“Why do people even go to the movies anymore?”
Christopher Nolan ("Memento," "Inception," the Dark Knight trilogy, as if you didn't know him already) is the one of the most popular directors of the modern era, a visionary of the digital generation. His stories are sparse, with color palettes or grey, blue, black. He doesn't concern himself with character, or drama, or even message. What sets Nolan apart is an almost hyper-rational, inhuman precision. The most apt comparison is to a watchmaker (appropriate that Hans Zimmer's excellent scores for Nolan's films always invoke the tick, tick, ticking of a clock); there are no happy accidents, no moments found in improvisation. The editing is so fast it gives you whiplash but it makes sense; everything is intentional, a cinematic machine.
Nolan makes, in the purest sense of the term, a thrill rides. The kind you don't see very often anywhere else.
I sat next to a friend of a friend at this film; she was older, middle-aged, loves costume dramas but doesn't make it out to the movies often. She asked me why people come to the movies anymore when they could just sit at home.
Because of movies like "Dunkirk."
Here, Nolan takes on the deepest and most important mythic canvas in all of Western pop culture — World War II. But he breaks everything. His characters have no significant backstories, no big monologues. The audience's spatial awareness of the beach at Dunkirk and its surrounding fortifications is informed only by what the characters in the film can know. There are no title cards explaining what happened here. We never, ever see a German soldier. Unlike the most celebrated modern WWII pictures, Nolan does not dwell on the art of depicting death. There is very little blood, very little meditation on what it means to fight a war or to kill another person. This is the mirror-universe version of "The Thin Red Line."
We already know these boys are probably going to die. Horribly. How do they feel about that? More to the point, how would it feel to be engaged in such an all-consuming situation? Nolan wants to make you feel their experience.
The story is told on three levels. Land (over the span of a week), sea (over the span of a day) and air (over an hour). They eventually link up, a triptych. Fans of "Inception" might recognize the structure as similar to the finale of that movie, but rather than different spaces cascading through relative time this story is told with events happening concurrently in real space. This structure and setting allow for Nolan to pack unyielding tension into a two-hour timeframe. The movie rises and falls but it never takes a breath. "Dunkirk" makes you feel exhausted in the way a movie of its kind should.
Nolan is joined by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (“Spectre,” “Interstellar,” “Her”) to capture the beaches, the sea and the air so dramatically that you feel like you're there. You can smell the salt, feel the breeze. You're flying through the clouds. It's an astoundingly gorgeous movie. And dear god the sound design. There are too many people to list on that team, but they deserve every award coming to them. Watch this movie loud. Watch it large. Tension is the screeching of a dive-bomber, the whizzing of bullets, the sound of waves splashing in the cold, difficult cut of the English Channel.
Zimmer scores a dozen films a year but he brings out his best for Nolan, actually taking a load of the storytelling here. I've seen critiques that his massive ever-present accompaniment tells too much of the story. I disagree. The movie is practically an opera of experience, as close to a wide-release art film as we're likely to see at this level.
A lot of hullabaloo has been made about whether "Dunkirk" can be properly experienced in a normal theater (all this stuff about 70mm IMAX on which Nolan shot the film, etc.). The answer is a resounding "yes." Our screening was at one of the oldest, least impressively equipped theaters in the area and it made not one lick of difference. I'm excited to see it at the Indiana State Museum IMAX on opening night — the best theatre in the state — and no doubt the experience will be different and probably even more immersive. If you can't make that trip or that ticket (hey, I feel you, those tickets are freaking expensive), do not be deterred.
Every book written about Nolan, when all is said and done, will feature a section encompassing everything other movie he has made, and a section about "Dunkirk."