Sorry to crash the Christopher Nolan love-in, but my visit to "Dunkirk" has just punctured my life-vest of expectancy for his most recent offering.
When I heard that Nolan would cover this historic moment, I thought that he was a great choice to bring to life the magnitude of an evacuation of 330,000 soldiers in eight days via 800 hastily-assembled boats. How disappointed was I. And I think that this is because of Nolan the writer, more than Nolan the director.
Nolan the writer uses two plot devices that diminish the movie: overlapping timelines and a focus on only three tiny pieces of the larger, table top-covering jigsaw puzzle.
We therefore repeatedly see only the same few dramatic happenings from different perspectives but at varying points in time. Whereas each re-visit brings new detail, the plot contrivance limits us to experiencing only a minute part of the overall evacuation, and so there was no point at which I felt the immense overwhelming scale of the event. Even though the film apparently used the largest ever marine unit and more than a thousand extras, we never seem to see anymore than 3 Spitfires, a dozen small boats, and few attacks on the not even close to supposedly 400,000 troops who were strafed and bombed again and again whilst awaiting transport.
Whilst I could instantly untangle the timeline conceit because timeline trickery now seems de rigeur in Nolan films, my 14-year-old Child One found it took several minutes to understand and declared it “annoying”. I found Nolan’s timeline alienated me from his story and stopped me fully immersing in the action; it is starting to seem a bit of a conceit and an unnecessary parlour trick now Chris.
In a recent interview with wittertainment’s Simon Mayo, Nolan said he wishes the audience to engage with the ‘dilemnas’ faced by the film’s protagonists rather than empathizing with the characters themselves. Not for the first time, I found I did not care enough about those I watched on the screen. Just as I was insufficiently engaged by Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in “Inception” and found that film technically brilliant but cold, the same was true in “Dunkirk”. Harry Styles (a good debut) does well to portray why the soldiers behaved as they did whilst repeatedly assuaged by the horrors of their evolving situation. Yet, like many, his character was unsympathetic, and so I was not rooting for him or others and did not truly invest in their final fate.
As with the “Inception” hotel corridor sequence, Nolan’s desire to stick with physical rather than CGI action scenes results in terrific cinema. The Spitfire sequences especially connect the viewer to all that the pilot experienced. Yet, this good work is undercut in the non-IMAX experience by a gliding Spitfire climax in which the CGI looks so plastic that the intended emotional response is destroyed.
Furthermore, Nolan the director is not subtle in ensuring the audience knows what to feel. I responded to Tom Hardy’s sunset celestial halo and the Hans Zimmer Elgar exactly as I should, but felt manipulated as I did so. And I had already understood the paradoxical contrast between the final circumstances of the Spitfire pilot and evacuees, so there was no need batter me over the head with the cut back to the newspaper-reader in the movie’s very last image.
Unlike the rest of the cast, Branagh, Rylance and Glynn-Carney are given a chance to establish themselves as sympathetic characters with soul. However, ultimately for me, this movie is a too cold and calculated examination of a vast, mass withdrawal, but without the masses.