2017’s “Dunkirk”, written and directed by Christopher Nolan.
Starring Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Tom
Glynn-Carney, Kenneth Branagh, Jack Lowden, Cillian Murphy, and Barry Keoghan.
What is it about?
“Dunkirk” is based around the WWII events that took place in
Dunkirk of France in 1940, where 400 000 British, French, and Belgian troops,
on foot, were trapped between a German offensive and the ocean. Three
occasional overlapping stories are told here, involving land, air, and sea. In
the first story, we watch a soldier (Fionn Whitehead), initially ambushed by
German forces, spend the remainder of the movie trying to get off of the
beaches of Dunkirk. In the second story, we watch a British civilian boat (lead
by Mark Rylance) head for France to rescue soldiers. Finally, in the third
story, we watch 2 pilots (Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden) engage with German
fighters to protect the British Navy. Will our characters be able to contribute
to the cause without becoming a death statistic?
Why is it worth seeing?
Christopher Nolan has proven himself capable of making big
budget blockbuster movies that make fortunes for Hollywood executives, while
they still think, and feel exciting and unique. This makes his sometimes
exceptional works such as, “Inception”, “The Prestige”, and “Memento” stand
apart from the usual dreck. Nolan has always been interested in puzzles and the
secrets behind unlocking the mind- making “Dunkirk” a bit of a puzzler.
Nolan chose to have less dialogue than usual here, and it is
effective in making us focus on the missions of these respective characters.
Too bad that we don’t really care as much as we could for the characters, as
the individuals we watch rarely stand out more than the hundreds of thousands
of men in the background. I don’t think it’s an accident that the most
successful of the three stories is the sea segment (Rylance and company), with
us getting to spend time exploring (some of the) motivations for the small
crew.
Nolan’s choices to keep our characters’ deeper motivations at
bay pushes us deeper into war scenes that just don’t have the gravitas of other
seminal works such as “Saving Private Ryan” or “Platoon”, or even the great beach scenes of “Live.Die.Repeat” or “Atonement”. The casting doesn’t help- those
that are worth watching are either hidden behind a lack of detail, or a mask
(seriously, does Nolan hate Tom Hardy’s face and voice?). That’s to say nothing
behind the casting of Fionn Whitehead as the fulcrum of the land scenes, as
Whitehead is not up to the task of being slightly more captivating than the
hundreds of thousands of men he is trying to escape with.
Nolan’s obsession with water comes in handy here, as Whitehead
and his fellow soldier’s Sisyphean attempts to leave the beach on some type of
water vehicle lead to more than 1 scene of potential drowning, their method of
escape a liquid filled death trap. However, these attempts to escape are
overshadowed by Nolan’s now familiar themes of fractured narratives (the 3
stories take place at different times), not to mention a “prisoner’s dilemma”,
also featured in “The Dark Knight” and “The Dark Knight Rises”- as well as Hans
Zimmer’s now almost predictably bombastic score.
Full of ambition and stressful turns, and clamoring loudly for attention, Nolan’s
love of 65mm photography and big budget epic storytelling would go down much
easier if it weren’t trying so hard to keep us at arm’s length.
No comments:
Post a Comment