Is Christopher Nolan's 'Dunkirk' Worth Seeing? Here's What The Reviews Say
Dunkirk, out this Friday, is Christopher Nolan's first war drama — a far cry in subject matter from Interstellar or The Dark Knight. For it, Nolan's assembled an ensemble cast of old collaborators (like Cillian Murphy and Tom Hardy) and newcomers (including Fionn Whitehead and pop star Harry Styles) while pushing for new IMAX techniques to immerse viewers in this desperate WWII evacuation effort. Is the result a victory for Nolan's exacting filmmaking? Here's what the reviews are saying:
'Dunkirk' Embraces Framing That's Distinctively 'Nolan'
In a radical move, Dunkirk entirely does away with the narrative scaffolding that holds together most war pictures: the introduction, at boot camp or in battle, of a crew of soldierly comrades. The scenes of military higher-ups debating strategy over maps. The cutaways to families waiting back home or flashbacks to the combatants' prewar days.
Instead, the film plunges us straight in medias res, or rather in the middle of several different res: Dunkirk follows stories unfolding in three separate places not at the same time but in three overlapping time frames: one lasting a week, one a day, and one only an hour.
[Slate]
The story of the ground troops – this is where we spend the most time with Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) and Alex (Harry Styles, who also sings in his spare time) – takes place over one week. The story of a civilian (Mark Rylance) and two young men (Tom Glynn-Carney and Barry Keoghan), who sail across the English Channel to rescue anyone who might fit on their boat, takes place over one day. And the story of the Royal Air Force pilots (Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden) takes place over the course of one hour. The film cuts back and forth between these three timelines, basically at Nolan's whim, to create a film that has literally no down time.
[UPROXX]
The film's setup may sound confusing, but onscreen titles inform us early on of the variable time frame. Still, it's a little shocking when a character from one storyline shows up in another, at an earlier point in his arc — which in turn sheds additional light on his psychology. Nolan and editor Lee Smith juggle these timelines with verve but also with compassion.
Nolan Also Steers Away From Some Of His Lesser Tropes
Scenes sometimes play out for minutes without audible dialogue, a rarity in commercial cinema made at this budget level; it's even rarer in Nolan's own films, which tend to clarify narrative via massive verbal exposition dumps.
Nolan's films are filled with haunted figures — flamboyantly, operatically haunted ones — but here the brooding feels organic, quiet, like part of the landscape, whether it's Rylance's soft-spoken, tenderhearted boat captain or Kenneth Branagh's lonely Commander Bolton, standing forlorn on a breakwater as he oversees the critical aftermath of a monumental military humiliation.
The swift-moving, pulse-pounding Dunkirk reveals its filmmaker at his most nimble, supple, and simple—all adjectives that seem strange to use in connection with a movie shot in 65mm IMAX format, using practical effects and real stunts to re-create such large-scale events as the sinking of a WWII destroyer and the attempted mass evacuation of more than 300,000 men.
[Slate]
This Film Absolutely Belongs On 70mm IMAX
When bullets are fired (oh, this happens a lot) the sound is ear piercing. When a fighter plane cranks up its engine to do an evasive maneuver, it's like that engine is right underneath your seat. (I should mention I saw Dunkirk in 70mm IMAX, which doesn't so much submerse a person into the experience as much as it commands you to pay attention. I think it almost tricks a person into believing his or her life might be in danger.)
[UPROXX]
Nolan's camera pushes the edges of the screen as far as it can — you must see this movie in IMAX and on film, rather than digital, if at all possible — as Dunkirk engulfs the audience in something that feels a lot more like a symphony than a war movie. (Nolan's fruitful collaboration with composer Hans Zimmer certainly helps.)
[Vox]
"Dunkirk" is the ultimate fuck you to the idea of streaming a new movie to your phone. The director and his team customized an IMAX rig so the camera could squeeze into the cockpit of a WWII fighter plane, and the footage they captured from the sky is so transportive that every ticket should earn you frequent flier miles.
The Cast Does An Incredible Job With Very Little Dialogue
Nolan's cast is exceptional, finding ways to engage and build character in a film that doesn't provide them the traditional means to do so. (Dialogue-wise, this is like a Terrence Malick movie without the explanatory whispered monologues.) Whitehead and Bonnard (and Styles, for that matter) have the kind of striking faces that, with the help of Van Hoytema's lens, allows them to stand out in a crowd of soldiers all sporting the same uniform and haircut, and their eyes communicate volumes as they face certain death over and over again.
[The Wrap]
Tom Hardy plays a fighter pilot trying to blast German pilots out of the sky before they can strafe soldiers on the ground and sink boats in the harbor. He has maybe a dozen lines and spends much of the film behind a mask, as he did in his last collaboration with Nolan, "The Dark Knight Rises"; but he makes a strong impression anyway by treating the character as the sum total of his actions. Mark Rylance plays a civilian with teenage sons who is determined to pilot his small yacht to Dunkirk and rescue as many people as he can; there are lots of these self-appointed rescuers around Dunkirk; their ultimate organization into one of the twentieth century's boldest non-military flotillas is as inspiring as you imagine it to be.
'Dunkirk' Stands In Stark Contrast To Other War Films
This is a powerful, superbly crafted film with a story to tell, avoiding war porn in favour of something desolate and apocalyptic, a beachscape of shame, littered with soldiers zombified with defeat, a grimly male world with hardly any women on screen.
"Dunkirk" is what I like to call an Ant Farm Picture: it's a portrait of a society, or a species, fighting for its life. It's not hugely interested in the plight of individuals, unless they're trying to save themselves or others. If you get confused about who's who and what's what from time to time, you can rest assured that this is a feature of Nolan's methods, not a bug (pun intended).
Although the film is deeply moving at unexpected moments, it's not due to any manufactured sentimentality or false heroics. Bursts of emotion here explode like depth charges, at times and for reasons that will no doubt vary from viewer to viewer. There's never a sense of Nolan — unlike, say Spielberg — manipulating the drama in order to play the viewer's heartstrings. Nor is there anything resembling a John Williams score to stir the emotional pot.
No fewer than four British ships go down in "Dunkirk" — not counting the one from which Cillian Murphy's nameless "shivering soldier" is rescued — and each capsizes alarmingly quickly. This isn't "Titanic," in which miniature melodramas had time to unfold as the boat slowly sank, either. Whereas air battles are drawn out and repeated for effect, Nolan and editor Lee Smith compress the doomed-boat scenes for ruthless efficiency, turning the water into a place of high-stakes peril.
[Variety]
TL;DR
Dunkirk is an impressionist masterpiece. These are not the first words you expect to see applied to a giant-budgeted summer entertainment made by one of the industry's most dependably commercial big-name directors. But this is a war film like few others, one that may employ a large and expensive canvas but that conveys the whole through isolated, brilliantly realized, often private moments more than via sheer spectacle, although that is here, too.
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