Dunkirk reviewed by Mark Kermode

well let's start with that handsomer because there's um there's a moment on the beach in which you get this kind of staccato kind of metronomic thing which starts to build tension okay this is quite fairly early on in the film and you think oK we've built this is building tension and in that interview Christopher Nolan talked about being tension being the main thing he's referred to because as wages of fear of course is remade by freaking a sorcerers this kind of exercising tension and you hear this Scogin doing this thing this kind of ticking thing and you think okay this is building up to thing what's incredible about the film is that that then builds pretty much constantly for the rest of the movie I think the score is an astonishing piece of work these growls which match with the sounds of the boats of the engines of the bombs of the boots on the ground these elegiac suspensions that sort of that strange gap between Badalamenti on the one hand and Elgar on the other hand this sort of sense of the whole thing having a mournful quality to it because although it is very very tense it is a mournful film it is a film that is somber and and you know and seriousness it is a film about a you know a victory being snatched from the jaws of defeat in a very very sort of strange way and it is as he said before british sir i mean of course it has been addressed before in cinema in various different versions you know whether it's mrs. Miniver or Dunkirk or you know or even recently their finest with that you know would somebody get mr. Hilliard out of Dunkirk I think from a cinematic point of view there is nobody working in cinema at the moment who is quite the great champion of cinematic formats as Christopher Nolan is you know shooting this in this using these very very large cameras hats off to a white van hoytl er his cinematographer if you look at any of the behind the scenes footage and logging around these bulky you know large format cameras and you're getting kind of you know it's a handheld dexterity and these periscope lenses use to capture the images in crystal-clear format so that when you see them on the screen you just go it is virtual reality without the Gockel I want me to get an IMAX camera in a Spitfire a little bit for how can we do that so for I mean and what's really impressive is I as you did saw it in BFI I'm at 70 ml so there are you know so that this is the screen stretching beyond the horizons of your field of vision and as a cinematic spectacle it is super but it's not just spectacle for the sake of spectacle one of the things that is important to say about it is it has this triptych narrative three narratives broadly speaking land sea air and what it does is it also intertwine three time periods one week one day one hour which it interweaves throughout the film in a way which is every bit as complex and dexterous and clever although not self-consciously clever as you know the time twists and reversals and you know lengthening zuv inception or of interstellar or going back earlier into Chris Nolan's career memento because he's always been fascinated by the idea of the flexibility of time and although this is telling a fairly straightforward story and attempting very clearly not to want to play games with the audience it does that thing that I've always said about Chris Nolan that I wrote about in a book some years ago in that I will stand by to this day Christopher Nolan imagines that the audience is smart enough to keep up and you know what they are he makes blockbusters that do not do what Michael Bay thinks you have to do which is to have Anthony Hopkins stand around and explain the plot he makes films which have interlocking you know strange crystalline structures but the audience just does understand even peculiarly enough if they don't realize that that's what they're doing at the time and I've spoken to people afterwards about you know the way in which those time structures interlocking Dunkirk and they said yeah I really didn't notice I mean I know that it flagged up one week one day one out but I I just you know it made sense the other thing is I think the the relevance of silent cinema seems unusual with a film which is so loud if a film in which so much of what is happening is to do with the Graeme thing you know the growling basements make sure you see it in a place it's got a good sound system but it's the imagery their dialogue is very minimal the dialogue sometimes I have to say is one of the foot the fall steps and they're a couple of moments of clunkiness but their visa very sort of minor quibbles but it's the silent cinema stuff it's stuff that makes you think okay well that owes more to Napoleon than it does to Battle of Britain for example and um you know it's visual storytelling it's understanding that cinema is a universal language and that often dialogue is the thing which serves it the least well I know in the past some people have worried that Nolan arm can seem a clinical that he can seem it's almost like the technical with this if something was always said about Stanley Kubrick with the technical wizardry was so extraordinary that you almost felt that it was that the films were cold and in the case of Kubrick I I do feel that in the case of Noland I don't I've never felt disconnected from his characters and in the case of this we have you know these sort of vignette human stories these different people whose lives you follow whose you know as they intertwine and I never felt that it was in any way dispassionate in fact the greatest credit to the film is that for a film with so many really striking outstanding moments of visual grandeur the things that I remember are the expression on Kenneth Branagh's face as he looks out to horizon the look on the soldiers faces as they watch somebody walking hopelessly into the sea the the small moments the moments which remind you that this is a mournful story amidst the spectacle um it's very impressive to take a film with a canvas that that big that's all that wide that broad and actually bring it down to those moments in the end um everyone might have to make their own decision about the best way to see the film I'm introducing a 35 ml print of it on Saturday I saw it in you know IMAX super gargantuan you know look at the size of that and I'm fascinated to see it again in other formats I've I thought it was a really impressive piece of work and but for me I still think you know I will always hold inception and Batman Begins is very very special places in my heart but you know this this is what blockbuster bring me back to a point I made seven this is what blockbuster cinema can look like if you can make blockbusters that look like this why would you not

Channel: kermodeandmayo

Views: 281,051

Keywords: Christopher Nolan, Fionn Whitehead, Damien Bonnard, Aneurin Barnard, Dunkirk, Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review, BBC, 5live

Id: VX1VLME36Xg

Length: 6min 51sec (411 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2017