Most reviewers of Christopher Nolan’s war drama Dunkirk have largely saluted the film, calling it a resounding success.
It is being called a sophistically told account of the mass evacuation of predominantly English soldiers from the French seaside town of Dunkirk in 1940.
Pressure-cooker intense, Dunkirk is made up of three segments set in the air, the water and the sky to tell the story of massive numbers of Allied soldiers fleeing the German war machine to get England, 26 miles across the channel.
Many of those rescued were taken to England on civilian vessels.
Over the course of nine days (May 27 – June 4), just under 340,00 men were evacuated, including nearly 140,000 French, Polish, and Belgian troops. There was also a small number of Dutch troops. To convey this, the film itself employed some 6,000 extras.
It was written, co-produced and directed by Nolan who again teams up with Hoyte van Hoytema who was the cinematographer for Interstellar and of course composer Hans Zimmer.
JUDGEMENT
“Dunkirk is an impressionist masterpiece. These are not the first words you expect to see applied to a giant-budgeted summer entertainment made by one of the industry’s most dependably commercial big-name directors. But this is a war film like few others, one that may employ a large and expensive canvas but that conveys the whole through isolated, brilliantly realized, often private moments more than via sheer spectacle, although that is here, too.” Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter
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“Lean and ambitious, unsentimental and bombastic, overwhelmingly guy-centric, Christopher Nolan’s World War II epic Dunkirk showcases the best and worst of the director’s tendencies. The best win out and the worst recede in memory when you think back on the experience —provided that you want to remember Dunkirk, a movie that’s supposed to be grueling and succeeds.” Matt Zoller Seitz, rogerebert.com
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“Effectively one enormous, stunningly rendered and thunderously intense set-piece stretched to feature-length, Dunkirk thrusts you into a pressure cooker and slams the lid on. It doesn’t have anything like the gore of Saving Private Ryan, but that doesn’t lessen its power. In fact, there’s a very good reason it doesn’t have a more fulsome runtime: audiences would likely have staggered out with PTSD.” Nick De Semlyen, empireonline.com
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“Christopher Nolan’s astonishing new film, a retelling of the Allied evacuation of occupied France in 1940, is a work of heart-hammering intensity and grandeur that demands to be seen on the best and biggest screen within reach. But its spectacle doesn’t stop at the recreations of Second World War combat.” Robbie Collin, The Telegraph
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“But amidst the sound and fury, Dunkirk possesses a meditative quietness. There can’t be more than a handful of pages of dialogue scattered within its 106-minute runtime. It’s a bold decision, creating a starkness at the level of plot and character, but it never bothered me in the slightest such is the quality of film-making and acting on show.” Daniel Krupa, IGN
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“Dunkirk is not a typical war movie. There are no brothers in arms, no flashbacks to simpler times and pretty wives and girlfriends left behind, no old men in situation rooms pontificating about politics or helping with exposition. There’s no talk of Hitler, or Germans or battlefields or trauma or mothers. In fact, there’s hardly any talk at all, or, for that matter, even any characters in the traditional sense. But don’t be mistaken: Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is a stone-cold masterpiece.” Lindsey Bahr, AP
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“But, like Nolan’s last feature, 2014’s Interstellar, it is a dazzling spectacle that demands to be seen on the silver screen. Nolan shot it using 65mm film, which is rare these days, but gives his film the visual scope of old-fashioned epics such as Ben-Hur. Dunkirk, too, is indubitably epic.” Brian Viner, The Daily Mail
Watch Chris Stuckman’s review of Dunkirk below: