Christopher Nolan was first known for a pair of movies that had experimental takes on chronology (Following & Memento) - so he's no stranger to trying things that are unconventional in the cinematic world. Prior to its release, he described Dunkirk as being his most experimental movie to date. That's quite a big statement to make considering the outré nature of the movies mentioned above. Unfortunately, while Dunkirk might succeed in being a unique take on the war genre, it fails as a movie.

Dunkirk tells the real-life tale (poorly, but I'll come back to this) of a crucial point in WW2 where France & England were pushed to the edge of continental Europe by Hitler's army. Trapped and with no chance of a successful push back inland, they needed nothing less than a miracle to guide them to the safe, not-yet-invaded shores of Albion. With the military already stretched thin, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his advisors make the decision to enlist every civilian in England with a boat to make the journey across the English channel to rescue their trapped lads. It is one of the most unique strategic moves in modern warfare and perhaps Nolan saw himself as the eccentric mad genius of Hollywood most suited to tell this singular tale in his own idiosyncratic way. This unprecedented military decision was fraught with pressure, both temporal and strategic and Nolan makes this pressure the focus of his film, rather than telling the story in a more high-level, wide-reaching way.

As we've all learned over the years from films like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, and countless others, war is two things: hellish and stupid. So why Nolan chooses to drill down so thoroughly into those two aspects is a bit bewildering. The average person doesn't need to be hit over the head with those fairly obvious observations. And in all the movies mentioned above, they manage to convey those two observations well without dedicating every single frame of film to them. Nolan on the other hand decides to make the most on-the-nose movie possible. There's immense time pressure to rescue the troops? Let's put a constantly ticking clock as the main motif of the soundtrack! War is futile and pointless? Let's kill a few main characters in the dumbest, clumsiest, most infuriating ways possible! And so on.

Because Nolan so totally and completely focuses on the unrelenting, overpowering, unbearable pressure of war, I hesitate to even call Dunkirk a movie in the traditional sense of the word. It's more like a movie-length gauntlet of extremely tense, grisly vignettes bookended by the thinnest of introductions and half a minute of an "ok we can finally exhale" ending. This total disregard for any kind of pacing was clearly intentional to show the pressured nature of the situation, but the end result leaves the viewer emotionally exhausted less than halfway through the movie. Unlike Full Metal Jacket, Schindler's List, and Saving Private Ryan, there is no space made for levity, love, hope, or any other positive human emotion that an actual soldier in an actual war might employ to help get them through. In Dunkirk, there is only the unyielding pressure of war and the mad scramble to survive. Having never been in a war, perhaps that's much closer to the reality of it. But it makes for a bad movie - and a waste of some very talented actors.

If you're interested in the events leading up to the escape from Dunkirk, Darkest Hour is the better movie for that. If you're interested in an experimental war movie, 1917 is vastly more entertaining. Dunkirk is strictly for the most masochistic viewers who want their movie-going experience to feel the way that most wars feel to the people fighting them: hellish and stupid.