I can but it's really one you should see just going in cold. It starts off with a bang, literally, and doesn't let up. Ever. It's basically the first 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan but an entire movie albeit not gory at all despite many many deaths.
It's basically three story lines: land (a week), sea (a day) and air (one hour) and like all Nolan movies there is a time aspect where all these come together at the same moment and oof. It's ******* intense.
You never see the Germans. Just air raids and bullets and torpedos. It's a war movie but more about survival and the fisherman from England that took their ships across the channel to save 400k soldiers that were surrounded on the beach at Dunkirk.
The direction and cinematography are some of the best I've ever seen. Some of the shots Nolan used are just jaw dropping.
And be aware. There is very very little dialogue in the whole movie.
My thoughts building on this...
-- I actually appreciated a war movie that did not glorify or stylize combat, but rather left it as it was... loud, chaotic, terrifying, capricious, often with no idea what is coming... I felt the lack of an R rating and some realistic, not gratuitous, violence held it back, however
-- while war movies traditionally depict most "war" as FPS-style infantry combat, that was simply not the experience of most fighting in the Great War and the World War, which were industrial wars on a mass scale beyond our sensibilities... 75% of casualties in the Great War were from artillery fire, which was as random and unpredictable as a meteorite striking you, not the "glorified" combat of "men and their rifles, sight-to-sight, muzzle-to-muzzle" as you mostly see
-- most men in these wars fought against, die from, and killed with weapons and implements that kept them far from their enemy... men hidden in armored vehicles or entrenched positions, airborne bombs, torpedoes, artillery, automatics and long-range precision semiautomatics... it was brutal and inhuman and industrial... this is what it felt like
-- maybe it is different now again, given the U.S. is mostly involved in brush fire wars that involve a lot of small unit, infantry combat and Special Forces, but that was not the case in 1940
-- I agree with other's comparisons -- this was like the opening battle scene in
Saving Private Ryan, which had the same feel to it, stretched into a 90 minute film instead of 20 minutes of that followed by what was, basically, a pretty conventional WWII "important mission" action movie
-- Nolan did not try to develop his characters whatsoever, and is taking some flak for that, but I actually appreciated that here... never been his strong suit, though I think some of his work in this realm (and particularly for
Interstellar in putting together a family drama cross multiple generations) is underappreciated and in
The Prestige, but it would have not fit here
-- there are
enough war movies out there with developed characters who will muse and wax poetically and philosophically on the nature of war (especially from the Vietnam era), why they fight, what death and sacrifice means, etc.; we have a quota of "war movies," I would almost call this film part of a select genre of "battle movies" that feel entirely different
-- surprise Tom Hardy at the end... no idea that was him...
-- the bottom-line of it... just try to survive, and do what you can to help in the meantime
8/10... behind
Interstellar,
The Prestige,
Batman Begins, and
The Dark Knight in his canon for me... still an obviously great film held prisoner by my incredible expectations for Nolan... he is turning into the modern Kubrick for making one film in each genre, and each being a classic in its own way, and would be very curious to know where he is going to go next.
