Dunkirk (2017)

I've seen "Dunkirk" around a month ago, but I really wasn't in any mood for blogging (personal reasons). Now = late night, no sleep => I decided trying a short entry with what I can still remember... When I heard about this movie I asked myself how can you fill up two hours with a subject that's in the end a bit limited as... narrative amplitude, I can't find a better term now. The evacuation from Dunkirk might have been a miracle during WW2, but let's be fair... as story for a movie it doesn't have much potential. As historic fact, what we have is a mass evacuation lasting about a week - how can you get a movie out of that? I thought I'll see again the recipe applied in "Pearl Harbor", or "Titanic", or even "Hacksaw Ridge" (keeping the distance to the other two) including a romantic story + more stuff in background. Well... I got an example that you can do without that.

First of all, a movie doesn't need to last two hours - something that most directors seem to forget these days. "Dunkirk" has a bit more than 90 minutes, in which we effectively have the evacuation of the Allied troops from the French coast. There's not even much of the historical context - how did it get to this, and why the German army let enough time for it to happen (sorry, but I'm not in mood for details - check Wikipedia). Second, you can see one more time that Nolan knows how to do a movie - what keeps you there is not necessarily the story, where we just have a couple narrative threads following a few simple people involved in the event. It's a movie with few dialogues, which already says something. What got me from the first scenes were the visuals, the audio, and the editing, which are at a really high standard. Everything is put together so well that this time I can even get over "the shepard tone", which I think nobody abuses so much as Nolan does in his movies. The only part I can nag about is maybe the time interleaving of the flashbacks that might lose you a bit. Besides that... is a lesson of movie making. Enough said.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5