After a wait of about 3 years, Chris Nolan comes back to write and direct this war thriller, Dunkirk. While this one is not one of his original ideas, he adapted the historic event during WWII masterfully. No matter what scene you look at, you know there is a work done by someone in control of everything.Dunkirk isn't a story as much as a painting of a huge event that if had gone the wrong way, could have changed our entire history. Nolan puts you directly in the middle of the war with the clock ticking (literally) and it doesn't stop until the movie comes to an end. You get the feeling of how difficult and harrowing the times were in those days and also admire the courage the everyone including the civilians showed at that time. Chris, unlike most (if not all) of his earlier films, doesn't direct this movie building characters instead the situation is a character of its own and the actors were there to magnify it.
The most I admire from this movie is the team that Nolan put together from cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema with his sweeping and sprawling shots of beaches, ships and planes to intimate action shots of people stuck in a boat or on a bridge hoping to survive. The music and sound design by Hans Zimmer's team is extra ordinary and gives you a thrilling sense of the adversity approaching those war soldiers and the civilians. The movie doesn't show you that the war finishing as we see Tom Hardy's character being caught by the Germans but even in that moment, you witness the hope and defiance of those soldiers. Mark Rylance had the most fleshed out character and he played it excellently. I have been a fan of him since I saw Bridge of Spies. This movie felt like something that could have been titled "A day in the life of a war" because of how intimate it felt. I did take some time catching up to Nolan's parallel story telling technique but it added to the story once I was in sync with everything.
The only thing I had some objection was that Tom Hardy's character does get a film style ending which is just a extremely minor negative.