Dunkirk (2017)

I won't talk for too long about how much I love Christopher Nolan's directing, but the long and short of it is that the man is my inspiration for even examining the technical aspects of film and seeing how they impact the emotions I feel while watching a movie. I have rated five of his films before this one, and four of them are tens (the odd one out is The Dark Knight Rises at a nine, for what it's worth). I kind of like him a lot.

That being said, I never expected him to release a film like Dunkirk.

One of the hallmarks of Nolan's films is how they wear their emotions and philosophy on their sleeve. I really like this because it helps me see the connection between the filmmaking and the other stuff. The Dark Knight does this a lot thanks to Heath Ledger's Joker, as does Interstellar with all of its talk of the link between love and time. Now, when I heard Dunkirk was actually a thing, I figured it would be similar in this aspect to Nolan's other films.

This couldn't be further from the truth. Dunkirk does not focus at all on characters going through an event; it focuses almost purely on the events themselves. From the very beginning, we are thrown into an intense war scenario with 400,000 British and French troops stranded on the French coastline in the open air of a beach. There is very little backstory given to anybody present on screen, and at first this got to me a little bit. It made the film feel a lot colder right from the outset and therefore far more unsettling; however, as Dunkirk went on it actually felt extremely right. There's no time for troops stranded on a beach to reminisce about their wives waiting for them to return home; it's all about addressing the situation that the soldiers themselves have been thrust into. This extremely honed feel is something I didn't expect from Nolan, but the fact that he is able to create this kind of a tense, immediate tone just shows all of us exactly what he is capable of.

Now, I could go on to describe exactly how every element of Dunkirk is crafted to get to this tone, but it would be way too long for even me to bear reading. The cinematography, editing, score, and performances all do such a good job at making me feel the tension of the Dunkirk evacuation in such an immediate way that it goes beyond description. It is so ridiculously obvious that Christopher Nolan is flexing his creative muscles with how he put this project together.

However, there's one more thing I want to mention about Dunkirk that I didn't know until right before I saw it (and don't worry; it's not a spoiler): the film isn't linear. Nolan messes with the timeline of the film, dividing it into three sections that occasionally overlap on screen while also being entirely distinct in their own right. I didn't know what I thought of this at first, but just like nearly every non-linear film I have ever seen, it ended up exactly where it needed to in order to pack the perfect punch. I praise Nolan for being able to pull this off in such a different type of film from his norm whose genre doesn't typically rely on non-linear storytelling.

This unique angle, combined with the very distinct tone, make Dunkirk one of the purest, most intense, and best war films I have ever seen. It doesn't quite get to the emotional heights of the character-rich classics like Saving Private Ryan, but that's because it's a very different type of film. That uniqueness will undoubtedly make it a film that stands out as time moves on, and I look forward to watching it again and again and again -- something that I have done with all of Nolan's films.

My recommendation: See it in a theater on the biggest screen you can. 

My grade: 98/100