“ OK, sure, there are needlessly complicated overlapping timelines . . .”
No. No, there are not. The split timelines aren’t an unnecessary gimmick; they’re an attempt to solve a very real problem. Land, sea, and air combat all take place on different timescales. The Mole needs to take place over days in order to capture the constant dread and tension, but a flight mission in a Spitfire is less then 90 minutes. The Sea falls in between. War movies almost always avoid this problem by being about just one facet; airplanes in Saving Private Ryan are things that happen to the characters, not something they are involved in. If you make an actual combined arms movie, you need to figure out how to deal with this
If you don’t want to use non-linear time structuring, you have three basic options: 1) use snippets of different air missions over the course of days, but this kills the continuity of action in the air and won’t have the feel that we get from Farrier’s ongoing war with his gas tank; 2) run it chronologically, in which case Tom Hardy doesn’t show up on screen until the film is 80% over; 3) make the movie an hour longer. None of those would be very satisfying.
I can understand that the converging timelines don’t work for everyone, but I wish the critics would at least try to understand why Nolan structured the movie this way.
