Dunkirk 

Academy award winning director Christopher Nolan, has made one of history’s most remembered wars into one of the most boring films of the century. Dunkirk may well be Christopher’s second shortest film ever, but it couldn’t have ended soon enough.

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With the constant repetition of falling bombs, intense music and star gazing soldiers, not even Harry Styles debut performance could make the film worth while.

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Released a year after the multi-award winning war movie Hacksaw Ridge, Dunkirk lacks the energy and engaging elements of a true blockbuster. Unlike that of Hacksaw Ridge’s Andrew Garfield, Fionn Whitehead doesn’t show the raw emotion of a soldier on the verge of death and instead looks as confused to be the films main protagonist as I am.

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The films plot is simple, retelling the events in which around 400,000 British troops found themselves stranded on the beach of Dunkirk. But with the German army closing in, bombs being dropped from the sky and torpedoes stealthily taking out British troops, there only wish is to make it home. But with 39 miles of deathly cold water in the way, their hopes are fading with ever life lost.

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Dunkirk is without a doubt one of the most well-known and most remembered battles of World War 2, but that doesn’t mean we are all aware of what actually happened. So when Christopher Nolan decides the make the film with limited detail of what happened and a lack of verbal information, the audience are left puzzled and confused.

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With random dates and timings blighting the big screen, the audience never really engage with the movie and instead self consciously find themselves try to work out what the times actually meant, as if it was a mental maths question for 2 hours. Now for all those people still bemused at what the timings meant, you’ll be glad to know that I have solved the mystery. The timings represent the number of weeks or days that part of the film lasted for in real life – another hugely confusing element the film sadly included.

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With so many different story lines happening at once, it is tricky for you to connect with the actors and makes an already confusing film even harder to follow. The constant change of story and speed doesn’t make the film in any way more clever and in fact backfires immensely, making the film nearly unbearable to watch. In fact if you weren’t aware that each part of the film was happening at different times, you may have left the film with PTSD, as you repeatedly watch the same plane fall from the sky time after time, like a recurring nightmare as a result of war.

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So if Nolan was trying to represent the wars catastrophic and devastating affects by creating a movie as confusing and disastrous as war itself then he really has succeeded in his ambitions. With a dull cast, a mind bending timeline and a 90’s style silent movie effect, Dunkirk is well and truly Christopher Nolan’s worst film to date and has given critics a huge target to aim at.

 

That said, he will save time not having to write a winning speech for this years Oscars.