"Dunkirk"

How amazing it is to watch a Christopher Nolan movie! No matter what the subject, be it memory loss ("Memento") or subconscious infiltration and theft of memories ("Inception") or time-travel through galaxies ("Interstellar") or super heroes ("The Dark Knight") Nolan knows  how to hook you, suspend you and let you down not gently. He is a master at fucking with your mind in the guise of entertainment. 

Not so entertaining is "Dunkirk," however.  It's a straight-on war movie, so if you don't like that genre, you won't like this movie. But it is masterful, it is genuine and it is amazing. Did I like it? I liked all of it except the subject, war. But you can't go see a war movie without being immersed in that subject. I was knocked out and exhausted by its scope and its depth.  It is so difficult to watch at times, not for the blood and guts (of which there is little, a lot of death but not a lot of blood) but for the human factor. The gut wrenching terror in a boy's eyes, the massive fear of being killed, the immediate realization that one has zero seconds to live.  Difficult to recommend but it would be a shame to not experience this movie.

There is no preface, no narration, no big stars on the screen, no familiar faces (except Kenneth Branagh, who has short screen time) to distract you. The movie just begins and within a minute, you are deep in the pain of war. 

Nolan likes to play with time, forward and backward, and there is a bit of that in this film.  You see the same scene from a few different angles and perspectives, four or five or ten minutes apart.  It sounds distracting, and it is a bit, but it also increases the tension and the suspension of reality. (It's odd to use that phrase "suspension of reality"
 in a movie based on fact, but I imagine war suspends reality while imprinting reality at the same time.) For example,  Steve and I disagreed on something that happened, I said one thing, he said something else, until we realized we were both wrong, it was something totally different seen from two different sets of eyes at two different interludes of time. Nolan is a master at that, making you question what you just saw.

Bottom line, it's an astonishing achievement in every way. Nolan has made one helluva movie here. His craft and technique are flawless.  More than that, it is a tribute to men and women of war, of survival and of fear and bravery, of doing one right thing at one moment.  It's a testament to the British soldiers, who came home from Dunkirk feeling like failures but who went on to fight the long fight of the war.  And in the end, it's a look at war, a very short snapshot of the thing no one wants to see, to endure, to live.  "Dunkirk" is, as all war movies should be, a plea for survival, for peace. Not that Nolan puts that on the screen, but if a viewer can't find that, then that viewer is blind.