There's no denying that Writer/Director Christopher Nolan (Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar) has played with our sense of time in his past films.
It's safe to say that he's never done it as brilliantly as he does in his new historical masterpiece DUNKIRK.
Nolan tells us three separate stories. The one taking place on land takes one week. The tale on the sea takes one day and the saga in the air takes place in one hour.
He dazzles by interweaving the tales so they connect and interlace at key moments while unspooling in their own time frame. In lesser hands, it would be confusing, but under Nolan's sure guidance, it's spectacular.
On land, three young soldiers are doing everything they can to get back to England.
400,000 British, French and Belgian troops are stranded and surrounded with no way home.
Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) is young and terrified, the lone survivor of his group. Damien Bonnard is a young French soldier he bonds with and Harry Styles (Yes THAT Harry Styles from the band One Direction) stars as English soldier Alex. While the trio try to escape the bullets of Nazi fighters on the beach, our story on the sea depicts an Englishman (Mark Rylance of "Bridge of Spies") his son and son's friend navigating their pleasure boat the 50 miles to Dunkirk as part of a massive civilian effort to rescue the troops. When they pick up a stranded and shell-shocked English soldier (Cillian Murphy) they learn of the horrors of war.
In the air, a trio of fighters lead by Farrier (Tom Hardy of "Dark Knight Rises") soars toward Dunkirk with minimal fuel and plenty of ammunition.
Nolan stages all of these moments on real boats dressed to look historically authentic, with full size sets and as many as 6000 extras on the beach.
It's old fashioned film-making with his modern day twists. The flying sequences are some of the best ever put on film, with real Spitfires battling it out and very limited CGI throughout.
The cast is fantastic, filled with unknowns as well as established actors like Kenneth Branagh in supporting roles.
It's one of Nolan's shortest films at 106 tight minutes. Imagine the opening scene of "Saving Private Ryan" lasting an hour and a half and you have a sense of the tension and suspense that Nolan builds here.
Hans Zimmer's music score is his all time best, ratcheting up the pressure almost non-stop for the entire running time. I'll bet now that it wins next year's Oscar for best music score as its one of the best of all time, as vital to the action here as John Williams shark motif was to "Jaws".
The photography by Hoyte Van Hoytema (Spectre, Interstellar) is jaw dropping, capturing all the actual places where the events took place and Nolan has now staged them.
Exciting, suspenseful and brilliant, DUNKIRK is the best film so far of 2017 and one of the best war films that I've ever seen.
By staging the war on both a grand and small scale, Nolan pulls you into the individual battles that make up the world wide scope of conflict.
These are men faced with impossible choices and horrible odds, fighting with every ounce of their lives to save their way of life.
It may just be Nolan's best film and that's saying a great deal. DUNKIRK gets an A+.
See it on the biggest screen you can find and just listen to those fighters approach. It's an immersive experience by any measure.
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