Dunkirk: Review

Tim Almond
Jul 30, 2017 · 2 min read

No other director working today could have made Dunkirk. Christopher Nolan has established such a strong trust relationship with the cinema-going audience, and in such large numbers, that he can make large budget film, visceral, spectacular films and take risks with them.

The film in the back of my mind after I left Dunkirk was the 1966 Algerian neorealist masterpiece, The Battle of Algiers, which is a film concerning the guerilla war between the French forces in Algeria and the rebel forces. To anyone not familiar with the term, neorealism is the genre of cinema that tries to make films look and sound naturalistic rather than what much of cinema does which is to deliberately raise the drama. It often uses real locations rather than studios, and casts ordinary people or lesser known actors. The Battle of Algiers is also a film that takes a very neutral perspective on the situation. You don’t know much about the characters, they don’t have backstories. You’re just thrown into the situation.

This isn’t a criticism of Nolan. It is to his credit to be so ambitious in his filmmaking to bring neorealism into his filmmaking. This is not simply borrowing from genres for the sake of it, but for good reason. By simply following the men, whether on the boats, the beach or the air, without any establishment of character, we do not have expectations set up. We are kept in constant suspense as to the outcome of each character. We want them all to make it.

This is all heightened by the brilliant, unsettling score and excellent cinematography. There are some excellent performances and I particularly liked Mark Rylance’s performance as the mariner that picked up a period detail of much stronger regional accents in those days.

While Nolan himself has described it as a suspense movie rather than a war movie, I found Dunkirk moving in its moments of understated heroism. Of non-superhuman people who just tried to help, who put themselves in harm’s way to do what they could. Whether intended, and I think different people will take different things from it, I found it a tribute to those people.

I wholeheartedly recommend Dunkirk and seeing it in the largest screen you can find. It is a film to be experienced in a cinema. It has an intensity to it that may be lost seeing it on a small screen, in the same way that Gravity isn’t the same on blu-ray.

Tim Almond

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website/database development. Mostly http://ASP.NET MVC stack. getting into Angular. also, wine, opera and general foolishness

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