REVIEW: DUNKIRK
Picture this wintery image to help you stay cool this summery day: 2012-era Travis going on to Crackle, the (legal!!!) free movie streaming site and picking Joe Cornish's amusing Attack the Block as a snow day diversion. The sci-fi comedy about South London teens experiencing an alien invasion was notoriously difficult for us Americans to comprehend, which led to the distributors pondering if they wanted to include subtitles. I think Warner Bros., the producer of Christopher Nolan's latest Dunkirk, should invest in captioning the war picture, because my inability to decipher at least 50% of what the soldiers in the film were saying diminished the enjoyability of the product.
We start with...well, in all transparency, you won't remember any of the names of the soldiers in Dunkirk, so I'm employing IMDb to its fullest. I remember George because his name was said about 50 times in the movie, and once you'll see it you'll understand why. But we start off with Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) and a fellow soldier (Damien Bonnard) trying to save an injured man from the beaches of Dunkirk. It's at the height of World War 2, and British forces are surrounded. From there, Nolan doesn't let the tension go for a second, an actual clock in the score ticks for the film's entire duration. Strangely, the movie it reminded of in that sense is Mad Max: Fury Road. It's Nolan's frequent collaborator Lee Smith who deserves the credit here. Three story lines are simultaneously occurring, which I won't go much into, because I wasn't expecting it in the theatre, and it was one of the most pleasant surprises of my moviegoing experience in 2017 thus far!
I wanted to try not to focus on exclusively just Nolan in this review, but the man is a bonafide "blockbuster auteur." After his Batman trilogy, Warner Bros. gives him as much budget as he wants for basically whatever it wants, and it gets solid reviews and beaucoup box office returns. He is hard to pull away from his art, because the style is always so...Nolan. I've watched The Dark Knight twice, its sequel twice, and Inception thrice. Repeated viewings of Nolan films shouldn't be recommended, they should be mandatory!
Things I'm positive I liked about this film: Hans Zimmer's hopefully award-decorated score, Hoyte Van Hoytema's gorgeous, landscape-engulfing war photography, and the performances of Mark Rylance and Harry Styles. Rylance is as subtle and commanding as he was in his Oscar-winning turn in Bridge of Spies, and Styles really took me back with his dramatic chops. But as engaged as I was by these men's performances, we get absolutely no character development, little motivation (besides George!), so it was hard for me to root for characters like Tom Hardy's pilot Farrier. He plays a pivotal role, but he's harder to understand than he was in the Bane mask, and though his eye-only acting is superb, I beg the filmmakers why I should care about him? In this particular instance, I believe Nolan failed to see the trees for the forest. Depicting the grand scale of the Dunkirk evacuation was prioritized more so than giving us gripping characters to relate to.
I didn't review his 2014 space odyssey Interstellar because frankly I don't know what I watched. There are videos on the internet dedicated to decoding it, and I knew I could not do it justice, and in my lifetime, I'll likely re-watch it. I have a friend who's seen it five times, and called it the best movie of that year. I look forward to seeing Dunkirk again, probably next summer, unfortunately on a screen much smaller than I did initially. But going off what I have, I would still recommend seeing this movie in theaters, just opt for some headphones for the hearing impaired. You'll thank me later.
Rating: 2.5/4 stars
We start with...well, in all transparency, you won't remember any of the names of the soldiers in Dunkirk, so I'm employing IMDb to its fullest. I remember George because his name was said about 50 times in the movie, and once you'll see it you'll understand why. But we start off with Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) and a fellow soldier (Damien Bonnard) trying to save an injured man from the beaches of Dunkirk. It's at the height of World War 2, and British forces are surrounded. From there, Nolan doesn't let the tension go for a second, an actual clock in the score ticks for the film's entire duration. Strangely, the movie it reminded of in that sense is Mad Max: Fury Road. It's Nolan's frequent collaborator Lee Smith who deserves the credit here. Three story lines are simultaneously occurring, which I won't go much into, because I wasn't expecting it in the theatre, and it was one of the most pleasant surprises of my moviegoing experience in 2017 thus far!
I wanted to try not to focus on exclusively just Nolan in this review, but the man is a bonafide "blockbuster auteur." After his Batman trilogy, Warner Bros. gives him as much budget as he wants for basically whatever it wants, and it gets solid reviews and beaucoup box office returns. He is hard to pull away from his art, because the style is always so...Nolan. I've watched The Dark Knight twice, its sequel twice, and Inception thrice. Repeated viewings of Nolan films shouldn't be recommended, they should be mandatory!
Things I'm positive I liked about this film: Hans Zimmer's hopefully award-decorated score, Hoyte Van Hoytema's gorgeous, landscape-engulfing war photography, and the performances of Mark Rylance and Harry Styles. Rylance is as subtle and commanding as he was in his Oscar-winning turn in Bridge of Spies, and Styles really took me back with his dramatic chops. But as engaged as I was by these men's performances, we get absolutely no character development, little motivation (besides George!), so it was hard for me to root for characters like Tom Hardy's pilot Farrier. He plays a pivotal role, but he's harder to understand than he was in the Bane mask, and though his eye-only acting is superb, I beg the filmmakers why I should care about him? In this particular instance, I believe Nolan failed to see the trees for the forest. Depicting the grand scale of the Dunkirk evacuation was prioritized more so than giving us gripping characters to relate to.
I didn't review his 2014 space odyssey Interstellar because frankly I don't know what I watched. There are videos on the internet dedicated to decoding it, and I knew I could not do it justice, and in my lifetime, I'll likely re-watch it. I have a friend who's seen it five times, and called it the best movie of that year. I look forward to seeing Dunkirk again, probably next summer, unfortunately on a screen much smaller than I did initially. But going off what I have, I would still recommend seeing this movie in theaters, just opt for some headphones for the hearing impaired. You'll thank me later.
Rating: 2.5/4 stars
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