I actually posted this a month back (along with short notes on 5-6 other movies). But, when I finally edited and posted the draft, somehow only the first para was posted. Just to get this off my mind, I will post this.
Dunkirk (2017)
Dunkirk is very different from the usual war movies (as
@sam9s mentioned in his post a few months back).
Firstly, it is not about a victory, but about an evacuation of soldiers running away from German attack. This was later turned into a morale booster by the oratory skills of Churchill and the media (See
this). The Germans in the film are never shown (except out of focus in one scene) and I don't remember if they are even mentioned other than as the 'enemy'. The camera work is excellent especially with the aerial shots and the dogfights.
There is no one hero. We don't know anything about any of the characters, except what we see. What I liked most was how it captured the chaos of war and how relentless the German attacks were. The soldiers literally had nowhere to run. During the bombing of the beach at the beginning, we see soldiers being afraid and some of them dying out of focus - all pointing to the irrelevancy of individuals in the middle of a war. None of their saviors had a backstory either. All this is nice, but as a film, this is where I had an issue. A movie is always the combination of what happens on the screen and how we identify with. If you cannot put yourself in any one's shoes, you watch it like an outsider rather than participating in it. This may be the intended effect, but it also reduces the natural emotional engagement we feel with most films. There are a lot of time (and event) overlaps when the story changes from one point of view to another (land, sea, air), but some of it feels a bit repetitive towards the end. But, this was just a minor issue.
Maybe I will appreciate Dunkirk a lot more if I revisit after a few weeks, months or years, but as of now, I respect Nolan's choices and like some aspects very much, but I still felt something was missing at the end.