Dunkirk is a disappointment, but definitely not a bigger one than Interstellar. And it does find way more takers than Interstellar as well.
The film begins on a poetic note, with a shower of flyers dropped by the Germans, to advertise how doomed the British and French soldiers are. It is one of the greatest moments Nolan has created in this film.
Another strong point in this film is the magic of Hans Zimmer.
Other than great sound design, there are some great aerial shots. But that’s not enough to attain the tag of ‘masterpiece’ or ‘the greatest war film’.
Is Nolan very good at filming action? I never felt so. A few memorable moments from the The Dark Knight Trilogy or Inception really don’t help in proving the point.
After having watched much better war movies, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Dunkirk feels relatively weak. Yes, it’s clear that Nolan was aiming for a different kind of reaction but still.
I don’t like this side of Nolan which tries to hide the flaws behind all the gimmickry, ethereal imagery, amazing sound effects and background score and most importantly, the cloud of IMAX marketing.
As an ardent fan of Nolan’s works, it’s tough to see the man behind Memento, The Prestige, Insomnia and Inception come up with such a downer.
Sourav R Nath,
Third year, sociology,
St. Xavier’s College
Disaster re-created could be the only take-home from the cinematic torture that Christopher Nolan had inflicted upon the audience.
There was no regard for historical narrative or background facts. In a state of time when 50 per cent of Americans struggle to recollect John Kennedy, perhaps the audience was supposed to have Wikipedia live-online to appreciate the laconic references. Is disregard of facts and background a feature of intellectual arrogance?
The outstanding facet of the evacuation was in the fact that 300,000 soldiers were evacuated in a span of five-six days. There is serious problem of scale in the movie, not more than a few hundred soldiers were visible. The scale was horribly wrong in terms of the sea vessels visible as well. The deployment as shown on screen would have taken a few months to evacuate the whole lot.
Most farcical of all was the scale of the air operations. It was more like the skies above a flying club than the skies over the English Channel. One lonely pilot hogging the limelight, almost in soliloquy.
The inaccuracy of ethnic portrayal has already been written about.
I hope critics will come out of their hagiographic trance and have the objectivity to call a bad movie a BAD movie.
I was so tired of the sing-song syndicated reviews, by the deference of the critics to Nolan, that I am even tempted to be a lonely acerbic film critic from Calcutta, once in a while.
Kunal Sarkar
senior vice-chairman, director and head of cardiac surgery at
Medica Superspecialty Hospital
