In “Dunkirk,” very few people die, and when it happens, the film is too restrained to let you taste the sting of death the way that “Saving Private Ryan” or “Full Metal Jacket” did.
It’s truly an epic vision — at times nearly an abstraction of war, like a graphic silent film with (awesome) sound. The vast, panoramic frames lend an immersive quality to almost every image and event: dive-bombing planes, British soldiers amassed in endless rows on the beaches of France, men scrambling out of boats like rats as they try not to drown, a civilian in a wooden yacht heading into the fray to save a handful of his countrymen, a fighter pilot shooting Luftwaffe bombers out of the sky. The effect is surely Nolanesque, though this is a new kind of Nolan picture: gargantuan and minimal at the same time, like a nearly wordless documentary shot by God in IMAX. The images are momentous, the flow of terrified humanity indelible, yet “Dunkirk,” powerful as it often is, is more of a transporting experiment than a masterpiece. It’s a little too depersonalized, and for a film that seeks to plunge us into the cataclysm of war, it is, to a nearly shocking degree, a stiff-upper-lip rouser, with Edward Elgar on the soundtrack and the film practically pinning medals on the brave hearts of its heroes. In “Dunkirk,” very few people die, and when it happens, the film is too restrained to let you taste the sting of death the way that “Saving Private Ryan” or “Full Metal Jacket” did. What Nolan, for all his virtuosity, offers is an English gentleman’s view of World War II.