MOVIE REVIEW: First half of 'Dunkirk' pointless and annoying

Harry Styles is an actor. Who knew? Is it terrible that I didn’t even notice he was in the movie until I was looking up the credits? I’m clearly not as big a One Direction fan as I initially thought. But anyway…on to the story.

Dunkirkis a Christopher Nolan movie based on the true story of British and French soldiers stuck on an island in the middle of the war in 1940, after Germans have invaded France, unable to get respite or rescue because of enemy pilots shooting at them like fish in a barrel.

Let me stop for a minute there and talk about the fact that Christopher Nolan, who I don’t like because he all but ruined Batman for me, wrote this movie very early on in his career, and was waiting until he was a big enough deal for a movie house to give him the money and the leeway to write it, which is interesting to me – mostly because it is interesting when directors get to make the movies they actually want to make. Because I don’t know if he wanted to make The Dark Knight Rises. Can you tell I’m rolling my eyes?

There are maybe two Christopher Nolan movies that I actually like. I was surprised that I liked this one, at the end of it – not enough to watch it again, but I did like it. And no, the other movie isn’t Inception. So, Dunkirk is the moving story of how these stranded soldiers got off the island, which is where Harry Styles comes in.

POINTLESS AND ANNOYING

For me, the first half of the movie was pointless and annoying, in that Nolan pulled a Nolan – that kind of dreamy, not really exposition but kind of exposition film making that is very artistically pleasing, but tends to drag on for hours on end and you start to get irritated (remember a young Bruce Wayne in the first bat cave ever in TDKR? Ugh). It was a lot of planes and muffled radio, a lot of soldiers running across beaches with intense looks, all of that introspective stuff. Whereas I found it unnecessary in TDKR, it was a bit unnecessary in this film bit in a different way – in that the pointlessness, so to speak, of the first hour of the film, kind of deeply emphasized the pointlessness of war in general. It contributed to the storyline instead of taking away from it – you just had to have a little patience.

I’m going to do spoilers from here, though if you know the history already, then it isn’t really a spoiler.

How the soldiers got off the beach is British civilians with boats came and rescued them, I suppose because there were some British soldiers in planes shooting the enemy out of the sky and thus enabling the smaller ships to get to the beach and take as many soldiers as they could with them. The enemy planes could easily target the bigger ships, obviously, so that strategy wasn’t working.

FEW HEART-WARMING MOMENTS

There are a few heart-warming moments in the story, which almost make it worth it, but the end for me really sealed the deal on what Christopher Nolan was trying to do with this movie. At the end, when the battered cavalry is sitting in trains to go home at last, after not resting, not eating, not sleeping for days on end, and you hear Churchill saying that famous speech where he says that they are going to fight the enemy everywhere they can. And these incredibly tired men are reading these words in the paper – from an old man sending young men out to war. I thought it was a very poignant moment that summed up the movie for me.

‘Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.’