Master Review: Dunkirk

Master Review: Dunkirk

            I’ve been looking forward to Dunkirk for a long time now. Why? To be honest I just look forward to everything Christopher Nolan creates/commits himself to. A brief history of the films I enjoy are as follows. Memento: Great film, The Prestige: Great again, The Dark knight Trilogy: Masterful, Inceptions: Good,  Interstellar: Fantastic and required viewing. Now you can see that I was very excited for the next film Christopher Nolan had to offer.

            To begin with I viewed this film in IMAX. Not 70mm IMAX, just the generic digital IMAX now found in almost every movie house. This film hits the ground running but in a different way than you’d expect. The film starts off and throws in into world. I haven’t experienced any film that has done this for me. I’ve viewed plenty of IMAX and 3D films and none of them have every felt as immersive as this film. To the point where it didn’t feel as though I was watching a film. There was a clarity both in video and sound though out this film that made me forget I was in a theater. Speaking of sound this movie is extremely loud. It seems as ever since the Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan’s films have been getting louder and louder. Dunkirk follows that trend but is exponentially louder than the last film, Interstellar. The sound quality is very good. But the sound is used to instill terror and horror and is one of the factors that keeps you not only glued to your seat. But makes you forget you’re even in a seat to begin with.

            This film doesn’t pull punches. It very much shows the horror of war. It doesn’t do it with blood and gore, it alludes to it. It just doesn’t show it strait on. It Compounds however. 30min in you want to get off this beach where the English and French soldiers are trapped. That feeling comes with a constant sense of dread right up till the end of the film.

            Before I finish I have to say I enjoyed this film, I plan to see it again in theaters, Just not the IMAX again. But I recommended you do see this film in IMAX first. Dunkirk very much takes advantage of screen size and large sound of IMAX. There were however some problems I had with this film. There were three characters and stories this film told. One story took a month, one a week and one an hour in real time. The film combines these stories so that they all converge at one point in time and place. There you can see the three stories start to interact with each other. The problem I had was that after the stories converged in the same place, the timeline started to get jittery. They would show an event happen in one character, then show before the event and the same event again from the other characters’ perspective. So you’d end up watching the it twice and I just felt a little like bad editing and pulls you out a little from a very immersive film.

            Like I said, I’m heading towards the theater to watch it again. I will own this film on Blu-Ray and It’s a good Christopher Nolan film, just not the best. That place still goes to Interstellar, which in my opinion might be the best film I’ve seen so far… ever.