Dunkirk Review: You must be this tall to experience Dunkirk

Christopher Nolan hasn’t just made a World War II epic, he’s made an artisanal World War II epic.
Within every shot, he demands you appreciate the fine craftmanship that went into recreating the beaches of Dunkirk. He wants you to marvel at how he gets every detail right in the cockpit of a Spitfire, right down to how the pilot marks fuel with chalk when the fuel gauge cracks. That’s real chalk made from ethically sourced limestone! Those are authentic Nazis corpses, imported from a free-range farm in Germany! Every prop, every set, every costume…It’s all World War II as fuck.
That’s Dunkirk — World War II as fuck. I just wish it was more than that.
It’s undeniably immersive. The entire movie is essentially the opening of Saving Private Ryan stretched to two hours. Like Spielberg, Nolan has a gift for injecting an audience in just the right places in a scene to maximize dread. Moment to moment, the film grabs you. You actually feel like you’re right there and that’s the problem. There’s echoes of Terrence Malick’s A Thin Red Line, but Nolan isn’t a poet. He engineers his scenes with too much precision for there to be any abstraction, his action sequences too clean and clear.
Because Dunkirk isn’t a movie, it’s a VR ride at Universal Studios. So much focus is placed on immersion that it leaves little room for anything else. All the characters in the film are essentially cyphers for you to project whatever WWII cliché you want onto them. They even look distractingly similar (including three soldiers who look like Cillian Murphy even though only one of them is Cillian Murphy), as if Nolan saved on budget by just reusing character models for his crowd scenes. That doesn’t matter, though, because the movie isn’t about characters; it’s about you. Instead of characters making choices or demonstrating agency, they react along with you as passengers in this ride.

And like any ride, it ends on good feelings, otherwise, why would you get on the ride again? To do that, Nolan upends all the rules he had carefully established, throwing out the fragile stillness and dread of violence for a rousing climax that lifts all the best parts from Spielberg’s oeuvre.
As many other have written about it, his films are puzzle boxes to be solved. It’s in this way, that Nolan is an artist who creates experiences. He demands audiences engage with his work rather than passively watch. Dunkirk isn’t a puzzle, though. This isn’t a World War II happening in a simulation, there are no hidden identities or metaphysical murder mysteries. With Dunkirk, there is only the war. And unfortunately, that just isn’t enough.