Dunkirk – 5

Dunkirk is an unpleasant assault on the senses, the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan stretched out for two hours. We see death by suicide, by being shot in the back, burned at sea, strafed from the air, blown up on the sand, drowned in vessel hold, shot from the sky, machine-gunned at close range, knocked down the steps – and that doesn’t count the half-dozen ships that get sunk by German aircraft with untold anonymous deaths resulting. Aside from the always brilliant Mark Rylance and the dependable Kenneth Branagh, the actors are a fairly indistinguishable lot, and half of the little dialogue there is is lost in murmurs or foreign accents. The expected upbeat saga of Dunkirk (see, most recently, Their Finest Hour) is reduced to a footnote in favor of an unrelieved essay on the horror of war. Someone, maybe director Christopher Nolan, described Dunkirk as an “Impressionist” painting. I get that, but only if the artist were Goya, not Monet.

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