Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight Rises, Inception) might be the best technical director we’ve ever seen. His precession is perfect. His attention to detail is unmatched. His brain operates so that it is always ahead of his actors and two steps ahead of his audience. We’ve seen technical masterpieces throughout his already storied career. At 47, he already has masterpieces like Following, Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, The Prestige, Inception, and Interstellar all underneath his belt. According to Rotten Tomatoes, his “worst” movie is Interstellar, which still has a 71% fresh rating. That means his “worst” movie still had five out of every seven critics gave the movie a positive rating. However, for all of the positives associated with Nolan’s films (and there are many), he has failed to capture the often-needed emotional component with every single one.

When I enjoy his films for their near technical perfection, unpredictability, vision, etc. (and I have enjoyed every single one), I wonder why I feel nothing emotionally. I love these films, but I’m not invested in one of them (except for The Dark Knight because that’s one of the ten greatest films ever made). He had the perfect opportunity to create a situation that could have drawn out feelings in the audience with Interstellar. You had the actors for it. You had the story for it. Everything was in place for a story that we could remember for years. And it fell flat in its attempt to draw out human emotion. Nolan had the opportunity, once again, to right himself with Dunkirk. But he fell back into his old ways, retelling one of our time’s more inspirational war stories and leaving us detached from its characters, many of whom we cannot differentiate from each other anyway. It is one of nine nominated movies for Best Picture. It should be there. It could even win. I don’t think it will. And I hope that it won’t. It was by no means a bad film. It was a good one and even great in some ways. It just wasn’t an overly memorable movie all around. And with all the hype associated with it, I don’t know how you can’t be disappointed with the end product.

The movie is confusing in the very beginning. The more you have to explain a film before it begins, the more of a whole you are putting yourself in. But in this case, we completely needed it. Some may be puzzled throughout the movie. The three-story aspect could have been introduced better. How was I supposed to know that the story being told with the land characters (or the mole) took place over one week, the story in the sea over one day, and the story in the sky over one hour? Even if I had known that going in, I would have been lost. I don’t understand the purpose of confusing your audience when you don’t have to. Nolan has made his movies more complicated in the past than he needed to. It’s his greatest strength, as well as his Achilles heel. So we go back and forth between these three stories, and following them becomes frustrating. Couple that with characters that are either underdeveloped or, worse, never defined. It becomes a history lesson more so than it does a movie. I still don’t understand why an actor of Tom Hardy’s (The Drop, Mad Max: Fury Road) caliber was doing a role I felt anyone could have played. Still, despite my frustrations, there was a lot that I liked.

Most of us know the story by now. Even if we didn’t see Dunkirk but saw Darkest Hour (another film nominated for Best Picture this year), we would still know the story. 4000 British soldiers are trapped in the harbor on the beaches of Dunkirk, France, during the early portions of World War II (late May of 1940). They need a miracle rescue mission, or German soldiers will slaughter them. The United States is merely a spectator in the war at this point. Most of the world watched as Hitler’s Germany invaded helpless countries. It is easily my most anticipated movie of the year. Dunkirk promotes itself as a war film but is much more of a survival/disaster film. We pick up the movie with the British soldiers, trapped by German forces, being pushed out to sea for one final annihilation. The 4000 men are simply trying to wait out a rescue while avoiding getting killed by Germans.

Dunkirk may sound like an amazing movie, but it wasn’t. Parts of it needed to be clarified. Most of it had to do with the three different stories, each operating on a different timeline. The second was the actors. Sure, you had Hardy, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy, etc., but most other actors were so indistinguishable that it was difficult to know who was who. We got to know them a little bit. However, there are too many characters to focus on, and the screen time for each is too limited. It’s frustrating because we almost forget what happens with some of these characters when the story comes back to them. It’s disappointing; unfortunately, the parties involved didn’t fix this.

It’s a movie worth watching, for sure. It’s a movie worth a second viewing. I would appreciate it more now that I know more about the format. Would a second viewing make it more clear? Would it fix the inherent problems with the movie? Nolan needs an editor who has his ear. This movie is technically brilliant, and I hope it does win some Oscars. It’s not worthy of Best Picture, but it’s a down year, and this category has no clear-cut favorite. Whichever movie wins will be one of the poorest movies to have done so in the history of the Award.

Plot 8.5/10
Character Development 6/10
Character Chemistry 6/10
Acting 6/10
Screenplay 7/10
Directing 8/10
Cinematography 10/10
Sound 10/10
Hook and Reel 8/10
Universal Relevance 10/10
79.5%

B

Movies You Might Like If You Liked This Movie

• Hacksaw Ridge
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• Schindler’s List
• Saving Private Ryan