Dunkirk is probably my most anticipated film of 2017, because it’s the first film of my favorite director in three years (!).
All of Nolan’s films are brilliant, from the script, which he himself writes often together with his brother, to the directing, to the stellar acting. He hasn’t made a ton of movies, but the ones he has, were all pretty good. If you don’t know who Christopher Nolan is and you’ve just escaped the cave you’ve been living in for the past decade, he’s the guy who managed to make Batman films good again after the disastrous failure Batman and Robin and Batman Forever were. Not that the recent Batman film was the greatest, but he was not the one responsible for that. He always has something creative going on in his film, whether it’s the story or a twist at the end (think of Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight Rises…). The story Dunkirk wasn’t really shown, which I actually really like. Well, we know the story of what happened there, but we don’t know the story of the protagonist. I liked that they didn’t give away a lot of the plot points, which a lot of trailers nowadays do: they spoil the movie. And I hate when movies do that, it doesn’t make me want to see the film, it doesn’t make me excited for the film, it only makes me despise the film and that’s something that they don’t want to happen. The trailer of Dunkirk on the other hand made me more excited than I already was. The tense score of Hans Zimmer (you can’t go wrong with this guy, can you?), really fitted the trailer well and I’m looking forward to hear it being used in the film itself. We got a taste of the score in the previous trailers, but also in the prologue, which also was really good. The score is original and creative and I like how they integrated some kind of clock-ticking noise, to crank up the tension with every beat.
Visually speaking this film looks gorgeous, with fantastic cinematography, but also with well captured action sequences, which seem to be quite claustrophobic at times. The explosions we see are all real and makes me love Nolan even more for his use of practical effects, whereby the film will probably get a more realistic feel. I’d like to come back on that claustrophobic part of the previous sentence. Claustrophobia is something Nolan can play around with in this film, and I think he does have the opportunity to. We get to see how the soldiers are all stuck together on boats or at land, and that they can’t escape Dunkirk, because it’s their duty to fight there. I think that this can bring up an interesting turn on the story, and knowing Christopher Nolan, he’ll be able to nail the sense of isolation and not knowing where to go and maybe he’ll be able to reflect that onto the protagonist, which also would lead to an interesting character.
The tease of a dogfight we got was amazing and will most definitely be one of the highlights of the final film and I am really looking forward to seeing that scene in IMAX. The sound design of them sounded very realistic and menacing. It’s pretty amazing how he can already make planes feel scary in just a few tiny clips.
The acting too seems very promising, since we have Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy and Mark Rylance all acting in the same movie. Cillian’s acting we got to see quite a bit of already and he was amazing for the bits he was in. He really seemed scared to go back to Dunkirk and that’s also something I believe Nolan will set up brilliantly: the scariness of that place and the isolation it brings with it. Not so sure about the lead actor and about Harry Styles, but Nolan knows what he’s doing by now, so I hope that he has made the right decision.
I’m looking forward to this film, are you? What’s your favorite Christopher Nolan film? Comment below!
images via: YouTube, Buzz.ie
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