This is my first movie review, and what better movie to choose than the cinematic experience everyone has been looking forward to – Dunkirk. There’s a lot to be said about this movie, but let me start with this – the trailers don’t really prepare you for the movie the way it’s told. From entrapping cinematography to Hans Zimmer’s choice music accompaniment, Nolan’s take on the war movie genre is bold and daring. Watching it on the IMAX screen was breathtaking, particularly in the landscape scenes that show desolation. What it lacks though are a coherent narrative and some minor historical corrections, but that doesn’t take too much away from Dunkirk’s brilliance.

This review does have spoilers, although the story of Dunkirk is actual history and so spoiling really won’t do you any wrong.

The war movie genre is a tough one – it’s one of the most popular genres because of explosions, historical relevance and its metaphorical significance and yet it also ends up being saturated with many of the same kinds of movies. How many times have we seen a war movie try to address Churchill, Hitler or some kind of Nazi monolith? One of the first productions that got me into the war genre was HBO’s Band of Brothers. While it was more of a series than a single movie, it shook me on how heavy the times used to be, particularly because of its committed storytelling and beautiful development of characters amongst all the chaos of the war. There is a high bar to beat in the genre.

Nolan’s Dunkirk takes place in three storylines that are nonlinearly intertwined. They occur over land, air, and sea and cover a week, a day and an hour respectively. It’s really a poetic attempt at describing how time seemed to stretch and compress differently for different agents in Operation Dynamo, the effort to rescue the troops stuck in Dunkirk. I had no idea about this premise and ended up being very confused for around 80% of the movie on when what was happening. The trailers for Dunkirk promise a story of how 70 civilian boats saved the troops when the big navy ships couldn’t. This really isn’t that story. This is ultimately a story of suffering, longsuffering I may add, of everyone involved in the battle. And that suffering is felt throughout the movie, regardless of storyline. As someone who has served in the military, I could connect, albeit in no way to the fullest extent that the soldiers themselves felt, with the kind of desperation and hopelessness felt by the troops. This is Nolan’s primary success – he has used all the tools at his disposal from music score to visual elements to paint the bleakness of Dunkirk in such a compelling light.  The 70 civilian boats take up a grand total of 10 minutes in the movie.

From scenes of soldiers cramped onto a boat to the roaring shriek of the Destroyers as they drop bombs on the troops, Dunkirk takes you on an immersive journey through the battle. My favorite scenes are during the expansive shots of the environments where you realize again and again how alone all these agents are. The fighter pilot in the sky, the civilian boat at sea and the soldiers stuck on land are all in such open settings that the vulnerability is felt throughout. The film also has some powerful close-up scenes on the characters including Tom Hardy and Kenneth Branagh where you can sense the stress of their responsibility.

This movie does have a happy ending, with more than 300,000 soldiers being evacuated, but it does gloss over some other historically significant points. For example, in the battle of Dunkirk,  many soldiers did end up being caught and treated as prisoners of war (POWs). This is hinted at by Hardy’s character’s capture but the omission of the nearly 80,000 soldiers who were also left behind underplays the implications of being stuck at Dunkirk and the actual torture endured. No movie is going to be a 100% accurate – that’s a fair point, but I do feel in Nolan’s attempt to be poetic with his story, he left this end untied.

Overall, Dunkirk is a movie meant to be watched on the big screen and experienced with a mind and heart ready to take it all in. I wish I watched it on 70mm, to see the movie with its slightly grainy texture but the IMAX experience was already sufficient in giving me something to chew on. Also, I couldn’t find a cinema in Singapore screening this in 70mm film so if you know one let me know.  Let me know what you thought of the movie – I know people are divided on Nolan’s hype and whether he deserves it so I’d love to hear any new insights. Here’s my rating of the movie below:

Cinematography: 5/5

Screenwriting: 4/5

Score: 5/5

Acting/ Performance: 5/5

Overall: 4.75/5