Watch the first full trailer for Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan's new film that's due in theatres on July 21.
Christopher Nolan did not disappoint with his movie Dunkirk. This nearly flawless film put me on the edge of my seat for two hours.
It is the best thing I've seen about war since the stunning opening of Saving Private Ryan - and Nolan, bless him, is not prey to Steven Spielberg's compulsion to mar his creations by slopping them over with speechy goo.
As with all of Nolan's films, it's emotionally distant from its characters. Cillian Murphy plays an officer credited only as "Shivering Soldier," and none of the characters have much in the way of backstory or goals, other than survival.
A lesser director would have given in to the temptation to make this a story about the righteous crusade against the Germans, men fighting other men, but Nolan shows us a world in which the enemy is a plane, a torpedo, the water and the flying bullets, and men are reduced to little more than their rage to live.
The result is less a war film than a disaster movie. An exquisite disaster movie. I didn't expect such a vivid and visceral illustration of how quickly a ship can sink, or just how difficult it is to hit a target in the sky. I left the theatre almost too overwhelmed to talk.
Having recovered, I began to wonder why we can't have more pictures like Dunkirk. The easy answer is, of course, that there is only one Christopher Nolan, and only so many people willing to give him US$150 million ($202 million) to spend putting thousands of extras and some World War II-era ordinance on to a French beach. But the easy answer is incomplete.
It is getting rarer for a genius like Nolan to be given substantial sums of money to put their vision on the screen. Instead, the substantial sums go to "franchise films".
The pursuit of blockbuster movies is becoming less of an act of creation, and more an exercise in brand management. Franchises generate box office revenue, merchandising revenue and what economists call option value: Furious 7 does not simply bring ticket revenue for the studio, but also the ability to make more revenue through Fast and Furious Episodes 8, 9, 10 and onward to The Fast and the Furious 987.
None of the characters have many goals other than survival.
Naturally, such valuable properties cannot be left to the quirky whims of some individual; studios have intervened more and more heavily to ensure that no director goes too far off the rails. As with other markets where mass franchises have taken over, the result is a sort of flattening of the available quality: There aren't so many truly awful blockbusters being made anymore, but there aren't so many truly great ones either.
Indeed, there aren't so many big movies being made at all, because studios find it much more attractive to rake in cash off of a predictable comic book film with a big global audience than to make risky bets on greatness.
One reason Dunkirk is such a joy is that here is a film in which the deadening hand of the committee is nowhere evident. A committee would have wanted something with more merchandising and tie-in opportunities ("Just a thought: What if the captain of the destroyer is drinking a Diet Coke? Then we could give his action figure a detachable can that fits in his right hand".) A committee would have wanted a lovable band of misfits who could be taken into sequels. ("No, this is terrific: Next time, instead of fleeing France, they invade it!")
That this movie got made at all in modern Hollywood strikes me as a minor miracle, an undeserved blessing for which we should all be intensely grateful.
It's not that "no adult movies" get made anymore, as you sometimes hear: There are indie films, small films, studio-produced "Oscar bait" between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But the franchise pictures keep sucking up more of the oxygen in the room, threatening to strangle both the mid-budget "serious" films and the large summer blockbusters featuring one director's original vision.
As the "tentpole" picture increasingly becomes the main product of Hollywood, and directors are selected for their ability to please a committee, how many more memorable big films can we hope to get? If the flotilla of small craft disappears, all we'll have left is a few big ships drifting inoffensively in international waters - and a lot of moviegoers stranded on the beach.
