Dunkirk Is a Masterpiece

“It is a $150 million epic, yet also as lean and spare as a haiku, three brief, almost wordless strands of narrative woven together in a mere 106 minutes of running time.”

“It is classic in its themes—honor, duty, the horror of war—yet simultaneously Nolan’s most radical experiment since Memento.”

“And for all these reasons, it is a masterpiece.”

“When it was announced that Nolan intended to make a film about the evacuation, it was easy to anticipate a kind of Saving Private Ryan in reverse, departing rather than landing upon a French beach. In classic war epic form, there would be the buildup and laying out of context, the unfurling of backstories, the explanation of geography, the rolling waves of sentiment, the tectonic running time.”

“Instead, Nolan has stripped his film bare of such trappings. There are no generals making plans around tables, no loved ones worrying back home, no Winston Churchill. Just the men and the beach and the sea and the sky.”

“Apart from a handful of Luftwaffe planes, there aren’t even any Nazis, merely the knowledge that their artillery lies over the hills and their U-boats prowl beneath the waves. They are less an enemy than an existential threat, and at times Dunkirk feels less like a war film than a disaster movie.”

“Except for the aerial dogfights, there is no “fighting,” and certainly no “winning.” There is simply not dying.”

“Nolan’s three stories take place on land, on sea, and in the air, and although they are intercut with surgical precision, they take place over three separate but overlapping spans of time.”

“Occasionally these narratives intersect, but more often they merely offer alternative vantages, a Rashomon in which the separate tales are intended to enrich rather than confound one another.”

“I hesitate to write more about the plot (or plots), in part because “plot” seems almost an improper descriptive term. These are shards of story, at once intimate and clinical.”

“Dunkirk belongs to Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, who have crafted the rare film that positively demands to be seen on a large screen.”

“The movie was shot entirely on large-format film (75 percent of it IMAX) and it is being released in 70-mm projection in a remarkable 125 theaters across the country. As George Miller did two years ago with Fury Road, Nolan has made the film using practical effects rather than CGI whenever possible—he even spent $5 million on a vintage Luftwaffe plane in order to crash it—and the difference is palpable. Rarely has the beauty of aerial flight (or the unpleasantness of its failure) been captured so vividly.”

“it is hard to imagine a better tribute to this victory of survival than Nolan’s spare, stunning, extraordinarily ambitious film.”