's kind of the case in Dunkirk, but knocking him for that would also be missing the point. The characters are only there to populate the film. The direction and technical elements are the stars. The sound is terrific (editing maybe a little more than mixing). The film editing is surprisingly taut for a Nolan film. At 1hr 46min, it's Nolan's shortest film since his debut feature, Following, in 1998. The production design and cinematography are top notch. If this isn't a major player in all the technical categories at the Oscars, then I understand nothing about anything. The film is tense throughout without becoming tedious. This is probably Nolan's finest directing job yet. See it on the biggest screen you can find.
The film isn't perfect. The dialogue doesn't go out of its way to explain everything, so if you mention the one mention of something or one of the context clues or forget who one of the characters is, it can be unforgiving. It didn't affect my enjoyment of the film, but I can already tell that there's a good deal more that I'll pick up on the second time I see it. It might not hurt to even look up the actual events a little before seeing it. The less that you are asking what's going on, the more you can enjoy the rest. There's also the tricky matter of when to credit Nolan for capturing the disorientation of battle and when to say that some of the murkier sequences were just poorly edited. Nolan haters will say that the geography of especially the air sequences was poor. Nolan apologists will say that he perfectly captures the feeling of the people in those moments. I'd say it's more the latter than the former, but I can't confidently say after seeing it only once.
The performances aren't showy, but some people still get some good things to do. Mark Rylance steadies the Sea third of the movie against Cillian Murphy as a rescued soldier with shell-shock. The film Locke proved to me that Tom Hardy can easily carry extended periods of sitting in a vehicle by himself and make it look interesting. The soldiers in the Mole are all pretty generic, which fits the idea of there being 400,000 nameless soldiers being picked off a few at a time. Kenneth Branagh gets to stand around and look dignified a lot as the commander in charge of the beached troops.
I wasn't blown away by the film. A good amount of that is my WWII fatigue. Even still, I found several parts toward the end very touching. I love the efficiency of the storytelling and the technical precision of it all. It doesn't transcend the genre or anything. It's basically seeing people do things you've seen before only at a very high level. This continues a great July, and if this is the film that finally lands Nolan that elusive first Best Director Oscar nomination come January, it will be very deserved.
Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend
(Note: I'm trying to come up with a rating system that I can use across all films. Thumbs up or down is too binary. The five star system ends up with too many three star ratings that mean nothing. I'm currently thinking: Strongly recommend, weakly recommend, weakly don't recommend, and strongly don't recommend with some caveats if needed. I don't like the grammar of it though. This will likely develop in the coming weeks)
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