DUNKIRK (Christopher Nolan 2017)

[Chris Knipp]

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: DUNKIRK (2017)

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HARRY STYLES, ANEURIN BARNARD AND FIONN WHITHEAD IN DUNKIRK


The helplessness of war: Nolan's radical, succinct epic

Here is a great and classic war movie that's radically different - not even about "war" in the usual sense. Because it's a great "escape," not a battle, the evacuation called "Operation Dynamo," between 26 May and 4 June 1940, of 300,000 Allied soldiers from the northern French beach at Dunkerque where they were trapped by the Germans. Volunteers, with small English working and recreational boats, came from Dover, only 26 miles away, to rescue the troops, necessary because only they could get into the shallow shore and dodge the attacking Germans. Dynamo was a miraculous achievement (without it some say the Germans would have won the war) and we don't really see how it was carried out. Instead Nolan provides intense glimpses of everything that was going on, on land, at sea, and in the air - and above all he shows us the terror and helplessness of the common soldier (not to mention the ranking officer - because they are at the mercy of tight circumstance here too). Not a war movie? This is nonetheless one of the greatest of them.

And controversial, and destined to be long debated. For some it's a chaotic mashup of time that makes no sense. For others - including me, since I was enthralled, if confused - it is a "Hitchcockian" triumph of brilliant editing. I hadn't read any reviews in advance to prepare and didn't quite grasp the importance of the opening outline chapters. They are typically telegraphic - words are kept at a minimum here: "1. The Mole: one week. 2. The Sea: one day. 3. The Air: one hour." These three time-schemes are intercut together, an hour of fighter plane battling with a week of activity on the beach and in containers, battleships, a day of coming and going of the small rescue boats. So there you are: I have to go back and watch it all again, if I dare. Nonetheless the intercut three levels are as deeply visceral as you could imagine.

This is war like Tolstoy's description of the Battle of Waterloo in War and Peace: chaotic, incomprehensible and terrifying. And that's how you feel it, as you watch. There is no safe place, not on land, at sea, or in the air. A new level of accuracy is achieved. You've never been in a ship that was torpedoed like this, or flown inside the cockpit of a Spitfire like this (and seen what it's like to try to hit a German plane struggling with the controls), or been in the water with soldiers when a plane falls into the water nearby and explodes in flames and you dive to escape the fire. However these different experiences are recreated in the film, there is never the demoralizing sense so common today that they're "just CGI." The cinematography of of Hoyte van Hoytema achieves beauty, terror, and completeness. All is forged together, even Hanz Zimmer's bombastic music (though it's too loud at times). This is a great director at the top of his game.

This is, by the way, a low point for Britain, but a moment when Churchill turned defeat into victory with his "We shall fight on the beaches....we shall never surrender" speech - neatly provided us not in the famous stentorian tones but read by a young soldier, in a train car, from a newspaper, at film's end - and it is a moment without Americans. And without stars, though, strictly speaking, there are lots of them, from newcomers like Fionn Whitehead ("Tommy" in the credits, but nameless, but the first pale young soldier we follow), Aneurin Barnard, Barry Keoghan (the tragic young George), Jack Lowden, and many other young actors with small but key roles, including One Direction's Harry Styles - to big names like Tom Hardy (in a "mask" once again as the key fighter pilot); Kenneth Branagh as the ranking naval officer; Mark Rylance as Mr Dawson, who stands for all the captains of small rescue boats. Rylance's performance is typically perfect and invisible. This is an English movie in the old sense - no stars, everyone a star.

Dunkirk is in contrast with Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, without bloody awful horribleness. There are plenty of people dying, from the oft-described opening behind the line in town when we follow three young English soldiers and only one, "Tommy," gets through alive, but there's no gore or running blood or severed limbs. The horror is desperately struggling to get onto a ship that then is blown up, or being in the hold of one and seeing it shot full of holes, or landing your plane on the water and being trapped in it as it sinks. Or rescuing a shell-shocked man (Cillian Murphy) who then creates mayhem and tragedy on your little boat, but later shows how in a war villains can turn into heroes. Dunkirk has a lot to say amid the confusion and chaos that are its troubling default setting, but gore is not its message.

Dunkirk is an unusually intense mix of the epic and the intimate. It was shot in 70% with iMax cameras - bolted on the little planes, in the water, and hand held (though they weigh 50 pounds) on board ships and containers, to be viewed in iMax theaters (or those few cinemas projecting in 70mm) in square intimate academy ratio, with many closeups so you can see Kenneth Branagh's sickly pallor, the mask over Tom Hardy's face, the gloss of Fionn Whitehead's black hair, and witness the color of the flames when Farrier sets fire to his plane after he lands on the Dunkirk beach (where Nolan actually filmed), so the Germans who are coming for him - who we never hear or see, and experience only as the soldiers do, through their bullets, bombs, and torpedoes - can't get it. It's very bright, and very orange, and it's burned into my memory.

Dunkirk opened in France 19 July, US and UK, 21 July 2017.

[tabuno]

Count me in the minority who feel this is a disappointing movie with only "glimpses" of a war escape that doesn't permit the audience sufficient expanded, connected experiences to capture the totality of the sustained horror and human tragedy of military conflict. The opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan (1998) is much superior that Dunkirk pales by comparison. There are too many small frustrating plot devices and sequences to mention. I began to have a strong desire to look at my watch and almost walked out of the movie half way through.

The movie seemed to be more of an director's fancy attempt to pitch a three virtual reality experiences about war like one might develop for a Disney theme park experience where you go into a darkened theater. Yet it's like especially with the aerial combat scenes that there are many real life video takes that one could attempt to locate if one wanted such vicarious technical experience rides. The intercutting only made this movie more a visual audio entertainment pack ride than a epic war movie drama. But the connection to the human drama and characters, unlike what seemed to be a manufactured boat sequence, was really missing for me. I didn't care about most of these characters.

If one wanted the "chaotic, incomprehensible and terrifying" as Kniff appears to, then one would be wise to use the cinematography of Aleksey German who directed Hard To Be A God (2013) instead of Christopher Nolan. Peter Rainer of the Christian Science Monitor describes it as:


“Dunkirk,” with its scaled-to-be-a-masterpiece visual grandiosity, aims to be an epic of the spirit, but there is something weirdly underpowered about it. It’s a series of riveting tableaux, but the human center is lacking. When “Dunkirk” was over, I felt as if I had been through something, but it wasn’t a war, exactly. For all its painstaking realism, the movie resembles a great big impressionist abstraction. Maybe it’s not so different from Nolan’s other movies after all. Grade: B-

[Chris Knipp]

It's just not character-driven drama. The power of it is that there aren't characters. YOU are the character.

As I said the tripartite narrative, which requires concentration, is destined to be controversial.

[Chris Knipp]

It's a pity tabuno didn't enjoy the film. Hopefully at least he saw it in iMax or 70mm as it was made to be seen.

The faint praise from Rainer is very atypical. The Metacritic rating of Dunkirk is 94% - IMDb rating 9.0 - the highest of any film so far shown this year in the US. And it got 4.1 on AlloCiné - raves from the French critics too. It being widely declared a masterpiece and Christopher Nolan's best work.

[Chris Knipp]

From Philly.com:


Nolan fractures the narrative so that it loops back on itself — we see the events from the perspective of different characters and from different chronological vantage points, though the story coheres by movie’s end.

So, at last, does the movie’s emotional component, as the hope-starved men on the beach in France peer through the lifting fog to see their bobbing boats of their countrymen.

Or if not their countrymen, their allies. The evacuation included tens of thousands of French and Polish soldiers, who lived to fight another day. A reminder that important alliances and friendships, treated so flippantly by leaders today, were forged in blood, and not so long ago.

Nolan drives the point home in the final moments, when a British naval officer (Kenneth Branagh) stays long past the last possible moment, determined to save retreating French. It’s my guess, watching Dunkirk, that Nolan did not vote for Brexit.

MOVIE REVIEW Gary Thompson (http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/movies/chris-nolans-stirring-dunkirk-saving-private-ryan-and-400000-other-guys-20170718.html)

[Chris Knipp]

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The White Cliffs of Dover

"You knew this was the chance to get home and you kept praying, please God, let us go, get us out, get us out of this mess back to England. To see that ship that came in to pick me and my brother up, it was a most fantastic sight. We saw dog fights up in the air, hoping nothing would happen to us and we saw one or two terrible sights. Then somebody said, there’s Dover, that was when we saw the White Cliffs, the atmosphere was terrific. From hell to heaven was how the feeling was, you felt like a miracle had happened."

— Harry Garrett, British Army, speaking to Kent Online[90]- Wikipedia, "Dunkirk Evacuation" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkirk_evacuation)

[tabuno]

I saw this movie unfortunately in a Cinemark theater in somewhat uncomfortable lounge chair with the screen almost in my face. I had to turn my head in order to read the subtitles I was so close to the screen (the miniature reserved seating chart that renovated theaters are opting for nowadays doesn't show where the seats are in scale to the big screen when choosing which seat to select, yech!).

When it comes to war movies, the experiential approach to me is more like a Disneyland ride where one can become immersed in the experience, like virtual reality or perhaps a videogame. There are movie theaters where there are seats that actually vibrate and move to stimulate the experience. I've heard of even odors being introduced into a theater. Interestingly, what Chris is describing can also be transferred to such a visual experience as with the new movie Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) that is playing at the same time as Dunkirk, except its a visually stunning sci fi version of Dunkirk.

For me a dramatic full feature film is more than an experience. If one has to contend with concentrating on an experiential movie I would think it would defeat the purpose of such a movie which is to just be able to sit back and let the movie's sensory output just wash over one and transport one into the movie without having to mentally contemplate on various cognitive reflections during the movie. It is with video games, one becomes the character in the video game experience. A feature film on the other hand is the experience plus story, plus character, plus connection to emotional meaning within the context of the movie, not as an audience member becoming part of the movie itself. As with Last Action Hero (1993), where a film characters enters into a movie, there is a separation from the audience. The movie experience is about an audience member experiencing through a character's experience and context, not an audience member themselves who are not deliberately scripted into the movie.

[Chris Knipp]

It sounds as though tabuno's viewing situation for Dunkirk, which he judges so harshly. were far from ideal; in fact they were terrible. As for "experimental," great art is always challenging, when it is new. The more so the better. Much of what is exciting about Dunkirk is because it is innovative - and yet it has classic elements.

Dunkirk actually has many of the elements of a classic, epic war movie - fighter plane battles, for instance; excited discussions among those in command; the danger, the excitement, the terror of being attacked and taking flight.

[Chris Knipp]

In the passage below, tabuno actually seems to be saying a film should not make one have to think. An extraordinary thing to say.
For me a dramatic full feature film is more than an experience. If one has to contend with concentrating on an experiential movie I would think it would defeat the purpose of such a movie which is to just be able to sit back and let the movie's sensory output just wash over one and transport one into the movie without having to mentally contemplate on various cognitive reflections during the movie.

[tabuno]

I suggest that Chris may have read the opposite of what I have intended. I believe that Chris has proposed a new way of experiencing a film consisting of substituting one's self for the lead characters in the film and from which perspective to experience the film which I propose calling an "experiential film" experience or as Chris might label "You are There" approach If so, I don't know how one can concentrate on a film in which one is actually there in the film without also having to mentally separate one's self from the film, unless one proposes an ability to read thoughts and emotions of another film character.

For me the best experience of a film is to concentrate on the movie's character's experience not from a "you are there" experience. The closest that I have come to the "You are There" perspective that comes to mind is Douglas Trumbull's Brainstorm (1983) and Natalie Wood's last film where there is a scientific instrument that allows one to experience the same experiences of another person. In this movie it was designed for the audience to really experience what another character was experiencing as this was a fundamental plot device of the movie. What Chris proposes, however, is for films to be experienced in such a way that currently defies the scientific capabilities of current technology as well as to mostly ignore in part the actual storyline and the inner essences of the characters themselves.

[Chris Knipp]

Harry Styles, the One Direction singer, who plays one of the initial soliders, makes exactly the same comment in an interview as what I was saying. I tried to link to the interview but haven't been able to. He is responding to the suggestion that the characters don't have much depth. Indeed they don't, he says, and that's intentional because it makes them blank slates onto which the viewer projects himself, so you feel a direct part of the action. It's a very visceral film that makes you feel over and over how trapped you are, how hard it is to down a German plane, how fast the ship you're in is sinking. Direct identification with the physical situations in all their immediacy is the primary aim of each scene. It's not "hard" to do this identifying - it's hard NOT to.

[Chris Knipp]

Another big reason for the immersiveness and the identification Dunkirk viewings engender is the format it's shot and projected in, the aspect-ratio.

There's an article discussing this for the film HERE. (https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/7/19/15985474/dunkirk-explainer-format-imax-digital-70mm-35mm-buy-ticket)

In iMAX the top and bottom are taller - it's not like wide-angle cinemascope - causing you to fall into the screen, rather than sit back and admire a beautiful panorama.

Interesting to learn Warner Bros. even bought a bunch of 70mm projectors used for Tarantino's Hateful Eight to increase the number of screens offering Dunkirk in 70mm film projection " 125 theaters in total (including non-IMAX 70mm screenings), which is bigger than either Hateful Eight or Nolan’s last foray into 70mm, Interstellar." As I said, having seen it in an iMAX theater, I'm now hoping to see it at the Grand Lake in Oakland projected in 70mm - it's a big old auditorium.

[Chris Knipp]

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There is a lot of talk about format right now because iMAX & 70mm projection are really being promoted for Dunkirk-watchers. I'm sure it makes a difference, and I'm personally a champion of film vs. digital. Note DCP - pretty standard nowadays. This is not intended primarily to be viewed that way. Grand, yet intimate - that was the aim.

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KENNETH BRANAGH IN DUNKIRK

[Chris Knipp]

Anglocentric Dunkirk: the French are (quite justifiably) not liking its complete omission of showing or telling about the 120,000 evacuated French troops during this event.

Mandelbaum's French review in Le Monde (http://www.lemonde.fr/cinema/article/2017/07/19/dunkerque-un-deluge-de-bombes-hors-sol_5162278_3476.html) is impressive - and it describes the film in glowing terms for four long paragraphs before coming in the fifth and sixth to the omission of the French except for two little scenes. (There is omission of mention of the Germans too: Nolan chose to use only the word "the enemy" instead of "the Germans" - which they may not mind as much, but also contributes to the total spotlight on the Brits.)

As I noted, though, most of the French reviews of Dunkirk ("Dunkerque" to them) were favorable and its AlloCiné press rating was a very high 4.1/5. If Nolan erred, he erred in a grand and impressive way. The film isn't without flaws. Arguably some dialogue (limited) is over-explanatory. Worse, 1/3 of it I found incomprehensible. I look forward to seeing the film again on DVD with a subtitles option. Even the first time I watched it I was wishing I was seeing it in Paris with French subtitles that would have interpreted everything said. (Some of it is just drowned out by the bombing, or if not by that by Hans Zimmer's bombastic and terrifying score.)

I am still in awe of this movie. I think it's fantastic.

This article from the Telegraph, London:
Writing in France's Le Monde newspaper (and reported by The Local), Jacques Mandelbaum called Nolan "witheringly impolite" and "indifferent" [" une cinglante impolitesse, une navrante indifférence (http://www.lemonde.fr/cinema/article/2017/07/19/dunkerque-un-deluge-de-bombes-hors-sol_5162278_3476.html)"] towards his country by disregarding the role it played in the battle. [i.e., the evacuation]

"A dozen seconds devoted to a group of French soldiers defending the city who were not very friendly and a few more to a French soldier disguised as British in order to try to flee the massacre?" he asks. "That does not account for the indispensable French involvement to this crazy evacuation.

"No one can deny a director's right to focus his point of view on what he sees fit, as long as it does not deny the reality of which it claims to represent. Where in the film are the 120,000 French soldiers who were also evacuated from Dunkirk? Where are the 40,000 who sacrificed themselves to defend the city against a superior enemy in weaponry and numbers?"

HuffPost France have also joined in with the criticism, claiming that Dunkirk's erasure of French sacrifice in the event is an example of typical British behaviour.

"Anglo-Saxons have an unpleasant tendency to put forward the feats of the British army and pass over those of the French army," claimed journalist Gary Assouline.

To be fair, he may have a point. In his review for The Telegraph, our film critic Robbie Collin said, "Dunkirk is every inch a British film, with no detectable concessions to the international market."

While Collin was largely talking about the film's exclusively British cast, it also gives a clear insight into the narrative focus of the film. For patriotic remembrance of their own fallen servicemen, it seems that France may have to look elsewhere.

[tabuno]

Instead of declaring Dunkirk, the greatest war movie of all time,
perhaps to really experience in intimate nature of the horror of war it
would of value to experience the following movies first: The Railway
Man (2013), The Great War Diary (2014, television mini-series),
Excaliber (1981), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dances with Wolves (1990),
Full Metal Jacket (1987), We Were Soldiers (2002), Schindler's List
(1993), Schindler's List (1993), Jarhead (2005), How The West Was Won
(1962), Apocalypto (2006), Alexander (2004), Apocalypse Now (1979),
United 93 (2006), Cold Mountain (2003), Fail-Safe (1964), The Great
Escape (1963), Black Hawk Down (2001), The Revenant (2015), Enemy at
the Gates (2001), Platoon (1986), and Gettysburg (1993).

[Chris Knipp]

If lists make you happy, fine,but as in your previous reviewing, just throwing out names of other films doesn't ultimately convey that much info. Several of those are fine films, several are not, but none outweighs Nolan's achievement in Dunkirk.

There are many interviews about Dunkirk. Kenneth Branagh gives a particularly good one HERE (http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXZEnMgd1qA). What a very articulate man he is. So is Mary Rylance; in fact what Finn Whitehead and Harry Styles say is very good too, in another interview. It's evident as intense an experience of filmmaking as this gave the actors clear ideas of what they were doing.

[Chris Knipp]

"We Shall Fight on the Beaches."

The final scene is particularly neat in rounding out the story and providing historical perspective without departing from the intimacy that has prevailed throughout. Hence Alex (Harry Styles} calls through the train window to a boy to tell him where they are and give him a copy of the newspaper from the pile. And then Tommy (Fionn Whithead) reads out loud in his own voice the front page story that (in the film's typical telescoping of time) reports the evacuation and Churchill's famous June 4, 1940 "We Shall Fight on the Beaches" speech. As Tommy reads it Churchill says what happened was a terrible defeat, but the saving of 340,000 English and French soldiers was a triumph snatched from the jaws of that defeat.
Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

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An English paper from June 3, 1940.

[tabuno]

Chris apparently won't accept just a war movie list that is my compilation of war-like movies that reflect a genuine "you are there" experience that in my opinion either rival or exceed Dunkirk's experiential novelty and in addition offer a stronger and more important emotive story-connection with the audience that Dunkirk lacks, backed up by a multitude of audience members' comments on IMDb. So I must believe that what's in order is a much more time-consuming, detailed one at a time dissection of some of the movies I've listed so that Chris if he so desires can attempt to offer some basis on which his adoration of Dunkirk is so cemented and to refute my contention that Dunkirk is more of a Disneyland ride excursion into a 3-D virtual reality ride with the audience member as the primary character.

To begin with, most of the movies on my list can be supported and generalized to provide a foundation that Dunkirk is deficient in important ways in being a great war movie. One of the best examples of a movie that enthralls and allows the audience to experience the horror and almost helpless chaos of war, along with a much more visceral awareness of the fleetingness of life is Randall Wallace's "We Were Soldiers" based on a book whose author was both a real authentic Lt. Colonel and who actually oversaw the first major American-Vietcong battle in Vietnam.

In comparing the opening sequences of We Were Soldiers and Dunkirk, the audience is presented with a beginning scene in We Were Soldiers presenting an isolated dirt road among lifeless trees of la Dang Valley of Vietnam, June 1954 (twelve years before Lt. Col. Harold Moore would take his own American Soldiers into the valley of death) with a somber man’s voiceover explaining the setting as a testament to both the Americans and Vietcong who are to die in this war as a background prelude to the main story while in Dunkirk the audience is immediately presented with a squad of American soldiers walking down an small road bordered by apparently abandoned buildings in a small town as a preface to the oncoming scene of the wide expanse of beaches of Dunkirk sometime between May 27 and June 4, 1940.

What transpires next on the screen is suggestive of just how mutely Dunkirk opens with its images of the backs of American soldier’s looking into open windows, taking a smoke, attempting to relieve oneself and later being shot at falling to the street compared to the scary, visceral images of brutal carnage as photographed in We Were Soldiers without seemingly any over the top stylized dramatic presentation making the scene ever so much more riveting and frightening because of its likely connection to reality. The audience is presented in We Were Soldiers the close up a French officer’s sweat on his face in hot Vietnam, they get to hear swear words coming from a frustrated commanding officer. Then suddenly there is the sizzling sound of a shot and blood spurting out against a soldier’s white hat and the camera pulls back to reveal that the soldier next to him has been shot and there follows an explosion and fire. And then a soldier attempting to rally the platoon is shot in the throat between he can complete a few notes on his trumpet, blood drops splattering in a spherical design from his cut artery. From then on in the space of few minutes the entire platoon will be slaughtered. From the very beginning of the movie it is established that eventually the French will leave it to the Americans what apparently the French could not. Already there is a sense of dread and the possibility of future failure that encompasses what follows next throughout the movie. The Americans are vulnerable. In Dunkirk there is little of the savage viciousness, most of it is unseen in terms of damage and pain. Even the enemy is for the most part invisible, detached. By the time the British soldier arrives on the beaches of Dunkirk, there is an odd sense of detachment from the impending Nazi invasion instead of the visceral fear that was developed in We Were Soldiers of the overwhelming power of the enemy. There is only a tacit scene to acknowledge the French sacrifices they made in keeping the Nazi’s from slaughtering more British soldiers. In We Were Soldiers, the same French soldiers have already been presented with much overwhelming brutality even as this movie interestingly is primarily about the American experience.

[Chris Knipp]

Good job tabuno on showing why you like We Were Soldiers better. Indeed Dunkirk is consciously free of the gore and "savage viciousness" of warfare your preferred film has. But it is simply unfair to call the new film "more of a Disneyland ride excursion into a 3-D virtual reality ride with the audience member as the primary character" - an opinion that seems to stem partly from accidentally having wound up in an uncomfortably close seat (but was it IMAX or 70mm?). The Dunkirk audience member becomes more of a primary character, but it is not a "Disneyland ride excursion" but a war film in the classic mold with quite a number of characters we remember very well despite the lack of background on them and despite its structural and conceptual originality. After the introductory voiceover, showing someone getting shot in the neck, the spurting blood, the severed artery, the flying limbs, that is the conventional thing and how Saving Private Ryan got our attention and made its impression. But there's no need to denigrate this great new film or to dismiss the other films you love, either.

Here's a paragraph from a good review by Dana Stevens, the film critic of Slate, that puts its finger on the main reason why I think you got turned off and some others may too. I recommend reading Stevens' entire review. (It's HERE (https://slate.com/arts/2017/07/christopher-nolans-new-movie-dunkirk-reviewed.html).)
The degree to which the viewer does or does not “get to know” the characters in this intimate yet somehow impersonal movie may be a point of contention among audiences. Dunkirk is a portrait of a military and humanitarian operation more than it is a study of a group of individuals. It isn’t that big on characterization or, for that matter, dialogue—a good deal of which is inaudible thanks to the near-constant cacophony of plane crashes, gunfire, and explosions. And the closest thing this ensemble piece has to a protagonist—a very young soldier played by Fionn Whitehead—is not only nearly silent but sometimes difficult to distinguish from two of his fellow survivors (Aneurin Barnard and Harry Styles), especially when they’re covered in oil and grime from the various bombed and capsized ships they’ve abandoned. And also (this paragraph comes before in the review):
In a radical move, Dunkirk entirely does away with the narrative scaffolding that holds together most war pictures: the introduction, at boot camp or in battle, of a crew of soldierly comrades. The scenes of military higher-ups debating strategy over maps. The cutaways to families waiting back home or flashbacks to the combatants’ prewar days. Instead, the film plunges us straight in medias res, or rather in the middle of several different res: Dunkirk follows stories unfolding in three separate places not at the same time but in three overlapping time frames: one lasting a week, one a day, and one only an hour.

[tabuno]

The opening scene of Dunkirk of British soldiers foolishly running down a town street only to get shot down reminds me of a scene from the updated War of the Worlds (2005) directed by Steven Spielberg as people are running away from gigantic Martian contraptions that just ray gun them into dust. Unlike We Were Soldiers (2002) which opens with Vietcong attacking a French platoon on a dirt road from both sides of the road, the British soldiers in Dunkirk seem to foolishly forget to use the apparently the abandoned buildings all along with entire length of the street to use for cover and even worse as they continue to attempt to reach a fence while being shot at directly even though there appears to be a cross street where they could easily have escaped the bullets by just going around a simple corner. While civilians might have fled in terror, I don't think that trained British soldiers would have simply forgotten basic training of evasion tactics, especially if one is going to die. Too bad actors with a military background in this movie didn't complain to the director of this huge oversight. I guess being you are there experience doesn't include authentic realism.

[Chris Knipp]

What's wrong with the picture, and other movies.

I think the big flaw with Dunkirk isn't anything tabuno mentions but omission of the 130,000 French and Belgian troops who were also being evacuated at the same time - we don't know how. Being unable to make out a third of the dialogue also isn't right. This movie has flaws. But it has greatness, and great originality, along with a classic feeling.

I like some of the movies tabuno listed a lot. Some like We Were Soldiers I've never even seen. Some other war movies I like that tabuno didn't mention: Three Kings (1999), Letters from Iwa Jima (2006), The Hurt Locker (2008),Hacksaw Ridge (2016). Ones I particularly don't like and find objectionable: The Deer Hunter (1978) Black Hawk Down (2001). The first builds on an experience that's completely false, the second is a crude celebration of war violence. I also don't like Alexander ("war movie"?), the Revenant, Fail Safe, and don't see How the West Was Won, Excaliber or Cold Mountain as "war movies." Lawrence of Arabia is a great film, I love it, but it's on a wider scale than just a "war movie," and is also primarily the portrait of a man's remarkable life, of which WWI was just a part. Dances with Wolves, a questionable film, isn't a "war movie."

[Chris Knipp]

The genre and outlook of Dunkirk: not so much war, as disaster and survival

The thing about Dunkirk is that it certainly focuses on a crucial moment for Europe in the Second World War, but it's also peripheral to the War since it has no battle in it, no combat, and is a retreat, an evacuation. It's relevant to mention United 93, others have too, and also many have mentioned James Cameron's Titanic. A lot of the "Mole" segments of Dunkirk that are its the most powerful, are disaster movie material on a grand scale. The central focus, neatly (again) underlined at the end, is not on winning but surviving, which is what you do in a disaster, if you're lucky: you survive it.

The old man (who turns out to be blind, as Tommy sees but Alex misses - one of Dunkirk's crafty little details) gives the boys blankets and congratulates them.

Alex says: "But all we did was survive."

And the old man answers: "Sometimes that's enough."

So the main action is from the point of view of young soldiers, especially the three, Tommy, Alex, Gibson, going from ship to ship as one after another gets torpedoed or shot up and sunk, and escaping desperately to another, then sent back to the beach, and having to wait in the cold and damp and uncertainty, and struggle again to get onto one of the civilian rescue boats that come, through fire and water, and water that's on fire. Being in the water full of oil when a plane in flames drops into it is one of the most terrifying moments of the long struggle to survive the young men go through - surviving to another day, to go back to war, perhaps to die in battle.

I think I like this so much because I know that it would be my experience if I was a young soldier (and I was a young soldier, but not in combat, just training), I could see that this was how I felt and would feel in this situation. It is the experience of being in the Army, most of the time. You are helpless, part of a collectivity, but also on your own, and your primary task is your own survival. This is the subject of Dunkirk.

The smallness of the roles, the lack of detail about the characters, isn't a proper gauge of how memorable they are or how much you might care about them. That's not how it works in this movie. Possibly the most memorable of all is George, the 17-year-old friend of Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney), son of Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance). Thanks to Peter, the world would remember George too. Mr. Dawson is humble and ordinary in his determination to do his civic duty, but who can forget him? He is the embodiment of Operation Dynamo, and it's not an accident that he's played by one of England's greatest actors, Mark Rylance.

This is the way the great English studio films of the Fifties were. Everyone in the cast was fine, without distinction. Everybody was a star, but there were no stars. Christopher Nolan carries out this spirit in making some complete unknown young actors as important in the film as three four of the UK's finest actors, Cillian Murphy, Rylance, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hardy.

[tabuno]

Knipp's insistence that Dunkirk's primary strength lies not so much on story or characters (which is apparently very diminished in this film) but on the apparently real vicarious experience of being in an actual war scene that individual audience members are allowed to experience has a fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that film technology isn't yet sufficient to offer what Knipp is really seeking. I'm reminded of, by now outdated, scene from Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (1966) where Linda Montag played by Julie Christie, the wife of the main character, is enraptured by a stylized soap opera broadcast on a full wall screen which supposedly allows individual audience members to directly participate as if they, and only they, are part of the soap opera. This fascinating participant technique is supposedly made possible through the advanced technology of spy cameras in every home and the ability of the actors to ask generalized questions of the individual audience members where an obvious gap in the dialogue appears and the name of the audience member is inserted making it appear that the audience member is being personally talked to which is apparently not the case.

The problem of the audience member as the primary character in Dunkirk approach is that unlike actual characters in the movie, such characters have a comprehensive historical context from which to experience their surroundings and circumstances in the movie whereas as in the case of Linda Montag they remain starkly disconnected from the events being presented to them. Most audience members do not have the military basic training, the prolonged periods of waiting around, of the apparent associations and friendships seemingly developed in the movie, the same motivations and persona as being depicted. Instead of the brilliant use of first person, found footage approach that made The Blair Witch Project (1999) so effective, Christopher Nolan still distances the audience using perspectives that a real character could never obtain if they had actually been at Dunkirk. Dunkirk falls starkly short of Knipp's criteria for you are here experience. We may have to wait at least ten more years for quantum computers to be able to tap in our individual brains to create individualistic movie scenarios in which audience members are likely to stay home and connect themselves up into a Matrix (1999) like virtual world instead.

[Chris Knipp]

Well, evidently you know better. How much military training these very young soldiers had is one question. Another is whether there were really any safe corners to get around. The scene is saying, they didn't have time. They were in a hurry to get to the line, to the beach. They made a run for it. A straight line is the shortest distance between two points. They didn't know that snipers were aimed at them. They got shot.

Frankly can't follow what's being said about Fahrenheit 451 and (!) Blair Witch Project. What we didn't need here, witness the great success of Nolan's amazing film, is virtual reality, or found footage. It's all done with bolted or hand held IMAX cameras in realistically recreated scenes in actual locations.

If you think young soldiers on their own and scared aren't capable of doing a stupid thing, you certainly haven't been in the Army.

[Chris Knipp]

All these objections to the opening scene say, to me, you didn't like the movie from the get-go. First of all you were annoyed it didn't start out with a voiceover explaining the context, or scenes of basic training, or the families of the young soldiers. Then you thought the scene was staged wrong, that it wouldn't happen like that. I'd say, you should have gotten uop right then and turned in your ticket and gotten a refund. At that point it wasn't too late to escape. If I'm at a movie watching a scene and all I can think of is scenes from another movie that I think were done better, I'm not happy. I'm also not really watching the movie. Luckily I can shut out memories of other movies when I'm watching a movie, most of the time, and enjoy it, at the time, even if afterwards I realize there are other movies I liked better.

[tabuno]

A real problem about the ending scene was the improbable, fantasy of a single engine fighter prop plane that continues to glide and glide without fuel forever and forever and even able to shoot down an enemy aircraft, one that still could outmaneuver with its own fueled engine. That whole unbelievable sequence really made Christopher Nolan look overly dramatic and manipulative in trying to come up with some fantastic ending that really should have crashed and which in some ways it did. I'm also reminded of the much more impressive battle scene from Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) which unlike Dunkirk truly portrayed the epic nature of the thousands and thousands of soldiers involved in each respective scene. Alexander making a sweeping turn with his cavalry around what appeared to be a sea of soldiers. Others have complained about how puny Christopher Nolan's ending scene is regarding the supposedly 300,000 soldiers that were supposed almost stranded near Dunkirk. When comparing these two movies, it is fairly obvious how understated and diminished the magnitude of Dunkirk's underwhelming magnitude of the actual heroic efforts and the immensity of the potential loss to Britain this escape would have resulted in.

[Chris Knipp]

You misunderstood the differently calibrated chronologies, tabuno. It wasn't "forever and forever" the plane's final flight was, merely seems so because part of the one hour expanded to mesh with one week and one day in the Mole and Sea sections. "Puny" ending also is a misunderstanding by some viewers of the method of Synecdoche used throughout, a few individuals standing for the many. Stone's Alexander, one of your list I consider bad, uses CGI for the thousands, of course - it's very obvious; Nolan used real living multitudes and real battleships and planes.
it is fairly obvious how understated and diminished the magnitude of Dunkirk's underwhelming magnitude of the actual heroic efforts and the immensity of the potential loss to Britain this escape would have resulted in. You're getting tangled up in your ideas here, tabuno. The story is about a gain not a loss, of 340,000 saved. But I think the key is to understand the device used throughout, from scene one, of Synecdoche, of a part put for the whole, to provide simplicity and immediacy. Logically failing to escape would have resulted in the loss, not escaping.

[Chris Knipp]

People, out there: don't be deterred by this debate or these objections. There are faults in Dunkirk, just not quite these ones, but this is the best movie to come to theaters so far this year, and one of the best war movies you'll ever see. Powerful, stunning, Nolan's best yet. See it - in big format, as it was made to be seen - in a comfortable seat, not too close to the screen - or too far back!

[Johann]

Great stuff Gents.
I'm not sure what Nolan is aiming to do with Dunkirk, but we all know how formidible a director he is.

[Chris Knipp]

Hope you see it soon johann and in large format. Theatres (http://www.businessinsider.com/christopher-nolan-dunkirk-imax-70mm-film-locations-showings-2017-7).

[Johann]

Closest 70mm screening is in Montreal...
I will see it Chris, for sure. 70mm might not happen, tho. Which sux, because that IS the format to see it in.

[Chris Knipp]

I was looking, I thought they had it in Toronto. Where are you? But IMAX is arguably the best format. I have seen it in both. Admittedly 70mm was awesome. Superb closeup detail. Sharpest big images I've ever seen.

[Johann]

I'm in Ottawa. Toronto is six hours away. Montreal is 2.
The last two films I saw in 70mm were 2001 and PT Anderson's The Master.
I'll never forget those screenings. Great to hear that Dunkirk delivers the cinema.
Christopher Nolan needed to make something good this time. He was slipping into Shyamalamadingdong territory....

[Chris Knipp]

He achieves greatness here. I was not ever a Nolan fan, but I went to see this twice in three days, IMAX then 70mm. The 70mm only cost $6! The Grand Lake in Oakland is an independent more humane cinema.

This site may list locations in Ottawa where you can see Dunkirk in large format. Check it out. There seem to be many locations but maybe not Ottawa.

https://www.frontrowcentre.com/locations/ontario/dunkirk-the-imax-experience-in-70mm/126417/

Really simply IMAX with the square format is what he most had in mind, so you don't have to see it in the wider format 70MM. But however you see it, it will be worth your while.

The metacritic rating is 94% from critics and that's based on over 50 reviews! But some people don't like it - like tabuno. If you come in with preconceived notions, maybe you won't like it. Come to it with an open mind and take it as it comes (but it won't hurt to understand the time-scheme structure or to do some prepping on the history.

[tabuno]

Chris nicely handles the ending scene time jumps with his commentary. Personally, I'd rather watch sci fi time jumps than its use in war dramas. For me, there's enough going on that a simple linear, not fancy director stuff is needed to really offer up a great war movie. But Chris makes a good point on how to experience the continuously flying fighter plane and its pretty hard to comment reasonably without watching the ending again. I think Christopher Nolan has Inception (2010) on the brain when it comes to time jumps or compressions. At least in that movie, the whole approach to watching the movie was explained prior to having to experience the movie in its entirety.

I'm with Chris regarding whether or not to see this movie. It's probably better to see this movie and make your own decision along with his idea of making sure you see it in IMAX. Having watched it with the screen almost in my face isn't the best way of experiencing any movie, even Tootsie (1982) where I ended up in the front row on the corner of one of the largest theaters in Utah at the time. That was the time when people packed the large theaters on the 70 mm wide screens.

[Chris Knipp]

"Brilliant" is bosh - it's just the way the film is made. Actually it is explained at the beginning for this one too, though I admit I didn't quite get it the first time. It says - but didn't you say you couldn't read the subtitles because of your awkward seat? : "The Mole: one week. The Sea: one day. The air: one hour." Those titles come right at the beginning. It made perfect sense in retrospect when I read a review, but at the time I didn't quite get it. I just kept an open mind, and thought the filmmaking was splendid so I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I didn't really care - every scene, every shot was wonderful. And full of humanity.

[tabuno]

I don't believe Dunkirk made you brilliant. You already were.

[tabuno]

Stephanie Zacharek, a Time’s film critic, July 31, 2017, appears to critically rave about Dunkirk for its elaborate and impressive visual and sound effects, its emotional details, and the trust in the faces of the movie. She’s especially impressed by Mark Rylance’s performance as an aging seaman and owner of a small boat coming to the rescue of British soldiers at risk in Dunkirk during World War II, 1940. Even though she quotes the director, Christopher Nolan, calling this movie a “ride” perhaps for marketing purposes, she expands on the movie’s strengths as containing the fears of claustrophobia and drowning as well as how this movie sustains its dramatic tension using “small strokes” and “bits of history” including an aerial battle and one of supposedly frightening proportions of a ship being suddenly sunk by a torpedo.

All in all, Zacharek’s description of Dunkirk might be adequate in themselves, but in the context of other movies, Dunkirk has plenty of competition and in many cases, specific examples where other directors have excelled in their visual and sound effects, emotional details, and even in the faces that the audience members are to trust. The “ride” of Dunkirk, seems to be exactly that, a ride of glimpses and bits of war time experiences as if one is being transported along in a number of sequential and concurrent expensive theme park rides at Disneyland or Universal Studios.

What seems to be missing is the elaborate and impressive visual and sound effects from a movie like Russia’s Aleksey Germany’s elaborate and impressive visual and sound effect masterpiece of Hard to be a God (2013) about a scientist who is sent to help a local Medieval society on the planet Arkanar. What is even more impressive is that even seen and heard on a Lenovo 16” laptop, the images and the audio effects are superior to that of Dunkirk as experienced on the big screen.

Even though Mark Rylance’s performance appears adequate he seems to be stuck in a fictionalized, melodramatic, and sensationalize plot where one of his boy is the accidental victim of a rescued soldier’s clumsy attempts to have the small boat captained by Rylance’s character turn around. Because of the myriad of interruptions and time jumps used by Nolan, the sustained faces we are to trust in become a disjointed discontinuous riot of the feelings and emotions cut short and interrupted by the two other plots being offered up by Nolan. As such, the sustained dramatic tension that Zacharek seems to enjoy seems rather to become an intrusive annoyance when compared to the sustained intensity as experienced in Wolfgang Peterson’s The Perfect Storm (2000) where George Clooney’s character as a commercial fisherman is caught up in the storm of the century. As for a sinking ship, it was pretty predictable that something bad was about to happen in Dunkirk and for it to occur with the coincidence of having the main character survive to go onto further extraordinary experiences turns this movie more into a mainstream survival movie, even more so than the more plausible Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in The Revenant (2015) or the riveting experience of the classic sinking ship where Leonardo gets to suffer perhaps even more in Titanic (1997) even though everyone knows what happens to the ship.

The many of the faces we are to trust in Dunkirk, appear to be two dimensional characters without backstories, without emotional depth, apparently seemingly just reacting, reacting to some written script and on location in Dunkirk and elsewhere. It’s hard to identify or feel emotionally attached to characters who seemingly come and go in bits and glimpses on the screen. As two British soldiers make their way toward a rescue boat with an injured man in a stretcher, even as the tension mounts and the stirring string musical accompaniment, reminiscent of the eerie music of Mica Levi from Jonathan Glazer’s horror movie Under the Skin (2013) , there is a corresponding odd conflicting tension of hope that they will not succeed in their apparent covert and seemingly unfair attempt to save themselves.

The fear of claustrophobia and drowning as well as the stunning aerial combat scenes are arguably decent, but in competition with the intense emotional, sometimes breath stopping rush surrounding similar suffocating experiences found in such movies as the underrated Alien: Resurrection (1997) or the more popular suspense action movies with emotionally riveting water scenes from Bourne Supremacy (2004) or Casino Royale (2006), Dunkirk appears to sink as an pinnacle of achievement. Finally, for aerial combat scenes, the broken and disjointed intercutting as well as both the use first and second person photography seems to be unable to sustain the smoothly execution of the continuing tension, anxiety, worry, and even strategy employed in a literal battle to the death used perhaps more effectively in such other movies as Star Wars (1977) or The Fifth Element (1997) even considering that these were sci fi movies.

As for epic and big as well as small and intimate scale, one of the most intriguing and immersive, compelling war movies might be Enemy At The Gates (2001) set during the much less familiar Battle of Leningrad.

[Chris Knipp]

I have read some reviews but not Stephanie Zacharek's in Time Magazine (http://time.com/4864051/dunkirk-review/). It's a terrific review, with some good background on the history, and I sympathize with her on several important things: I was not an IMAX fan but am for seeing Dunkirk, and I was not a Nolan fan but am - big time! - for Dunkirk. Dunkirk is a game-changer. I notice she calls it a "masterpiece" and that the movie is on the cover of Time, which she writes for, with the caption "The Miracle of Dunkirk." That's referring to the historical event, but suggesting the new movie is a miracle too. So I don't know how this review feeds your anti-Dunkirk cause!

Again I'm often impressed by the number and variety of other movies you can come up with by way of comparison in discussing a new film, and again you mention several I haven't seen, or even heard of - Hard to be a God this time, and Enemy at the Gates. But again some of them don't seem relevant - it's apples and oranges - or just movies that are fine but in quite different ways - like Under the Skin - or technically impressive but not really good movies - The Fifth Element; or good only in a limited way - The Perfect STorm. Again you trot out your "Disneyland" or "theme park ride" slur, which is just that, a slur, totally unfair for a film with such rich, visceral, realistic detail. Speaking of detail, I like Zacharek's description: " a supreme achievement made from small strokes, a kind of Seurat painting constructed with dark, glittering bits of history." A massive operation, a disaster turned into a triumph, constructed out of small rich details: a pointillist landscape.

But again you bring up the idea that the characters are shallow and we can't be moved by them because of that: whereas I argued that you don't have to know a lot about a person/character to care quite a lot about him. In the case of Mr Dawson (Mark Rylance) by the way you may reveal too much, and also somewhat misstate the case: George is not "one of his boy[s]" but his son's friend, or just neighbor, as Stephanie Zacharek says; Dawson's a recreational sailor so "aging seaman" might not be the right term. Dunkirk as I've said before is rich in small details, and it's important to get them right. Have you not noticed all that Zacharek says about "faces" - about how much they mean in depicting a historical event, and how brilliantly Nolan uses them, his actors, here? Humanity, tabuno, this film is packed with humanity, and just because you haven't seen it and only see a "theme park" "ride" doesn't mean it isn't there!

Whether or not these various films you mention have elements in which they excel over Dunkirk, this does not prove that Dunkirk is - despite the extravagant praise it has, in my view justifiably, received - somehow not up to par, not really as good as they are. Your criticism, almost condemnation, of Dunkirk rests almost wholly on the same slurs you have repeated before, the claim that it's incoherent because it intercuts three separate "scenes" of the evacuation and that they are just "Disneyland" thrill rides. If Nolan called Dunkirk a "ride" that was a great opportunity for you, but it was unfortunate, and inaccurate and he was doubtless, I'm guessing, just being British and modest. It's obviously a great deal more than a "ride." Zacharek says Nolan "clearly knows it's more than that." So again, I don't know how your references to her review support your attempt to reduce Dunkirk to just one among many action movies, and far from the best. Zacharek emphasizes right at the start how Nolan "puts so much care" into the "emotional details" of his film.

But this you overlook, and it's essential: this film is full of humanity and deeply stirring, but manages the feat of not being sentimental. It's cunningly constructed out of the "pointillism" of a wealth of tiny, precisely observed human details - like the one of the drowning man still clutching the tin cup that Zacharek keenly admires, or the blind man Alex doesn't realize is blind but Tommy does, which I liked so much. Zacharek also mentions other details of gestures and expressions by Tom Hardy and Mark Rylance that are so precise, so important, and so much contribute to our sense of their humanity, and all this in performances that at first seem simple, even faceless. But Mark Rylance and Tom Hardy are literally just about England's two finest actors today, so they're anything but simple and faceless. This is a picture that I'm convinced will richly reward repeated viewings. I've already gone back and seen it in 70mm after my initial IMAX experience and I saw a lot more the second time, but with each detailed review I read, like Zacharek's, which I thank you for calling my attention to, I discover some more small details I'd missed.

It seems every time there is a really fantastic film that I care a great deal about, I become aware that there are people out to denigrate and run it down. This was true with Brokeback Mountain. That was a film that was exceptional and meant a lot to me. But of course it notoriously didn't win the Oscar it deserved and it was attacked and dismissed by some. Its gay theme was too controversial for some. Dunkirk is controversial in its own way. It belies conventional war movie expectations. How can it still be a great war movie, lacking many of their trappings and not even having a battle, or the blood and gore post-Private Ryan moviegoers expect? But it is.

[Johann]

You're not known for seeing movies twice Chris, especially within days of seeing it, so it must be good.

[Chris Knipp]

That's right johann. And the chance to see it in another spectacular format was a big enticement. I'm keen for you to see it.

[tabuno]

I don't even get a twinge of an emotional sadness, despair, and longing from any moment in Dunkirk as when I experience James Bond, the stiff, unattached British Secret Service MI-5 man helpless as both he and the audience must witness the soulful death of Vesper Lynd as she helplessly falls deeper and deeper in the depths of the murky waters trapped in her cage, nor the poignant stinging last moments as Franka Potente's character succumb to the dark waters trapped in their vehicle as her body sinks further and further into darkness, even climatic scene of Leonardo DiCaprio's last handhold, a character the audience has become closely attached to, sinks along with the Titanic that becomes lost in the depths of her maiden voyage.

It is hard for me to believe that without the intimate attachment and emotional connections that appear deficient in Dunkirk and as Chris implies are not important that the humanity and real vital connection to human beings that Dunkirk appears to neglect can really make Dunkirk anything more than a visual, but somewhat empty feast for the eyes and hears. Like 3-D that Chris as I recall had an aversion to and I enjoyed with a storyline, the best movies must have more than distant human features along with some amount of emotional connection to our characters. For me, it the human meaning of the individual that also matters not just the Vulcan Star Trek sacrifice for the one when it comes to movies, individual faces matter for me and I must care and become more aware of the characters before I can offer up some semblance of empathy.

[tabuno]

Maybe it's just Utah, but here's a quote in today's local Utah newspaper by Chris Hick's:

"None of which is to suggest the film is perfect. As with other Nolan films, the dialogue is often garbled or drowned out by the incessant rumbling music; the timeline jumps around, sometimes incomprehensibly, and the story is paper-thin, with characters that are merely cardboard stereotypes."

Is this a description of a great war movie?

[Chris Knipp]

Life in Utah?

Yes, well tabuno you can always find condemnations and dismissals of the greatest films. You yourself have shown that you did not respond emotionally to Dunkirk and you had a bad, awkward seat, up too close so you could not read the subtitles and at a bad angle. Does this show the film has no emotional impact? No, it shows it had none on YOU.

But I see that Chris Hicks said in Deseret News (http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865685436/6Dunkirk7-brings-to-mind-an-array-of-earlier-real-life-World-War-II-movies.html) that Dunkirk is "a mind-blowing, visceral film, especially on an Imax screen." Though intending to limit his praise, he said Dunkirk "Certainly is an experience." So though it left him wishing for his favorite old war movies, like you, he didn't suggest that he was unmoved by it, that it had no effect on a viewer. He probably had a better seat.

Hicks makes much of the fact that a lot of Dunkirk was shot on IMAX cameras and ought to be seen in IMA cinemas, but he seems uninformed when he says "y. (Films aren’t really “films” anymore; they’re “digitals,” or perhaps “pixels.”) when in fact some of the greatest directors are making a point of shooting on film, including (see Tasteofcinema (http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2016/the-10-best-filmmakers-who-still-shoot-in-film/)):

Christopher Nolan
Quentin Tarantino ("I’m very hopeful that future generations will be much smarter than this generation and realize what they lost.")
James Gray
Paul Thomas Anderson
WEs Anderson
Steven Spielberg
Richard Linklater
Andrei Zvjagintsev
Sam Mendes
Darren Aronofsky
Woody Allen

And of course films aren't called "digitals" still less "pixels." Your Ricks is both retro - he prefers old war movies to this new innovative one and an enforcer of the status quo - "pixels."
there are also a lot of smaller, lesser known filmmakers who use film as part of their process, for the richness of image that can be achieved with it. But I have a feeling Ricks saw mostly big and loud.

[tabuno]

While I admit that I had a lousy seat for viewing and that I didn't see the movie in IMAX the whole idea just as with those people who were enthralled by Avatar (2009) when it came out, I also felt that as is the case almost a decade ago, there will always be something bigger and more dazzling movie spectacles to come with special effects, technological advances, 3-D, and so forth. As I said before the public will be inundated with virtual reality, Matrix style come this next decade that amaze even more.

I've been careful to point out where other movies have been better at creating this supposedly vital element of Dunkirk's supposedly amazing photography, "you are there" effect with more emotional intensity. I've also been careful to point out the even the more important lack of content that Dunkirk fails to offer as a substantive movie that's needed to connect the audience with important aspects of humanity, putting real faces to the characters that have depth. Thus even though I had a lousy seat and I wasn't able to enjoy the movie's flash and sizzle like Richard Gere's character Billy Flynn displayed in the Oscar-winning movie Chicago (2002), the problems of Dunkirk's substantive content can't be smoothed over and covered up by the fancy visuals and auditory advances that will only age with time and be easily surpassed by the next scientific gadget within a few years.

[Chris Knipp]

I think it's a TERRIBLE misconception to think Dunkirk is simply notable as a 3D joy ride of special effects. IT IS AN INTIMATE epic; it has both qualities, but in whatever form you watched it, you didn't get it, and more's the pity!

I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the film, and worse yet don't even respect it. But more than that I really can't say. I had a number of things to add about the film because it's so brilliant, but at the moment I've run a bit dry.

[tabuno]

Chris has repeatedly admitted that Dunkirk is primarily not about the story or characters but is about amazing experiential visual and auditory "you are there" experience. I find it hard to distinguish his description of this movie from the immersive effects of being in a virtual reality chamber where the emphasis is on the intimate details of simulated reality and in this case being on the beach of Dunkirk during World War II. Chris is enthralled by the experience, for example, of an unknown drowning soldier holding onto a personal items as he sinks below the waves.

Yet for most people I believe there is more to reality and more substantive connections that great movies must possess in order to survive through time and space becoming a classic. There will always be a better technological advance to make virtual reality almost, if not in fact, indistinguishable from the objective real world. At that point what will matter is the emotional connections, the deep thoughts that a great movie contains that in most cases will never be replaced or die. For most of the movies I cited earlier many of the emotional intense scenes were based on characters the audience came to know well and experienced their struggles, including the detailed emotions, and particularly the connections they made to the audience or to other characters. And if the script calls for their demise or the demise of some other character they are close to, such breakage of the emotional intimacy is something that is likely to resonate across the years. In the case of Dunkirk, very few of the experiences will be truly unique over time as there will be other movies in the future that will tap into the process of movie-making to make similar situations all the move attractive and compelling on the sensory, but not emotionally substantive level.

[tabuno]

I've been reading some of the very positive audience member IMDb reviews of the possible bomb of 1998 The Avengers. Several of the comments focus on the idea that The Avengers movie was not be taken seriously, but with its apparent surrealistic presentation of the dry British wit and silliness. As such it appears to have developed a sort of fan base hoping for the longer original cut. These comments lead me to wonder how Dunkirk might fare it with revised focus.

[Chris Knipp]

No I have never admitted that. That is your interpretation, not mine. It is about people and about characters. It's not about detailed backstories.

[Johann]

Chris: I'll see it in IMAX on saturday. There's one theatre showing it in Imax in Ottawa. I've cleared that day to go to that movie. Looking forward to it.

[Chris Knipp]

Bravo johann! Awesome movie, made a Nolanite of me, and IMAX is ideal way to see it.

[Chris Knipp]

"May we keep rewarding his inexplicable faith in us."

Review from Mike D'Angelo in his usual current venue, the Los Vegas Weekly (https://lasvegasweekly.com/ae/film/2017/jul/20/christopher-nolan-puts-audiences-in-Dunkirk/) neatly states what makes Dunkirk special and Nolan admirable. I differ at two points. They are characters; it's a movie, and they're characters. It's not exhausting, for me anyway, or maybe only as "great sex" is - I like his analogy there.

4/5 stars
Mike D'Angelo
Las Vegas WEekly (https://lasvegasweekly.com/ae/film/2017/jul/20/christopher-nolan-puts-audiences-in-Dunkirk/)

Dunkirk Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Rated PG-13. Opens Friday citywide.

Against all odds, Christopher Nolan has forged a wildly successful Hollywood career, using the capital he earned from the Dark Knight trilogy to make big-budget movies every bit as challenging as Following or Memento. Audiences that normally clamor for reheated leftovers willingly give themselves over to mind-bending narrative structures: the Russian-doll dreams of Inception, the gravitationally induced time dilation of Interstellar.

Those films are science fiction, though. Are people willing to wrestle with an old-fashioned yet newfangled war movie that combines the visceral impact of Saving Private Ryan’s Omaha Beach landing—sustained for nearly two hours—with Nolan’s signature chronological experimentation? Dunkirk is perhaps the boldest gamble yet made by this ambitious director, injecting a potentially alienating degree of abstraction into the sheer intensity of pitched battle. Once again, he somehow makes it work.

The film’s subject is better known to the British than to Americans, having taken place well before the U.S. entered World War II. Between May 26 and June 4, 1940, more than 300,000 Allied soldiers pinned down on the beaches of France by the German army were successfully evacuated across the English Channel—a seemingly impossible undertaking, declared a "miracle of deliverance" by Winston Churchill. Nolan depicts the event using three overlapping time lines that gradually converge (and occasionally abut one another en route in disarming ways).

One of them unfolds over the entire week of the evacuation, following a British soldier (Fionn Whitehead) desperately trying to find an escape route. Another takes place during just one day, during which a civilian (Mark Rylance) sets out in his yacht to help the effort, picking up a deeply terrified soldier (Cillian Murphy) on the way. And the third strand covers just an hour, as two Spitfire pilots (Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden) struggle to provide air cover for their fleeing comrades.

This unusual structure—the elegance of which only becomes apparent toward the end of the film—offers just enough narrative interest to obscure how little Dunkirk otherwise bothers with conventional drama. The actors aren’t playing characters so much as they’re embodying impulsive strategies (there’s almost no dialogue throughout); Nolan’s emphasis remains defiantly experiential, proliferating Steven Spielberg’s harrowing you-are-there approach from Private Ryan into something more along the lines of you-are-there-and-also-there-and-also-over-there-and-it’s-all-happening-both-separately-and-at-once.

Indeed, the film’s only real flaw is that it’s downright exhausting, in the same way that Inception’s parallel climaxes could wear you out with their expertly orchestrated multi-layered mayhem. But that’s like complaining about having pulled a muscle during great sex. With the lingering exception of Martin Scorsese (who struggles to get financing for films that frequently tank, despite superb reviews), nobody but Nolan demands so much from a mass audience. May we keep rewarding his inexplicable faith in us.

[Johann]

Yes, this film is Visceral. Very much so.
It's brilliant Bravura filmmaking, and I can say it's Chris Nolan's best movie so far.
This movie rivets you to your seat, and as Chris pointed out in his review there is nowhere to go. This is what it's really like in war. You cower when enemy aircraft dive-bomb you and you cringe at every bullet that zings by your head.
No stone was left unturned here- Nolan IMMERSES you in this battle- on land, on the sea and in the air.
You're right Chris- the editing is Masterful, really seamless and keeps you bolted to the screen. Nolan has achieved another special notch on his belt with DUNKIRK. He's done something new and fresh with "the war film", and he should be applauded.The technical achievements in this film are exactly what I want to see in a modern movie. It's hard to make a war film (especially a WW2 film) and make it fresh, make it engaging. But Nolan has done it. He's cemented his Legacy with this one.

He's got a bunch of fresh faces here, and they all do great jobs in their roles. Nolan veteran Tom Hardy was my favorite character. He's very good at acting with just his eyes. LOL The final scene with him landing his Spitfire on the beach was worth the ticket alone. Loved that.
Dunkirk is Masterful. You owe it to yourself to see it in as big a format as possible. I saw in IMAX and I was in awe.
This is the kind of film we go to the cinemas hoping to see. Bravo Chris Nolan.

[Chris Knipp]

Needless to say, johann, I agree with you 200%.

[Chris Knipp]

Pop star Harry Styles helping to promote Dunkirk- and he does well in his small role too.

Older viewers won't be very aware of the luster for young people added to Dunkirk by having the English pop star Harry Styles in his first movie role as "Alex," one of the three young soldiers followed through the course of the evacuation. Even Nolan and Rylance weren't really aware he was that famous, but he has inevitably been a spokesman and an enthusiastic one for the film and Nolan. See this article http://www.scmp.com/culture/film-tv/article/2101981/harry-styles-fame-was-news-dunkirk-director-christopher-nolan-and-co

“I don’t think I was that aware really of how famous Harry was” before casting the pop star in the upcoming second world war epic, Nolan said. “I mean, my daughter had talked about him. My kids talked about him, but I wasn’t really that aware of it. So the truth is, I cast Harry because he fit the part wonderfully and truly earned a seat at the table.”

Styles, 23, who gained fame with One Direction and recently launched his solo career, plays a British soldier in Nolan’s suspense thriller about the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers from Dunkirk, France, in May and June of 1940.

Rylance, also featured in the film, said he learned of Styles from his 11-year-old niece.
“She was just more excited than anything I’ve ever done because I was going to be acting with Harry Styles,” said Rylance, who has won an Oscar and three Tonys. “I went up in her estimation. I won the Harry!”

Styles described his first days on set as overwhelming.

I’d say realising the scale of the production was very overwhelming. I think whatever you imagine kind of a giant film set to be like, this was very ambitious even by those standards. You know the boats and the planes and the volume of bodies ... it was pretty amazing.”
Dunkirk opens in Hong Kong on July 20, and in North American cinemas the following day. It also features Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy and Tom Hardy, and stars newcomer Fionn Whitehead.
Styles, who recently added 56 dates to his upcoming solo world tour, said his One Direction bandmates were supportive of his acting dreams.
“They are big fans of Chris, too, and I think they’re excited to see it,” Styles said.

As a sign that Harry does a good job, though I do know very well who he is, the first time I watched Dunkirk I didn't even realize which one was him.,