Dunkirk: Nolan's Next Masterpiece

Christopher Nolan is awesome.  He just is.  When someone says, "Christopher Nolan," you automatically assume it's going to be a good movie.  Dunkirk, for some people, is a little risky.  It's a war movie that doesn't have an R-rating, and it comes out in the middle of the summer movie season.  Folks, I'm here to tell you that Dunkirk is a gem.

 Dunkirk is directed by Christopher Nolan and stars Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Harry Styles, Mark Rylance, and Tom Hardy.  It tells the true story of the evacuations that took place on the beaches and harbors of Dunkirk, France in 1942.  I'm going to start this review with a disclaimer, Dunkirk is not your traditional war film.  There aren't any long battle sequences and there isn't any gore.  In addition to that, there really isn't that much dialogue either.  However, you should still see this movie because it's freaking fantastic.  With that out of the way, let's dive into Dunkirk.

 Like last week's War for the Planet of the Apes,  this movie was phenomenal.  There isn't going to be a very large section for negatives.  This film is stunning.  The cast is great, the sound is great, the music is spectacular, and most importantly, it's just a very good movie.  It is kind of hard to talk about the cast because the movie doesn't focus on the characters.  Other war films, Saving Private Ryan for example, take time to give their characters backstories and flesh them out.  Those movies are about the people.  Dunkirk does the exact opposite and makes it about the event.  I found this to be an extremely bold decision.  The beauty of it is that it pays off.  That being said, everyone does a fantastic job, the stand out being Harry Styles. The film is divided into three parts: The land, sea, and air.  During the land portions, the movie follows the soldiers waiting to be evacuated on the beach.  In the sea portions, the movie follows a civilian boat that is trying to pick up any survivors.  The air section is about how the Spitfire fighter planes were trying to prevent anymore catastrophes from happening.  At first, I thought the film was going to do one section at a time.  Instead, it jumps back-and-forth from each situation.  What ends up happening is that the story-lines end up intersecting at parts of the movie.  It's incredibly intelligent film-making.  Hans Zimmer does a fantastic job with the soundtrack.  While the music is playing, you could hear the ticking of a clock.  When a scene becomes intense, the clock ticks faster.  Because of this, the film becomes a lot more immersive.  Even though the movie is PG-13, it is still very intense.  I actually like the fact that it was rated this because the movie becomes a lot more suspenseful.  Hans Zimmer's score helps a lot too.  Perhaps the best thing about this film is that it's about survival.  These soldiers are trying to evacuate.  They don't want to fight anymore.  There isn't any back-up coming.  All they want to do is live.  That's what makes this film so great.

Like I mentioned earlier, there aren't many negatives.  For some viewers, the movie may get a little confusing because it cuts back-and-forth to each story line so much.  I actually applaud this decision.  The movie is also pretty short.  It clocks in at about an hour and forty-seven minutes.  I wanted it be a little longer, not because the movie felt overstuffed, I just wanted to see more of this masterpiece.

To sum things up, Dunkirk is a work of art.  The movie works on pretty much every level.  The visuals are beautiful, the sound is gorgeous, the way the story is told is great, the acting is top-notch, and the music is stunning.  For some, the cut to each different story-line might get a little confusing, but this is an extremely minor gripe.  If I were to rate it, I'd give Dunkirk a 10/10