DUNKIRK (2017) ***

Christopher Nolan’s WWII movie, Dunkirk is a simple, straightforward war picture.  It’s primarily a tale of survival as its focus is on soldiers trying to stay alive on and along the coastline of the French town of Dunkirk as they are fired upon by German airplanes that perpetually strafe the area.  We meet characters on the land (soldiers pinned down on the beach), in the air (a pilot, played by Tom Hardy, who tries to keep the skies clear of enemy fighters), and at sea (a boat captain played by Mark Rylance who along with his sons, rescue downed pilots and beleaguered soldiers), all of whom fight for survival during the siege.  

The back-and-forth storytelling approach is almost mosaic in nature and yields uneven results.  The strongest passages are set upon Rylance’s boat.  He‘s an able-bodied seaman who is too old to enlist, but pitches in to help rescue soldiers.  His voyage gets complicated when he picks up a pilot (Cillian Murphy) who has no intention on returning to Dunkirk.  The stuff involving Hardy is fairly decent too.  The sequences of the soldiers stranded on the beach don’t work quite as well, mostly because none of them ever really stand out and become real characters.  I’m not saying these stretches of the film are necessarily bad.  They just pale in comparison to the other sequences.

Most of Nolan’s films are big and twisty in nature.  It’s almost as if this time the twist is that there are no twists.  In fact, the only real Nolan touch is the garbed dialogue and droning soundtrack.  Oh, and I guess the fact that Hardy wears a cumbersome mask for most of the movie, which means it would make a good double feature with The Dark Knight Rises.  

Given the fact that it was a WWII movie directed by Christopher Nolan, I was anticipating Dunkirk to be a bit bloated.  Much to my surprise, it moved along at a steady clip.  The thing that prevents it from being one of his best is that the dramatics tend to get a bit repetitive as the film goes on as many set pieces are merely variations on a theme.  (Cowardly characters find their courage, ill-equipped characters knuckle up, guest stars stand around and frown, separate sets of characters face drowning, etc.)  Although it might be a lesser Nolan movie, it remains a solid war flick.