Dunkirk * * *

       Christopher Nolan needs a screenplay written by somebody else (and I don’t mean his brother!), and he needs to be told to stick to it.  No chopping it up or messing it about.  Stick to the script!  And then when he’s finished shooting it he needs to be told he can’t come into the editing suite either.  We don’t need him to creatively cut it to change the narrative flow, or to reassemble it into some disjointed untidy unbalanced story.

Worst beach I've ever been to.
Let's get out of here.

        Chris Nolan is like a member of the team who is good at something - really good sometimes - but you just got to keep him away from everything else.

        If Nolan was a chef your main would come sprinkled with icing sugar and your dessert would make you wonder why there is gravy on your strawberry flan. Or maybe the meal would come the other way round - dessert first.  Do it all backwards Memento style. Yep, that’d be Chris’s style.

       Dunkirk has all the right ingredients, it’s just that they’re not properly served.  Here are a few scenarios: The volunteer boats are represented by an amateur boatsman and two teenage boys Their attempt to help brings them as much tragedy as success. Subtitles tell us their story is set over one day.

      A spitfire pilot with a faulty fuel gauge fights off the German planes, but cannot ever be sure when he will run out of fuel. We are told his story is set over one hour.
Then there other stories which we are told are set over one week:

      Desperate men try any means to get onto the rescue boats.  

      Other men commandeer a boat to learn it’s a death trap.

      The horror of men having to choose whether to drown or emerge into the burning oil on the water.  You sum up these and other incidents and you think “God! That’s got to work!”  Unfortunately it doesn’t.  The dialogue (as in all of Nolan's films) is mostly bad and the characters simply don’t engage you.  Good actors can only do so much to breath life into flat scenes.  The same can be said for Hans Zimmer’s, Elgar derived, swelling music: it can only do so much.  
  But it does look convincing. So convincing that the indifference we feel due to the lack of continuing narrative or dramatic involvement is compensated by our emotional reaction to a hospital ship being torpedoed and sinking, or aeroplane dog fights that are frighteningly realistic.

     However due to this one hour/one day/one week concept there were times where I didn’t know what scene I was looking at. Who’s drowning now, how much time is left and should I be concerned?   The most moving part was the arrival back in England and the sense of failure shared by the soldiers. The elation of having got safely home was tempered by the fact that they had lost, been booted out of France by the Germans, come home with their tail between their legs. Solace could only be found in reading Churchill’s stirring speech to rally.

     Good photography though, and the sound of gunfire is terrifying. As a visual portrait of the Dunkirk evacuation it’s impressive.  And maybe that’s Chris Nolan wanted.  A big loud intense portrait of the chaotic and frightening event.  I hope so, because as a story there’s not much to get into.