Dunkirk - Cinema Review

Christopher Nolan's films seem to always have a high bar of minimum quality and with that in mind I cannot say Dunkirk is a bad film in the traditional sense. On a physical technical level the film is superb. The period costume and set design is thoroughly convincing, the directing of such a vast amount of actors is impressive and the cinematography and visuals are, for the most part, engaging and memorable. There's only the odd occasion where you can't see exactly what's happening, which character is which and why they just died...

There's a frank few sentences of text at the start giving us brief historical context, a somewhat slow pacing and the unceremonious introduction of our main characters at the latest possible point to still arguably be called the start. These features give the atmosphere and feel of an old fashioned WW2 film from the 50's or around that era despite after writing that sentence I read a quote from Nolan saying "This is not a war film." Well...Moving on.

This latter point of scene entry is not always a negative but compounded with one of Dunkirk's two major flaws it distinctly works against it. This first flaw being the lack of depth and story progression for the characters. Given how little each of our protagonists experiences in the way of character development, a little more time setting them up could have helped the film immensely.

The film boasts an impressive cast of award winners, Nolan mainstays and lesser known but equally solid actors whose only flaw is arguably looking a bit too much like each other. Unfortunately despite the actor's best efforts, the character's depth and development given is so minuscule and stretched so thin across the 100 minute run-time of the film, audience engagement and investment in the story really begins to suffer around half way through the film.

If you like seeing Kenneth Branagh slowly change expression from quietly frustrated to frightening realisation you'll absolutely love this film.

As I say, for the first half of the film the technical spectacle, tension and perhaps novelty can keep you engaged but after that you begin needing more exploration of the characters where Dunkirk really just gives us more of the same action. Of course in its efforts towards historical accuracy the film's overarching plot can't vary too much but we should then focus on the subplots of our entirely fictional characters and the drama between them and aside from some brief moments, that drama isn't evident.

Which leads onto the second major flaw of the film in its editing and overall pacing. As you may have gathered there are several different protagoni (plural?). Fionn Whitehead playing a young private stuck on the beach and trying to survive amongst thousands of other soldiers, Mark Rylance captaining a civilian sailboat enlisted into helping rescue survivors and Tom Hardy, an RAF pilot (One of seemingly only three) doing their best to prevent German aircraft from reaching the shore.

When splitting the focus like this I find it's so vitally important that you choose the timing of switching between them near-perfectly. Not just in switching away but in coming back also. Cillian Murphy plays a shell-shocked soldier rescued onto Mark Rylance's boat and his unstable behaviour is the closest the film gets to an interesting dynamic between characters.

The problem being the film leaves such uneven gaps between their scenes and those of the other characters that a resolution of the paper thin plot-line on the boat eventually came so late that I no longer cared about the excessively prolonged payoff. Even more bafflingly the film actually travels back in time at one point as Tom Hardy's fellow pilot Collins (Jack Lowden) is shot down and we see a tense unclear view from Hardy's cockpit of him slowly descending towards the ocean.

Spoilers in that he manages to land relatively smoothly on the water and the film progresses onto another scene. A good 20 minutes later we return to this scene from Collin's perspective except we already know that he lands safely so there's no tension to be had and the scene is totally pointless. Following this is a new scene where he struggles to open his cockpit and faces drowning but why wouldn't you simply cut to that scene from the aforementioned Tom Hardy scene earlier?

There are other points where time seems very convoluted and unclear in the film as we bounce between characters for seemingly no specific reason other than to remind us they're still in the film. As the story progressed this became actively jarring, disengaging and tedious and I'm honestly baffled as to what was the intention behind this seemingly random fragmented editing style.

I swear Tom Hardy is still gliding around on no fuel a good 15 minutes after he ran out
 and all other characters are safely evacuated. 

The overall quality of the film is as unclear as some of the poorly mixed dialogue to me. Conversely the deafening volume and sinister soundtrack signalling approaching German bombers made them scarier than 90% of horror films I've seen in the past five years. There are particular set-pieces and moments of daunting realism that are also expertly executed, engrossing and tense when the film can stay focused on one scene for long enough. That second half however illuminated so many flaws that I'm not sure my enjoyment of the film wasn't simply an endurance of novelty and high expectations, in which case this will obviously vary greatly for every individual.

So as to a recommendation I certainly don't think it's a bad war film. From what a non-historian like me can gather, it handles most aspects of the actual event and the action very well but in terms of basic film storytelling, characters, engagement and pacing I think it falls short. As a big fan of Christopher Nolan films this is sadly my least favourite to date and I whilst I'm still somewhat torn on this verdict, I don't think I could recommend this to anyone but hardcore fans of war films or someone specifically interested in the setting and events portrayed.

I'd like to also note that Fionn's character needs a shit at the start of the film and never ever gets to...