[Skybird]

Saw it today on Blueray, they had in Saturn stores, apparently seven days early.

Strange. It left me completely cold. I had other, higher expectationsa, something more intense on the emotional level. This movie to me was almost lifeless, and desinterested in its own content. I had read good reviews, I wonder where they come from. The air combat scenes are nicely filmed, but then: nothing spectacular, just beautiful in a calm way: the colours of sea and sky, the flow of the air. The actors left me completely unconnected to them. The pressure these British osldiers should have felt, was not transported at all by the movie, the threat by the invisible Germans tightenign their grip around Dunkirk was nowhere to be felt as well. The only moment the film connected to me, were the first 120 seconds: the group of men exploring that street and then coming under fire, and I thought Hoppla! After these initial 2 minutes, the movie waved me goodbye for the remaining 140 minutes.

Emotionally completely unimpressed, and disappointed, I must admit. I rate it a "D" (4: ausreichend). The by far worst movie I have seen by Nolan so far. The most overhyped movie of this season, imo. Its an empty hull.

Interstellar and Batman are a completely different league of movie-making.

P.S. And a very major flaw, imo: the movie nowhere lets you get the impression of even close to 400 thousand men desperately hunkering down and waiting at Dunkirk. The "mass scenes" of the waiting men in long columns at the beach gave me the feeling of a theatre stage scene with a very limited cast. There might have been more actors on scene, but this is what the scene felt like: like a theatre stage play with a very small cast. Something went terribly wrong with the mise-en-scene there, imo. Nolan succeeded with the very questionable "trick" of letting maybe a thousand people appear as if they were only a dozen or so. And that is a flaw by the director then.

If this really would have been what happened at Dunkirk, then I would rate it as a very minor episode in the war. And that it certainly was not. Nolan missed the objective there. Completely.

P.P.S.
Another flawed concept that got a lot of writin g about it, the mixing of three different time scales: one week from the perspective of those on the beach, one day from the perpsetcive of those on the small boats, one hour from the perspective of the pilot. It simply does not ignite, the fuse does not work. It all feels like one dull day on the beach, narrated in a 1,5 hour film. That Nolan thought the 7 days-1 day-1 hour thing must even be mentioned in writing at the beginning of the film maybe illustrates how helpless he was, after having gotten the idea, in implementing it properly.