Christopher Nolan belongs to that premium category of directors whose projects are anticipated months, even years before release, carrying the premise of something innovative either on a technical or a storytelling level or both, Tarantino is perhaps the next in line. "Dunkirk" was on the talk months before its theatrical release in 2017, its critical success propelled it right to IMDb Top 250 but that's generally the first reaction with Nolan's films. Now it's no longer there and "Tenet" had taken all the hype, so "Dunkirk" can be appreciated as a movie, not as a recent hit.

The film opens in ominous silence with an anonymous soldier wandering across the town's deserted streets while sheets sent from German airplanes are literally raining from the sunny sky: we're in the midst of the post-Blitzkrieg debacle and British soldiers are literally cornered in that tiny portion of France. There's no dialogues for almost ten of fifteen minutes and I could feel the tension, the impending doom from the quietness before storm, anticipating a massacre to occur at any moment. Nothing of that sort ever happens, I got it then: Nolan wouldn't make the war-movie following the manual and I got better used to these false alarms signs.

Desperately seeking a character to hook my interest one, I also quickly realized that this wasn't Nolan's perspective on the Dunkirk evacuation and his rendition of that pivotal moment of World War 2 would focus on events on lesser scopes and soldiers whose anonymousness better highlight how impersonal they become in action. The limit of that reasoning is that most of the time, they're in inaction and opportunities to give them a little more human density are wasted on silences that heighten the tension but without any emotional reward whatsoever. We gather this is no movie meant as 'propaganda', we don't need to have backstories, to know that Harold has a fiancée in Brighton or Davis is a promising student for Cambridge, all that characterizes the soldiers is that they want to go home.

But they're all entrapped in the vastness of a beach, an open-sky jail that offers an infuriating view on their "home" across the Channel. And instead of talking, sharing memories, talking about politics, wars, girls, they wait, wait for a ship, or they get in the ship and wait for the tide, or get in the ship, survives drowning, gets back ashore and there we go again. The tension is palpable, the nervousness too, the sense of total abandonment by French troops and even the British enhance their frustration. Now, supposing Nolan has succeeded in highlight these aspects and making viewers on the edge of their seat, couldn't we be given a few moments of pure emotional relief? I didn't even expect humor it's as unlikely to happen in a Nolan film than an Oscar performance in a Michael Bay film.

Let's get serious now, I feel like Nolan by detaching himself from the usual archetypes have detached the movie from a fair portion of viewers who might have expected something a little more "Saving Private Ryan"-like, especially from a master of action movies who proved his craftsmanship in the Batman series or "Inception". Still, even on that level, the film is frustratingly minimalist, devoid of the epicness of one of the war's momentums, when Britain could have lost all his army and become incapable to fight the Germans. The evacuation of Dunkirk whose price was the sacrifice of soldiers in Calais was a success à la Midway or D-day, but it was a "Pyrrhic defeat", a symbolic defeat on the paper that still allowed Britain to resist the invasion and the Blitz on the longer term.

But Nolan's angle doesn't give much range to analyse whatever was Dunkirk military-speaking and emotionally, his neutral focus keeps us on the edge of a denouement that comes too late to be remotely inspiring. The last twenty minutes when the British civilian boats finally make their entrance and later the monologues that question the whole battle seem spiritually disjointed from the rest of the film. Yes, they're conventional but war movies have two options: question the war or embrace it, as much as I loathed some aspects of "Saving Private Ryan", I can't ignore the merit of Spielberg to portray the epic barbarity of any battle and make soldiers' deaths even more tragic when we know where they come from.

Nolan only gratifies us with no more than a few hundreds extras, three Spitfires, one or two Messerschmitts and no gore whatsoever, making it a relatively tame depiction of war. And characterization-wise, I couldn't tell who was who, most soldiers had Black hair, and the two relevant soldiers were a Frenchman (Damien Bonnard) whose role is always kept ambiguous, a shell-shocked pilot (Cillian Murphy) who commits an act that makes it impossible to sympathize with and Tom Hardy as an ace pilot whose face is kept hidden all through the film. Soldiers aren't given a heroic part, in fact the closest to a hero is Mark Rylance as the civilian using his own boat to transport survivors. Kenneth Branagh plays a Captain who waits for the rescue but you can tell he's here to provide enough information so we wouldn't lose track on the situation.

And it's true it can get confusing at time. Action switches from day to night making the continuum of events hard to follow, Hardy's Spitfire is in action all through the film and never runs outs of gas etc. The trick is that Nolan has outdid himself so many times that he's also among these directors whose flaws will always be regarded as intended effects, designed to convey something special. In fact, I can recognize the achievement that is "Dunkirk", and I might have missed a few things that make it a little better than the underwhelming experience I went through. And by underwhelming, I want to say boring.

Once again Nolan, why so serious?