Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017)

You might imagine that a pretty historically stringent retelling of the victory-in-defeat that was the Dunkirk evacuation would offer up no surprises, and hence dramatically have its hands tied behind its back. However, Nolan had taken quite a different tack here. He transforms the events into a form of impressionism that manages to communicate the essence of the story more effectively than any faithful documentary account could, with entire sequences of visual poetry containing little dialogue beyond a functional level required to lead to the next stage. Neither is the usually modish splitting of the narrative into incidents occurring at different times over a few days just a trick: it gives a sense of how chaotic the situation would have been from multiple perspectives, jumping between an RAF pilot with just an hour of fuel left in his tank, a stoic volunteer taking his sons across the Channel to rescue the evacuees and a young soldier just trying everything possible to get away. It's quite possibly one of the most artistically proficient attempts ever to try to capture war at the level of raw feeling, rather than just reciting the strategic details. All that said, it still fizzles out because the story has nowhere else to go than the historical chain of events, and the soundtrack, when it does come in, is unnecessarily bombastic and jars accordingly. But a bold go at a tough nut to crack nevertheless.

8/10