Dunkirk (2017)

[baumer]

Ok, start the circle jerk

[aabattery]

B+

[Amadeus]

His best Movie to date. A great accomplishment with which he proves he's really got talent. If every Movie of his was this great he'd be god. 

Watching it 70mm was indeed an experience: it all gets dark Before it starts and then you are like "trapped" with this film and when it's over it's like you just woke up from a Dream. 

The Movie itself showcased all his strengths. Here he is playing with time and timelines in an almost jawdropping way. 
The cinematography was pure precision. 
Watching Dunkirk, it almost feels like your an all knowing god who can see Everything but has no chance to change the course of the events (the sinking ship scene comes to mind). 
I also enjoyed how brittish this felt.
The direction is watershed. 
And its themes and characters are all thought provoking in a good way. 
It's so good that it's hard to write bout it.  

A (4,5)-- Fantastic (An (pretty) original idea executed with great ambition and precision). 

Top 10 2017 so far:
 

1. Dunkirk 
2. Wonder Woman 
3. Song to Song 
4. Alien Convenant 
5. Get Out
6. Logan
7. The Other Side of Hope
8. Spiderman: Homecoming
9. Baby Driver
10. It Comes at Night

[kaijukurt]

Good stuff.

 

Well-shot, well-directed with some very intense moments.

 

The aerial photography (okay practically all the plane scenes) was the best part of the film for me. 

 

Liked how the 3 main storylines overlapped at different points, and especially how youre just dropped right into the thick of things. 

 

However, sometimes I felt they tried to make a lot of the scenes seem "epic" with the the accompanying soundtrack (which did sound great and was very noticeable) and I felt they were too on the nose in some moments. Idk exactly how to word it, but Ill just say I thought it made some subtle, low-key scenes something they werent. 

 

Gotta admit was sad when Hardy got captured at the end

 

In the end, I liked it, and nothing in the film really felt mediocre.

 

3 or 3.5/4 (Depending on my mood)

Edited July 20, 2017 by kaijukurt

[blurredbynes]

Wasn't my cup of tea. Usually expository dialogue annoys the hell out of me but this could have done with something more. I didn't read up on Dunkirk before seeing this because I thought it would influence the tension I felt not knowing if they were rescued or not but now I feel like I should have to understand what the hell was going on. I didn't really care about a lot of the characters. It was neat how they switched up the timelines but I didn't understand how Cillian Murphy's character was on the boat trying to stop the young soldiers from getting on and then later he was in a plane wreckage? 

 

Harry Styles really impressed me, he was very natural. Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hardy, anyone else of note, they were fine. Just fine.

Wouldn't see again. Wouldn't recommend. This style of storytelling was not for me. That cinnamon tography tho 

 

Edited July 20, 2017 by blurredbynes

[pepsa]

Well i don't think this will amuse the GA, I found the movie incredably tense and very engaging. Was on the tip of my seat the hole time, could have used some more dialog but overall a very good film.

A-

[CJohn]

It is so good, even @Jay Hollywood and @MrPink will pull off the A grade to rate it.

[AdamKendall]

A-

 

Movie starts out and that clock begins ticking and fuck even though it's not always action, the pace just moves with the beat ... absolutely stunning sound mixing/visuals in the aerial scenes.  Wish I had an IMAX near me to see it on a huge screen. 

[afalconer7]

20 hours ago, aabattery said:

B+

I agree, one of the best movies of all time. I also give it a solid B+

[afalconer7]

PURE CINEMATIC PERFECTION!! Nolan gives us another masterpiece with his latest war film. It's not your typical war film. It's more of a suspense thriller (which is what Nolan was aiming for). This is a tense and gripping thriller with a situation which a huge sense of urgency which I love about this movie. Beautifully shot, well acted, jaw dropping sequences, suspenseful, intense, with a kick ass soundtrack. The movie fuckin floored me. I'm one of those people who would get attacked for loving Nolans films so much and sucking Nolans dick. I'm proud of being a Nolan dick sucker. Come at me. I suck his nice and juicy dick because his movies are masterful pieces of film making. This is the movie to beat for best of 2017. Fuck Yeah! 10/10.

[jb007]

For someone like me, who grew up on War and Battle comics in my teen years and reruns of great movies like Guns of Navarone, The Great Escape, Where Eagles Dare and great movies of the modern era like Platoon, Saving Private Ryan etc, this movie is a disappointment.  Nolan was able to desensitize me to the point that I did not care about the characters of a war movie. The Cinematography and sound design are stunning. The rest is a big meh.

 

Rating: C-/D+

[Kvikk Lunsj]

Loved it!! Simply brilliant finally a truly great summer movie!!!!

[Rsyu]

 The thought that hit me the strongest as I was leaving the theater at the end of my screening was how amazingly immersed I had felt throughout the whole of the film. The sound effect was incredible and each bomb blast and bullet ricochet, had me legitimately flinching, while the cinematography felt so real the tension literally pulsed in waves from the 2-dimensional screen throughout my whole body.

 

A point I found particularly interesting was that there was no clear protagonist in the film, which was such a break from traditional film-making, it felt almost jarring. But I can see why Nolan decided to do it that way, because I feel it did add to the kind of be-in-the-moment atmosphere that he said he wanted the audience to have. With no character to immerse ourselves into, the camera acted as more of a 3^rd-person perspective, allowing us to be one of the soldiers in that sense and go through the horrors that they faced.

 

One thing I’m a little unsure on, the film starts with 3 different points of perspective; the land, the sea and the air. And then specifies what I assume is the time period during which it is set; being one week, one day, and one hour respectively. So, does that mean, from the beginning of the film on the beaches of Dunkirk until their rescue, the real-world duration was one week? Because it didn’t feel anywhere near that long. Hope someone can help me on this one.

 

Small puzzlement aside, very strong rating from me 9/10

Edited July 21, 2017 by Rsyu

[aabattery]

2 minutes ago, Rsyu said:

One thing I’m a little unsure on, the film starts with 3 different points of perspective; the land, the sea and the air. And then specifies what I assume is the time period during which it is set; being one week, one day, and one hour respectively. So, does that mean, from the beginning of the film on the beaches of Dunkirk until their rescue, the real-world duration was one week? Because it didn’t feel anywhere near that long. Hope someone can help me on this one.

 

 

They had to skim over a lot since it would be impossible to fit a whole week in the running time, but the implication was that the guys on "the land" were on the beach for a week before they actually got out of Dunkirk. I think a few of the events (like the opening scene, the two guys trying to get onto that ship with the injured guy, the ship sinking from the torpedo strike at night etc) definitely happened in the days leading up to the final evacuation. At least that's how I interpreted it.

[4815162342]

Pretty good movie, but Nolan's choice to make it a sort of interlocked close-quarters thriller really deprives you of a sense of scale and insanity. 

 

The land part of the story was definitely the weakest of the three paths.

[rukaio101]

Pleasantly surprised to see I'm not the only one who felt fairly 'eh' on this movie. Don't get me wrong, I didn't dislike it and it certainly wasn't the self-indulgent snoozefest that was Interstellar, but a lot of Nolan's weaknesses as a director are still rather on display here, possibly even more so than Interstellar or TDKR. And the relative lack of dialogue only serves to highlight them further.

 

See the thing is, I think Nolan's style was kinda wrong for what this movie was trying to achieve. The movie is attempting to be a constantly tense survival thriller, akin to Gravity or Train to Busan, with constant danger after constant danger piling on and on as the protagonists desperately try to struggle past it all to get home to safety. The problem is that this doesn't really suit Nolan because his style of building tension is waaaaaaay too meandering to work for such a movie. Nolan's directing works best when he's able to milk a tense moment for all that it's worth, like the shuttle docking in Interstellar (one of the few scenes I unambiguously liked in that movie). However, Dunkirk is almost nothing but tense moment after tense moment, all of which Nolan ends up drawing out, until eventually it feels less tense and more just boring. Especially when the gimmicky framing device means some stuff ends up getting repeated. (Did we really need to see the same minesweeper boat get sunk three times from vaguely different angles?). The land portion in particular got the worst of it (since the air portions were relatively short and the boat portions had some actual characters to give a damn about).

 

Speaking of, considering the all-star cast he had available, Nolan really needed to rely on his actors a lot lot more here, because they felt very underutilized and certainly not to the film's benefit. Don't get me wrong, I get what he was trying to do here, tell a story through mainly through visuals and directing rather than dialogue. And I've seen that work really well in a lot of movies and comics. But it really is not a good fit for Nolan, who's kind of a 'one tone director' (that is to say all of his movies more-or-less have the same consistent tone throughout.) Of course, being a 'one tone director' isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I'd place a large amount of Nolan's success on his ability to (usually) pick his projects sensibly to best play off that tone. However, it also makes him a poor fit for the sort of visual storytelling I think he was trying to achieve here. It's impressive when you can go from a happy tone to a sad tone through visuals only (see the opening of Up). It's less impressive when you go from Nolan's usual tone to... Nolan's usual tone. And without much in the way of character established neither through visuals nor dialogue, we're left wondering why we should really be all that invested. Again, it's the land portion which gets the worst of this. Shame too because when the characters are allowed to actually talk to each other, the movie gets a lot more interesting.

 

There's a lot of other stuff I could say about this movie, both positive and negative, and again I don't think it's necessarily bad, despite how much I've complained about it. Some of the tense moments do work, most of the actors are great when given a chance to be and I liked a fair amount of the stuff on the boats and in the air. But there are still a lot of glaring problems with it, some of which are down to problems with Nolan as a director. Hopefully he can reign himself in and pick a more suiting project next time.

 

 

 

(Also, I've already prepared myself for this to inevitably top BOF's Best Films of 2017 list.)

 

 

 

 

 

[GrimFandango]

11 hours ago, rukaio101 said:

Pleasantly surprised to see I'm not the only one who felt fairly 'eh' on this movie. Don't get me wrong, I didn't dislike it and it certainly wasn't the self-indulgent snoozefest that was Interstellar, but a lot of Nolan's weaknesses as a director are still rather on display here, possibly even more so than Interstellar or TDKR. And the relative lack of dialogue only serves to highlight them further.

 

See the thing is, I think Nolan's style was kinda wrong for what this movie was trying to achieve. The movie is attempting to be a constantly tense survival thriller, akin to Gravity or Train to Busan, with constant danger after constant danger piling on and on as the protagonists desperately try to struggle past it all to get home to safety. The problem is that this doesn't really suit Nolan because his style of building tension is waaaaaaay too meandering to work for such a movie. Nolan's directing works best when he's able to milk a tense moment for all that it's worth, like the shuttle docking in Interstellar (one of the few scenes I unambiguously liked in that movie). However, Dunkirk is almost nothing but tense moment after tense moment, all of which Nolan ends up drawing out, until eventually it feels less tense and more just boring. Especially when the gimmicky framing device means some stuff ends up getting repeated. (Did we really need to see the same minesweeper boat get sunk three times from vaguely different angles?). The land portion in particular got the worst of it (since the air portions were relatively short and the boat portions had some actual characters to give a damn about).

 

Speaking of, considering the all-star cast he had available, Nolan really needed to rely on his actors a lot lot more here, because they felt very underutilized and certainly not to the film's benefit. Don't get me wrong, I get what he was trying to do here, tell a story through mainly through visuals and directing rather than dialogue. And I've seen that work really well in a lot of movies and comics. But it really is not a good fit for Nolan, who's kind of a 'one tone director' (that is to say all of his movies more-or-less have the same consistent tone throughout.) Of course, being a 'one tone director' isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I'd place a large amount of Nolan's success on his ability to (usually) pick his projects sensibly to best play off that tone. However, it also makes him a poor fit for the sort of visual storytelling I think he was trying to achieve here. It's impressive when you can go from a happy tone to a sad tone through visuals only (see the opening of Up). It's less impressive when you go from Nolan's usual tone to... Nolan's usual tone. And without much in the way of character established neither through visuals nor dialogue, we're left wondering why we should really be all that invested. Again, it's the land portion which gets the worst of this. Shame too because when the characters are allowed to actually talk to each other, the movie gets a lot more interesting.

 

There's a lot of other stuff I could say about this movie, both positive and negative, and again I don't think it's necessarily bad, despite how much I've complained about it. Some of the tense moments do work, most of the actors are great when given a chance to be and I liked a fair amount of the stuff on the boats and in the air. But there are still a lot of glaring problems with it, some of which are down to problems with Nolan as a director. Hopefully he can reign himself in and pick a more suiting project next time.

 

 

 

(Also, I've already prepared myself for this to inevitably top BOF's Best Films of 2017 list.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Very good points--I felt the same way about the tension: it's like a roller coaster with no valleys...it keeps climbing...and climbing...and climbing...

 

After a while the music started getting on my nerves--I'm tense already, goddammit! Give me a chance to exhale, man.

[GrimFandango]

Firstly, when I left I really wanted to hug a WWII vet, because if you were a guy in one of those situations, jeezus.....

 

I think what impacted me the most was simply how awful, disgusting and horrible war is. Every politician should be forced to watch movies like these (although I imagine a lot wouldn't care anyways). I really appreciated the realism, although it just occurred to me that this is not a gory film, a la Saving Private Ryan. For all the bombing, shooting, etc, I don't recall seeing any sprays of blood, guts, or anything (outside of the boy's cerebral fluid). Strange, because my initial impression was that it was very reminiscent of that movie, but it handles deaths and such completely differently.

 

The air battles were very impressive, as were the ship sinkings. Everything was top notch, but outside of hoping people survived, I wasn't really invested in any character. If they died, I was just "That sucks.", and that's it. I wish there had been more exposition from the characters. The other big problem for me is the pacing--there almost wasn't any. It's just full on the gas until the end. I really liked the score initially, but after it while it got on my nerves because it wouldn't let up. If I were to listen to it without viewing the movie, I wouldn't be able to tell you what was going on at that point.  I think Inception is a much better film than this one, and I'm reminded of it because the Inception score fit it so well; but in Dunkirk it's almost like listening to someone continuously up-shifting a racing car with an infinite number of gears.

 

My quick run-down:

1. It's going to get all kinds of Oscar noms
2. It was relentless
3. It was soberingly impacting
4. It is over-rated
5. It will not have the legs of Interstellar

 

I agree very much with Jeremy John's review, so I won't say much other than the fact that by the end I couldn't name a single character's name in this movie, and for me that means I wasn't seriously invested in it. It's a very well executed film, absolutely. I'm glad I saw it but I have no interest in seeing it again. The tension ratcheted up to 10 right from the get-go, and really didn't let off the gas for the rest of the movie, and I personally find that tiring.

 

I'm predicting most viewers will not want to see it more than once, and that's going to hurt it's legs. This is a better executed movie than Interstellar, but it's hard to empathize with characters outside of hoping that they survive. I found the timeline more confusing than it needed to be, particularly going back between night and day moments. At some point I wondered if Nolan was playing with some sort of time loop a la Inception or Interstellar, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't, but it felt that way to me.

 

I give it a B.

Edited July 22, 2017 by GrimFandango

[Rsyu]

@aabattery Watched it a second time and indeed, I did catch several scenes (mostly after the torpedo attack), which seemed to indicate a passage of time (thanks!)

 

One last thing I didn't quite get and bothered me; the shivering soldier who was picked up by Mr. Dawson, he seemed to be stranded on top of a sunken ship when he was rescued and his words indicated that he was a victim of a torpedo attack. As I remember the night of the torpedo attack that was shown during the film, Tommy was in the water and approached a small boat where the shivering soldier tells him that he couldn't get on board. So the "shivering soldier" wasn't the victim of that particular torpedo attack. Does this mean that there was a second torpedo attack off camera that we didn't witness? Or am I missing something here?

 

[dxmatrixdt]

x whoops x

Edited July 22, 2017 by Matrix4You