I can't believe I'm gonna say this about the director that brought us The Prestige of all things, but I'm starting to think that Nolan really isn't all that meticulous or obsessive a filmmaker as some of his contemporaries.
I actually
really enjoyed Dunkirk, but it often felt...
bare for lack of a better word.
The beach segment in particular felt strangely bare-bones and simplistic, like there weren't enough elements or creative ways of showing the horrors of the situation. Like, soldiers in their line are all pretty clearly exhausted, and wanting to get out, but their individual emotions never really ebb and flow beyond that. Like how are these guys getting food? Were they running out of it? Were they starving? Was it cold there? It didn't seem like they had much shelter/warmth - were there soldiers freezing to death? The nazis were closing in, but it never really
felt like they were surrounded. I understand Nolan wanted to show it from specific perspectives, which was absolutely the right choice, but he seemed to do it to an unnecessary degree, like he'd created a little rule for himself: "No ever seeing an actual nazi." Why? Wouldn't it be effective seeing these little dots of nazis off in the distance closing in slowly? At the start of the film they're much further away, and later on you can see their lines have drawn nearer? Like a tidal wave they can't outrun? This is a
survival film. Adding layers of problems slowly choking these characters out with a vice grip seems vital to me.
What are these soldiers doing on a day to day basis to keep themselves busy/not go insane? Are some of them going insane? I wanted to see the starkly different experiences and reactions to how these people are dealing with the extreme situation they're thrust into. You compare it to Cameron's Titanic - some people are calm and collected, some are panicked messes, some are suicidal, some are content with just sitting and waiting for their fate, some push back against the structured order they're being bureaucratically forced into, knowing that order isn't going to save their lives now. Like why didn't anyone challenge Branagh at any point? "We have just as much right to be on this boat as anyone else! You could fit plenty more people on the boat!" When the bombs start dropping, why are they literally all just ducking? Surely a heap of them on the pier would have just jumped off into the ocean, preferring to freeze to death than wait to be blown to bits. The moment where the guy drops his equipment and strolls into the ocean, attempting to fucking
swim back home was great, harrowing stuff. It's the kind of logical insanity these guys would be going through. The film needed more of this. This plethora of human reaction to an insane situation is, surely, the meat and potatoes of a film like this. Not the spectacle itself - the humans and their immediate struggles.
I'm reminded of
the scene from Atonement set on Dunkirk, and while the two films aren't trying to do the same thing with the event, I can't help but compare the far more detailed and rich variety of human experience that Joe Wright manages to communicate in just one scene that Nolan can't quite match in his entire film. This is just a visual example and doesn't really speak to the heart of what I'm talking about, but it's a good entry point into what I'm saying:
Basically, if the beach soldiers were analogous to a character, that character was pretty one-note: tired, scared and uniform. That character should have been a gradient of tired, scared, petrified, insane, desperate, determined, defeated, ordered, chaotic, rebellious, devastated, miserable, optimistic etc.
I couldn't ever call Nolan lazy, but it seemed like he didn't have as strong a grasp on the minute details of what it would have been like on Dunkirk, only the macro large scale stuff.
His best film since at least Inception though.
