Last night author and former Premiere editor Peter Biskind trashed Dunkirk, calling it “total garbage, confused and confusing, a criminal waste of several of England’s greatest actors,” etc.
I posted my stock reply: “Funkirk — purely immersive, post-narrative, high-throttle IMAXian viewing pleasure start to finish.”
Hamish McAlpine: “What a ridiculous, anti-intellectual critique. I am no fan of Christopher Nolan, to put it mildly, but this is his best film since Memento. You obviously wanted a paint-by-numbers conventional 1950’s war film. What you got was a film which tried to capture the essence of WHAT IS WAS LIKE TO BE THERE. That was the purpose of the film, not to provide a History Channel Reenactment.”
Nicholas Meyer: “I think the filmmaker had an idea and an approach which differed from conventional narrative techniques. Like many artistic innovations, it make take some time to be fully evaluated. Is it a failure or something ahead of the curve? I’m not an unadulterated Nolan fan and couldn’t get behind his Batman movies (to be fair, I can’t watch any movie that ends in ‘man’ except Searching for Surgarman), but I did love Momento and I think the worth or non-worth of Dunkirk may take a while to become clear. All I can say with confidence is that the film stayed with me.”
I’d like to see Dunkirk again this Sunday. At the Universal Citywalk IMAX, of course.