Now we know Sparse Nolan is just as good as Plotty Nolan. That is, not very good. This is a war film that feels at once large in scope and yet small in scale, intimate and yet distant (and not in a good way). A very sterile war picture.

And that monotonous drone of Zimmer's score... Damn.

This post has been edited by QuickFire: Jul 22 2017, 12:00 PM

The closest anyone ever got to war in a film is the Omaha beach sequence in SPR. This has a few sprinkling of scenes almost approaching that -- in particular the feeling of hopelessness when a bomber is flying toward you and you have no where to hide on the beach -- but on a sustained level this is not even close to SPR's infamous sequence.

To me, Nolan tried too hard at combining a minimalist, contemplative piece with war sequences. It tries to be a cross between SPR and Mallick. And fails. It isn't that none of the characters resonate (that's still fine), but each scene feels mechanically distant and impersonal, as of the director was trying so hard not to avoid making a typical direct war movie that it ends up feeling so sterile. Almost like a documentary. Fuck realism if it makes things boring. The dogfights in this are dogshite.

I don't necessarily agree with that. There doesn't need to be guts flying around like SPR for a war film to work. There is lots of room between that and this.

Honestly the movie wasn't just cold in the way Kubrick movies can be. Stripped of his usual high-minded ideas and script, Dunkirk really showcases Nolan's worst traits (or his best if you're his fan I guess). Everything is so sterile, so rigid, so... boring. It's just that it leaves me cold because none of the characters were developed (they aren't developed, but that's fine). It's cold because most of anything that transpires on screen is so mechanical and devoid of any intrinsic notion of entertainment. It's just stimulating, intellectually or visually. And it feels to me that this is the result of Nolan trying really hard to avoid the usual tropes of war films -- the action, violence, the directness and in-your-faceness of it all, and by eschewing all of that what's left is a bunch of visuals that don't entertain or stimulate. It's an obvious case of try hard. This movie has shown what a terrible entertainer Nolan is.