Review of Dunkirk (2017) by J H — 14 Sep 2017

War movies, more specifically WWII movies, are by far my favorite genre. I had heard somewhere that this movie was going to be the "Saving Private Ryan" of my generation, which most likely gave me too high of expectations going into film.

The action scenes all looked great - whether it was the beach getting strafed by an airplane, boats getting torpedoed, or airplane v airplane dogfights.

However, as the action scenes were cool, there was just as much film where everyone was just sitting around waiting. I understand that is what happened at the actual city of Dunkirk during the war and that the director wanted to accurately portray that. But as a consumer there's only so many minutes of men standing around that I can tolerate.

My least favorite part of the movie was how Christopher Nolan decided to have the "time jumping" around between the three, concurrent plot lines (classic Nolan, am I right?) Luckily my friends dad has scene the movie before me and gave us a heads up to how it was organized, which allowed me to be prepared for this style of presentation. The use of this style of film making always keeps you asking questions during the film ("Didn't this happen already?" "Is that the same boat the other guys were on earlier?"), and by the end of the film it all makes sense. However I think that this aproach took a little something away from the movie that was otherwise good - and for me that was the difference between 3 and 4 stars.