Saturday, July 29, 2017

Dunkirk (2017)

A satisfying movie about an interesting corner of World War II, but not much more.



Christopher Nolan is an interesting case of a director for me.  He's wonderfully accomplished at the technical aspects and at providing an entertaining spectacle, but I've had issues with his character writing going all the way back to Following (1998), where the lead character is essentially a cypher to whom things happen.  So it's slightly frustrating that Dunkirk has several interesting characters but at the same time the structure of the movie makes them so isolated from each other that I felt it difficult to really care as much as I should have.

It's an interesting narrative structure, where the three main threads of the movie start at different times and intersect at the end for the climax.  We have two soldiers on the beach just trying to get back across the Channel to England (Fionn Whitehead and Aneurin Barnard) whose story starts a week before, there's a small family boat requisitioned by the navy to help in the rescue (the father here being Mark Rylance) which starts a day before and finally you have Tom Hardy as a fighter pilot guarding the escapees from bombers in a story that starts an hour before.  All of these storylines intersect at various points and to Nolan's credit it's pretty easy to keep them straight, but it also leads to a certain amount of back and forth disconnect.  Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more with a more straightforward narrative.

None of this is to say the movie isn't good; it's a very solid war movie with a very appealing cast.  Kenneth Branagh is his usual solid self, Mark Rylance shines as one of the rescue captains, I'd have watched a whole movie of Tom Hardy as a fighter pilot and one of our more underappreciated actors in Cillian Murphy has an excellent storyline that's the emotional highlight of the movie.  They all help it make worth seeing (there's also James D'Arcy, who needed more to do than looking tall and flabbergasted at the disaster).  Toss in some lovely Hoyte Van Hoytema cinematography, some really fine effects work and a completely serviceable Hans Zimmer score and it's a decent afternoon at the movies.  Just not the transcendent experience that I was hoping for.

★★★ 1/2

2017 - Written and directed by Christopher Nolan.

No comments:

Post a Comment