I watched Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia earlier this year on a whim. It was one of those movies that I was not positive if I had ever seen it before or not, so I found it on a service and put it on. I had a very good time with it, and I just kind of moved on with my life. It was great, but it didn’t feel like much more than another film in a kind of Robin Williams spree I was on at the time.

That is, until recently when I was doing a guest spot on the Two Cents Critic podcast, and we covered Makoto Shinkai’s 5 Centimeters Per Second. While this might seem wildly disparate, during the discussion, the career of Christopher Nolan kept coming up as we compared his use of themes to Shinkai’s.

Even then, after the show my mind kind of wandered for a bit, and my immediate concern was with completing Shinkai’s filmography. I quickly consumed the two flicks of his I was missing–The Place Promised In Our Early Days and Children Who Chase Lost Voices–but something felt off.

I went back to our talk and realized… there are a handful of Christopher Nolan flicks I have not gotten around to, either. The big three of which are Memento, Tenet, and Dunkirk.

I was a little hesitant when it came to each. I’ve heard enough about Memento to feel like I already know the story, and I’m not often in the exact mood for a mind-fuck kind of film. Tenet, I just don’t remember hearing much positive about when it came out. And as for Dunkirk, well… I’m not much of a war movie fan. They feel very samey to me a lot of times, unless they are Saving Private Ryan, which is, of course, glorious.

Still, I wanted to give at least one of them a go, and I felt like it was decided for me as I scrolled through Peacock and came across Dunkirk as one of their daily featured pictures. That was as good as the universe talking to me, right? So I gave it a try.

Dunkirk is Nolan’s adaptation of the true story of the military defeat of the French and British in World War II against the Nazis. As the forces retreated to the seaside city of Dunkirk, the opposing Axis beared down on them. The Allies’ only hope was a retreat across the sea to Britain, but the minds back home were concerned with sending large forces to rescue their soldiers when those same forces might be needed to defend the homeland.

Instead, the Brits commissioned personal ships and boats to sail en masse across the sea to rescue as many of their forces as they could while Hitler’s army approached. While it was simply a retreat, it would become known as one of the most important military operations of the war since so many members of the armed forces were saved that day.

Nolan tells this story across multiple aspects and characters to show everything that went into the rescue. And how does he do in telling it that way? Let’s see!

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ It’s not a great surprise to report that Hans Zimmer does some solid work in any given movie, but Dunkirk has one of the ten best scores I’ve ever heard in one. There’s no big, noteworthy, memorable tune like a Star Wars or an Indiana Jones has that will have you humming as you leave the theater, but the music is just ALWAYS THERE, in the background, building and crescendo-ing. It’s making every moment feel even bigger than it already is.

It’s goosebumps-inspiring stuff from a master of his craft. I think Zimmer’s work might actually overshadow Nolan’s in this instance. Is that insane to say? But the score to this effort was all the way under my skin and making my hair stand up straight.

+ There’s about a twenty, maybe twenty-five minute stretch mid-movie (it starts around the fifty-five minute mark or so) where Dunkirk gets extremely intense, even moreso than it had been to that point. Maybe as edge-of-your-seat stuff as I’ve seen in any film. Nolan deftly weaves from scene to scene as he shows each different hero or survivor under a separate dire peril. I was absolutely gripped by what the film was doing. I can’t stress enough how phenomenal this bit was.

You have soldiers hiding in a boat getting shot at, aerial dog fights, and rescuers facing peril from the downed soldiers they have recovered from the water. And Dunkirk buzzes along, beat by beat, as it spins this yarns and leaving you stressed out to see how they will all resolve. I loved this chunk of the picture.

– The way the story shifts and moves from moment to moment–from scene to scene–you never really get too attached to any one character and latch onto them as the singular protagonist for whom to root. You don’t learn (or at least I didn’t catch) too many characters’ names, and the movie is more about the moments en masse than it is about the people you see on screen. And the film’s biggest stars–Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Kenneth Branaugh–have some of the smaller roles. 

– Not that the movie needed to be any longer (it’s a relatively breezy 1:46 for a work of Nolan’s), but it doesn’t really give much info on what Dunkirk was or what it meant to the war besides an opening bit of text. I know a slight bit more thanks to a WWII In Europe class I took in college, but even then, I’d have liked more backstory on how the escape was set up. What can I say; it’s the second of two nit-picky Downs for a great movie.

OVERALL

Dunkirk is tremendous, and another jewel in the crown of Christopher Nolan, as he continues to assemble a filmography that stands against any other director’s–be they his contemporaries or those from Hollywood’s history. Despite its short runtime, I was concerned I might not jive with this film due to my misgivings over war movies, but I suppose with Nolan at the helm, I had no cause for concern. Now bring on The Odyssey!