☆☆☆
You don't watch Dunkirk as much as you witness it. There is no way Christopher Nolan's film can be called anything less than impressive. It is a tremendous technical achievement, a film that is staggeringly well put-together.
But as a film, Dunkirk is a little like Titanic if the movie began and ended in the last reel and cut out all the stuff about Jack and Rose. It's like Star Wars if the Death Star battle went on for two hours and did away with the plot.
In that way, Dunkirk is an apotheosis of big-budget cinema: an important, commercially successful filmmaker has convinced a studio to release a filmmaking experiment, one that does away with conventional notions of storytelling and character development in favor of editing, sound mixing and mise-en-scène.
There are recognizable actors in the film (Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance) but they aren't given the opportunity to blossom into characters. Tom Hardy spends almost all of his screen time mumbling behind a face mask (a Batman in-joke?), while the younger cast members are interchangeable, as if Nolan intended for the audience to be confused about who's who.
Even dialogue is treated as disposable -- there are long, long scenes in Dunkirk where the characters are speaking but their words are vaguely incomprehensible. Nolan, perhaps, wanted to extend the you-are-there gut-punch of Dunkirk to these scenes, to place the viewer into the midst of battle so fully that there's constant confusion that is not helped by only occasionally being able to hear what others are saying.
The end result is that Dunkirk is only intermittently engaging as a drama, even while it is almost always fascinating to watch as a piece of filmmaking. As almost every article about the film makes a point of relating right up front, Dunkirk was shot on 65-millimeter film and in 65-millimeter IMAX by a director who refuses to allow cell phones on his sets, and the very fact that we know those things and they get reported explains quite a bit about the film as a whole: this is, first and foremost, a technical achievement.
Directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese built their careers upon crafting jaw-dropping sequences that defined their films -- think of the boxing scenes in Raging Bull, the shark attack in Jaws or the shower scene in Psycho. The indelible marks of those tightly constructed moments resonated through the entire film -- and through entire careers. Nolan takes that one step further and creates in Dunkirk a full-length sequence. Every shot matters, every moment is impeccably constructed.
But when the whole film is "the moment," how do you know what the moment means? Dunkirk begins and ends mid-scene, with little connective tissue. It has a terrific construct of telling the movie from three different chronological perspectives, but that proves to be as much a technical feat as anything else. There's really no reason to tell the story this way, except that it is a wonderful trick.
Every moment of Dunkirk is like a tightly wound gear that's ready to spring. Even Hans Zimmer's score keeps pulsing and pulsing and pulsing but never quite reaching a crescendo: Like the movie itself, it's all just very loud.
The pity of all of that is that buried within the technological marvel of the movie is a stirring and heartbreaking story. For all it gains in visceral impact (which is a lot), Dunkirk loses in humanity. Leaving the audience simultaneously exhausted by its relentless intensity and perplexed by its insistence on telling its tale in ways that are neither linear nor conventional, Dunkirk fully engages -- even overwhelms -- the senses, just not the emotions.
Viewed July 29, 2017 -- Chinese Theater
1915
But as a film, Dunkirk is a little like Titanic if the movie began and ended in the last reel and cut out all the stuff about Jack and Rose. It's like Star Wars if the Death Star battle went on for two hours and did away with the plot.
In that way, Dunkirk is an apotheosis of big-budget cinema: an important, commercially successful filmmaker has convinced a studio to release a filmmaking experiment, one that does away with conventional notions of storytelling and character development in favor of editing, sound mixing and mise-en-scène.
There are recognizable actors in the film (Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance) but they aren't given the opportunity to blossom into characters. Tom Hardy spends almost all of his screen time mumbling behind a face mask (a Batman in-joke?), while the younger cast members are interchangeable, as if Nolan intended for the audience to be confused about who's who.
Even dialogue is treated as disposable -- there are long, long scenes in Dunkirk where the characters are speaking but their words are vaguely incomprehensible. Nolan, perhaps, wanted to extend the you-are-there gut-punch of Dunkirk to these scenes, to place the viewer into the midst of battle so fully that there's constant confusion that is not helped by only occasionally being able to hear what others are saying.
The end result is that Dunkirk is only intermittently engaging as a drama, even while it is almost always fascinating to watch as a piece of filmmaking. As almost every article about the film makes a point of relating right up front, Dunkirk was shot on 65-millimeter film and in 65-millimeter IMAX by a director who refuses to allow cell phones on his sets, and the very fact that we know those things and they get reported explains quite a bit about the film as a whole: this is, first and foremost, a technical achievement.
Directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese built their careers upon crafting jaw-dropping sequences that defined their films -- think of the boxing scenes in Raging Bull, the shark attack in Jaws or the shower scene in Psycho. The indelible marks of those tightly constructed moments resonated through the entire film -- and through entire careers. Nolan takes that one step further and creates in Dunkirk a full-length sequence. Every shot matters, every moment is impeccably constructed.
But when the whole film is "the moment," how do you know what the moment means? Dunkirk begins and ends mid-scene, with little connective tissue. It has a terrific construct of telling the movie from three different chronological perspectives, but that proves to be as much a technical feat as anything else. There's really no reason to tell the story this way, except that it is a wonderful trick.
Every moment of Dunkirk is like a tightly wound gear that's ready to spring. Even Hans Zimmer's score keeps pulsing and pulsing and pulsing but never quite reaching a crescendo: Like the movie itself, it's all just very loud.
The pity of all of that is that buried within the technological marvel of the movie is a stirring and heartbreaking story. For all it gains in visceral impact (which is a lot), Dunkirk loses in humanity. Leaving the audience simultaneously exhausted by its relentless intensity and perplexed by its insistence on telling its tale in ways that are neither linear nor conventional, Dunkirk fully engages -- even overwhelms -- the senses, just not the emotions.
Viewed July 29, 2017 -- Chinese Theater
1915
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