Review of Dunkirk (2017) by Mixedmessage — 24 Jul 2017

Unquestionably a very good film and worth seeing, but doesn't live up to the hype. Many people knock the lack of characterization but I had no problem with that, it is plot driven and a conscious statement about the smallness of individuals in a the largest war ever fought.

Starts strong with a sense of immersion in the moment but becomes needlessly complex and distant as it goes on. An IMAX war film about 400,000 soldiers trapped by the Nazis is by definition a spectacle, but it never looks like more than a few hundred people are on screen at one time, and the climactic scene has what looks like a few dozen boats.

I never thought I would say this, but this movie could have benefited from some gratuitous CGI to give it a feeling of scale. Instead the IMAX screen is filled with mostly empty beach. It feels intense for a handful of people but hardly epic.

Spielberg may have had the same number of extras to work with, but he put them all on the screen at the same time and conveyed the immensity of the struggle. In my opinion Spielberg is best as an action cinematographer, he could never have made Memento.

But Dunkirk shows Nolan is too cold and abstract to make an epic. Dunkirk was a small film with a lot of empty space on the screen. Patton was 70mm and balanced intense small scenes with battle scenes that used the expanded screen space to purposefully convey the epic scale of war as a human activity.

Dunkirk is a smart and meaningful film, but misses the mark at being something greater due to an overly complex structure that adds nothing to the experience and poor use of screen space to depict a genuinely epic event from real life modern history.