Dunkirk

When Christopher Nolan made Tenet, some critics said it was the tipping point where Nolan’s quirks consumed his talent, and when his ego overrode his intellect. I would argue Dunkirk did it first. On a technical scale, this is a marvelous film. The use of period-accurate sea and aircraft, the practical effects, the relentless hopelessness of England being on the back foot at this point in WW2, the scale … the movie feels like war. If movies were all about the technical achievement, this thing would be 5 snowflakes easy. But Nolan got so lost in the technical details, he forgot that his film should also be a movie. The characters here have less depth than slasher movie victims; they might as well be named Soldier #1-50. If we didn’t have the subtitles on while watching it, my wife and I wouldn’t know more than one or two names, and even then, the movie barely tried to tie the names to faces. And none of them have any defining characteristics or story arcs. They’re just soldiers, and we’re supposed to feel sympathy solely for the situation they’re in. It’s shallow and renders the massive cast indistinguishable from one another. But even worse is Nolan’s “I have to tell a story in a unique way” obtuseness. There are three “storylines”, and they take place one week out from the evacuation of Dunkirk, one day out, and one hour out. The movie constantly jumps through these narrative threads, taking over half of the movie to get the first two caught up to the third. This leaves the movie feeling fragmented and jumbled. If it had picked one through line and gave it depth, the story would’ve matched the technical achievement. Nolan’s need to make A Christopher Nolan Film renders Dunkirk visibly exciting but emotionally lifeless and narratively sloppy. It did not need to be this way and it renders the movie an exercise in egotistical indulgence.