Don't Look Up (2021)

Deep Impact on a Shallow Planet

or

The Dinosaurs Couldn't Say 'Told Ya So..."

 

A recent article in The Atlantic says that there are 21 million Americans who have no relationship to reality, wanting to re-instate Donald Trump as President of the United States, citing sheisters, Alzheimic Air Force Generals, and bad math to support their contentions. There's a bunch of Gen Z's who think birds are fake (they should get together with the folks who worry about chem-trails—there must be a connection because they're both in the AIR!) And we've always had Flat-Earthers because they've never been in a plane and figured out why the shortest distance to get to anywhere is not over the pole.

 

But, ask a farmer about global warming and they get serious.  Or a gardener. They've seen the time-shifts. They've seen annuals sprout too early. Crops lose their "window" and you compensate by shifting the planting earlier, risking the prospect of freezing. They know. You can't count on the Earth anymore. You can't count on anything...except maybe on one hand the number of friends you have that actually might be sane.

 

It used to be "If You Don't Stand For Something, You'll Fall for Anything." Now, with the internet the harder you stand, you'll fall even harder.

So, with that little sanctimony out of the way...what's the scoop on Don't Look Up, Adam McKay's look at "problem-solving" in a modern "connected" world?

 

McKay's conceit is to look at the "climate change" debate in a metaphorical way—what if we knew an "extinction-level" sized body was going to hit the Earth and we couldn't depend on our leaders, political or business, to save us for any reason?

Michigan State doctoral candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is spending a quiet night at an observatory studying trace gasses in dead galaxies for Astronomy Professor Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) when she sees something weird on the screen. It's a comet...and it's moving. Mindy is called and he and his grad students celebrate what will be the Dibiasky Comet, and start working the orbital path...when Mindy starts to get nervous and tells all the other students to go home. Except for Kate. She sees what he saw: that the comet is heading for Earth. It's 5-6 km long and it will hit Earth in 6 months and 14 days. Call it 26 weeks.

They call NASA, who conference calls them in with Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The link says it's real. And shit just got real; Oglethorpe mutters "that's a big boy" and then goes quiet when he realizes it signals "an extinction-level event." And while NASA advises caution, Oglethorpe orders a plane to bring Mindy and Dibiasky to the White House to tell the President. Dibiasky sees the Oval Office through an open door and grabs Mindy: "Are we really about to tell the President of the United States that we have just over six months until humankind—basically every species—is completely extinct?" Getting a shaky affirmative, she promptly throws up in an executive waste-basket. 

They're kept waiting for seven hours because the Executive Branch is in crisis mode: their nominee for Supreme Court justice has been revealed to be a pervert. Coming back the next day, they're given 20 minutes to explain what's going on and it doesn't go well: Mindy is nervously hyperventilating and that's off-putting to the coke-head Chief of Staff (Jonah Hill), who got the job because he's the President's son. The President (Meryl Streep) is a hot mess, unable to focus on the potential disaster for need of a smoke, and saying that the timing of this "is atrocious" (mid-terms). She cuts to the chase: "What's the 'ask' here?" "Save us" is the reply. The decision is made to have "her people" look into it and "Sit tight and assess."

The three scientists can't believe it—they only have six months—so, they decide to take it to the press, the Washington Herald, who sets up a segment on it at the end of "The Daily Rip" (hosted by shiny anchors played by Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett) after a segment on the disasterous Supreme Court pick and then on the break-up of two "important" pop stars (Ariana Grande and Scott Mescudi). Warned that they don't have "media training" Dibiasky and Mindy have trouble negotiating the happy banter of the hosts until Dibiasky cracks and melts down on-camera: "Are we not being clear? Maybe the destruction of the entire planet isn't supposed to be FUN! Maybe it's supposed to be terrifying." The hosts are affronted. That's just bad form. And bad television. Dibiasky becomes a snarky meme, and interest in the Herald's story on the internet drops like a comet from the sky. So, they stop covering it.

But, because they've gone on national TV with national secrets Dibiasky and Mindy are arrested by the FBI, and the White House has to scramble. President Orlean goes on television in an elaborately staged event on a naval vessel to announce an emergency spending bill to launch a space mission to try and blow up the comet—a space mission that is manned by a single astronaut (Ron Perlman) because "Washington needs a hero." All well and good until a cell-phone/tech pioneer, Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), is told by his team that the comet is a source of Earth-depleted minerals that are critical for making cell-phones. The mission is scrubbed—he's a big donor to the President's campaign—and another mission is planned to break up the comet and have it's pieces fall into the Pacific so they can be recovered and resourced.

One sees the point: nobody is going to do anything about it while there's time enough for people to figure out a way to make money from it, because that's the only "killing" they're concerned about. If there was a way to take carbon out of the atmosphere that wasn't deemed fiscally expensive and would make a fortune, we'd be worrying, instead, that there was too much ice at the poles, rather than selling our waterfront property. Don't Look Up merely converts that to the disaster scenario of Armageddon—at times the movie looks like Michael Bay's "this would look great in a car commercial" style of film-making—or Deep Impact.

The satire veers all over the place, sometimes sharp (of course people wouldn't believe it until they saw it with their own eyes, and, of course, a television chat show would cock up such news and, of course, a screaming fit on-air is going to be dismissed and the stuff of internet jokes) and heavy-handed (the political stuff is baldly aimed at the last administration, with the difference being that the Orlean team look a bit more competent and decisive). It falls somewhere between Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy smart and Tropic Thunder dumb without ever achieving Dr. Strangelove brilliance. One grimly concedes McKay's aiming for the fences but he sometimes gets distracted by his own gee-wizardry and sarcastic weltschmerz to score a home-run.

Some of it is performance issues: Perry and Blanchett are rather one-note, but that seems appropriate for chat hosts. Hill's performance is as obnoxious as it's supposed to be, but Streep wears her tweet-hurt a bit too far, although it is reminiscent of Sarah Palin-subtlety. DiCaprio tries to achieve his Wolf of Wall Street comedic heights at times and falls short, but impresses in his dramatic scenes. Lawrence is terrific as the audience stand-in for expressing incomprehension and Rob Morgan stays out of comedy territory completely and frequently becomes a life-raft of reason. Best of all is Mark Rylance, who makes his tech entrepreneur suggestive but not an imitation, with just the right touch of Asperger's, child-like wonder, and child-like malice.

The reviews for Don't Look Up have been horrible, accusing McKay of condescension and being supercilious—social critics usually are—and there's a whiff of that here. But, there's also an earnestness that his heart is in the right place, if slightly broken, railing like a mad prophet to an ignoring, apathetic crowd. Despite the brickbats, I found myself enjoying it much more than I suspected I would, recognizing its weaknesses but appreciating the strengths.  

Now, about the message. Maybe by clothing "climate change" in a more direct disaster scenario is too subtle. There is a scene in the last season of "The Newsroom" ("Main Justice" Season 3 Episode 3) where there's an interview with a scientist from the EPA who has been prevented from issuing an alarming report about the environment (involving CO2 levels measured in Hawaii), and when asked to sum up the findings replies "a person has already been born who will die due to catastrophic failure of the planet" The anchor is taken aback and tries to walk it back to a less alarming conclusion, "Let's see if we can find a better spin...people are starting their weekends."

 

There isn't one. The only counter-argument is denial and that's just deflection and a stall to action. And we're doomed anyway. It's funny and it's a gut-punch. A sick joke that punches right in the nose.

 

On the much grander scale of things—pale blue dot-wise—cosmic catastrophes happen all the time—we just haven't heard about it since we haven't gotten television from there (yet)...because it's a messy Universe, despite all the space. We postulate the supernovas, the gravity collisions, but cannot grasp the implications, like imagining what happens to an ant colony when developing condo's. But, think of it in the "if Helen Keller fell down in a forest, would she make a sound" kind of way: "What if there was a cataclysmic event, and nobody did anything about it?"

 

The cosmic punch-line is "They deserved their fate."

The Trial of the Chicago 7

"'Fictionalizing History and Sorkin It Out"

 or

"Give Me a Moment, Would You, My Friend? I've Never Been On Trial For My Thoughts Before" ("It's a Revolution. We May Have to Hurt Some Feelings")

The Trial of the Chicago 7 has been in the works since somewhere around 2006 when Aaron Sorkin was introduced to the idea of writing it by Steven Spielberg, who wanted to make it as a directing project. Seemed like a good fit; Sorkin is the "dean" of writing compelling court-room dramas and has a knack for putting emotional juice into "wonk" arguments. That work results in some rapturous writing, even if one feels like opposing arguments are given short shrift for the "slam-dunk" moment. With him, it's a—you know—"a thing"

One wonders what Spielberg would have done with it. One knows it would have been a much more precise directing exercise. One hopes that Spielberg might have taken the script and roughed if up a little, textured it with a bit more grit, and thus friction, and thrown in some ambivalence to make the thing more of a courtroom "shit-show" (as it was) than anything too neat and tidy. Maybe an "anti-polish" of the script by the Coen Brothers could do that.

Because the way Sorkin tells it, it's all very neat and tidy with a wildly "boo-yah" finish, where the defendants are convicted on one of the charges—to incite a riot (rather ironic post-01/06/2021)—but their post-conviction statement is such a rousingly heart-felt protest that the crowd in the court-room (and even the prosecution!) gets up to applaud in solidarity.

In a word..."Nah!"

To be fair, trying to organize the ramshackle case number 69 Cr 180 The United States v. David Dellinger et al. into a coherent timeline of pertinent facts that has "a wow finish" is an almost impossible task. Yes, the case was a slap-dash collecting of "usual suspects" at the behest of the Nixon Administration, so that a consistent charge was specious at best. Yes, the trial went on despite one of the defendants not having the benefit of counsel. And, yes, that defendant ended up being bound and gagged for a good section of the trial. Yes, Judge Julius Hoffman was out of his depth trying to juggle the cats involved, ending up charging 175 combined contempt charges among the defendants and their lawyers, indicating not so much that there were violations, but rather that the judge had no control over his court.

What actually happened, you can find here and here. There are so many feints, fibs, and sleights of hand in Sorkin's "portrait" (rather than "a picture" he's said about the script, something he also said about his script for Steve Jobs) that I could write the rest of the review going over them. But, they're well-documented (the least of which is that there were eight defendants counting Bobby Seale, not seven—the man was only in Chicago to give a speech, but he was lumped in with the others because putting a Black Panther on trial was "good optics" for a cynical Department of Justice, until the optics turned horrifying).

It is a "given" that, unless someone is making a documentary, film-makers will swerve away from the facts (and even documentary film-makers will cherry-pick from their sources). No one was there in the room taking down notes for dialog (although, in this case, Sorkin did have the trial transcripts), so we don't know what was said behind closed doors. There's a writer's term/cop-out for making things up: "Writing to Silence," because there is no one around to object.

Except, of course, the audience.

What is the creator's responsibility—to the audience or to truth? Tough question. It should be kept in mind by any discerning audience member that when the line "Based on a True Story" appears that it is a hedge against accuracy: the actual Perdicaris taken hostage in The Wind and the Lion was a man, not a plucky widow, and we don't know what Neil Armstrong was doing by that moon crater, even though First Man has him completing an emotional story point in the film. It might be some dramatic license to make a better story, to tie up a dramatic loose end. Or, changing the facts might be some cathartic wish-fulfilment as Quentin Tarantino provided in Inglourious Basterds or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

John Ford famously used the sentiment "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend" even as, in his later films, he sought to negate it.

Sorkin is not above re-writing history for the perfect dramatic punch-line...he did it quite a bit in "The Newsroom," blending real-life events with a parallel universe news organization. And one can't forget the point in A Few Good Men when he ginned up false drama by making Tom Cruise's defense attorney appear unsure and faltering before delivering his final gavel blow. It makes no sense, other than to show his protagonist at his lowest point before his turn-around to triumph. He "had" to get one more dramatic beat in to make the ending suitably triumphant. Audience manipulation. Nothing more.

But, now—after this particular Inauguration Day—perhaps we should reflect on the responsibilities to Truth. Even if it makes the side you favor look bad...or less righteous. False narratives and wishful, even magical, thinking does not make it so. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, but that art has to stand on the fundamentals of truth. Not just how we want the truth to be. No matter who's side you're on.

Well! "Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?"

Sorkin does a good job mixing in contextural news footage (and some of Haskell Wexler's footage from Medium Cool) from the times, with his DP Phedon Papamichael. Given the amount of material he has to cull from, Sorkin, as both writer and director manages to keep the personalities he's interested in—that is anybody except John Froines and Lee Weiner, who are given short shrift—engaged and sparring. Acting stand-outs negotiating the dialogue are Eddie Redmayne's Tom Hayden and Mark Rylance's William Kuntsler (Jeremy Strong's Jerry Rubin is a bit of a buffoon, unfortunately). But, the stand-out is Sacha Baron Cohen's Abbie Hoffman, not so much in how good he is portraying the trial's Merry Prankster, but in how good he is in the dramatic scenes, when the veneer drops and the words become measured and sharp as a knife.

The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)

Written at the time of the film's release...and before Mark Rylance, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Eddie Redmayne became "Big Deals" (and failed to be mentioned).

"Lord help the Mister who comes between and my Sister/
and Lord help the Sister who comes between me and my Man"

"Gettin' tickets for the 'girlie-show?'" the ticket-taker said to me.

*Sigh* If only...

Sadly, there's not much life in The Other Boleyn Girl--either of them. Peter Morgan's script (from the Phillipa Gregory novel and the BBC production) is a bit cut-and-dried---er, poor choice of words---and it doesn't create anything other than a proper colonist's righteous indignation over the way women in prominent positions were treated back then. Now, the sexism isn't so much like horse-trading (as it is in this film), as in just making sure that standards for men are inequitable with those for women, as we do in these oh-so-much-more-enlightened times. I came away thinking Morgan--who's probably set up a script-writing mill by this time--might want to take a script or two off, and sharpen the quill a bit. But it's not all Morgan's fault--he does get some choice words in once in awhile. The direction by Justin Chadwick is flat and staid--even by Masterpiece Theater standards--without even the benefit of some Merchant-Ivory snootiness to breathe life into the thing.

Then you've got the actors. As "the two Boleyn whores," Scarlett Johansson, as younger sister Mary*, uses 1.5 expressions throughout the entire movie and both involve mouth-breathing--no, sorry, that's unfair--2.5, she has a child-birth scene, and Natalie Portman looks like she's going to run away with the thing, having a fine old time as the smarter, more manipulative Anne but her hysterics towards the end have an air of high-school production--when the chords of her neck stand out you begin to worry that the court is going to catch fire like Sissy Spacek did in Carrie.

As for Eric Bana, it's not good to be the King. Henry VIII is one of those characters that most actors relish playing whether its Charles Laughton, Robert Shaw or Keith Michell. Bana, though is a sometime thing--he can be "on" (Munich, Black Hawk Down, Troy), or he can be totally "off" (Hulk), giving nothing up for the camera (or audiences) to grab onto. Here he plays a weak King by giving a weak performance--as if that'll do the job convincingly enough. But it would be better to have this lusty, conscience-less King do his selfish terrible deeds and have a good time once in a while. I mean, why completely sever the ties between England and the Catholic Church if you're not having any fun while doing it? The same point is made, it's just not so spot-on...or so deadly dull.

One looks for any good performance in the thing, seeing how its not an action-piece at all, and Kristin Scott Thomas continually looks like there's a bad smell on-set and is allowed one moment of high dudgeon, and Jim Sturgess, the chirpy "Paul-ish" lead of Across the Universe seems to threaten to belt out another Beatles tune any minute. There is one ray of sunshine in the whole thing and that is Ana Torrent as Catherine of Aragon, speaker of the earlier "Boleyn whore" line. Every moment she's on the screen there is a power and command that every other member of the cast is lacking. She looks and acts like a Queen who belongs there, rather than one merely playing dress-up.

* "Is the story true", I hear you cry. Well, Gregory defends any historical inaccuracies in the book—or agreed-upon inaccuracies—by saying that it's from the character's point of view, in this case Mary's. But nothing is made of the fact that Mary is rumored to have had an affair with another King—of France, leading to her expulsion from the French court—earlier than her time with Henry, and even the most unreliable of narrators might get the fact that Mary was the older of the two sisters correct.

Ready Player One

Full Tilt Boogie (Midnight at the Oasis)
or
Virtual Encounters of the Shallow Kind

During the break that was required for the extensive special effects in Ready Player One, Steven Spielberg prepped, cast, shot, edited and released The Post, a very fine film that did get some attention for its historical material that, given the world at large, seemed all the more relevant today.* Ironically, the gee-wizardry of his new film does not feel relevant—unless someone has lived under a rock or in Mom's basement since the 1980's—as RP1 is a monument to nostalgia of the most puerile and shallow kind, piling on pop-culture references on top of each other as they flash, then die, on the 3-D IMAX screen, only to be replaced by others upon others along the way. This movie could conceivably fund its own edition of Trivial Pursuit next Christmas—and it is sure to be the most "paused" movie of the last (and next) quarter-century.

Look, I'm not a gamer. I choose to waste my time watching movies and writing about them on this worthless blog (so, who am I to judge?), so to see Spielberg do his "take" on the immersive experience with the same peripatetic verve that he gave to The Adventures of Tintin is not my idea of the director progressing as an artist, no matter how much of a roller-coaster thrill ride this film might be. It hearkens back to the Spielberg, who grew up frightening his sisters with his horror stories. It's the same Spielberg of the intimate, brilliant detail—like cutting away (in Jurassic Park) while a jeep is trying to out-pace a Tyrannosaurus Rex to a shot of a side-mirror, with the etched warning that "Objects May Be Closer Than They Appear." That Spielberg is here in abundance, unafraid to toss in asides and joking references, which he'd never dared with his more serious films like Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, or The Post. This is Spielberg on top of Play-Mountain.

Oklahoma, City in the Year 2045, not so soon after "The Corn-Syrup Shortage" and "The Band-width Wars," and the cultural hub of the world, while looking like a dystopian nightmare that would depress Calcutta and Jo-burg. The populace lives in "The Stacks," literally motor-homes and trailers stacked on top of each other, under a drab pollution-filled sky. One imagines we're in Oklahoma City because the coasts have since flooded and drowned, and that things are in such a sorry state because through every window of those trailers, people are escaping their realities by entering "the Oasis."

"The Oasis" is its own alternate reality, with its own rules, its own culture, and its own economic system, built on lives and bonuses accrued during play. It is the product of a company called Gregarious Games, a somewhat ironically named corporation as its messianic co-founder, James Halliday (Mark Rylance in a performance that resembles a morose version of Rick Moranis' accountant in the original Ghostbusters) is hardly the gregarious type. He and his former partner, Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg) established the gaming platform, which has virtually and literally supplanted the drudgery of real life, in which the participants can compete against each other using avatars of their choice accumulating personal fortunes that can be used to improve their game and their alternate lives.

The Game 1 Grand Prix containing such vehicles as the Back to the Future Delorean, the 1960's TV Batmobile, Steven King's "Christine," the V8 interceptor from Mad Max, the van from "The A-Team", K.I.T.T. from "Knight-Rider", and the Mach 5 from "Speed Racer".

The story revolves around Halliday's be-quest announced after his death of his challenge for control of the Oasis and Halliday's personal fortune of over a trillion dollars, which can be one by winning three particular games, each rewarding a key that will unlock the ultimate challenge to win the Oasis' easter egg that will give control to the virtual kingdom. Obviously, this is a really big deal to the world at play, setting up ultimate challenges between "gunters" (the term for "egg-hunters") and a corporate conglomerate (only one?) named Innovative Online Industries—an Oasis outfitter, run by a former Gregarious intern Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who wants to corporatize the Oasis for his own ends—he has already run studies that he can commercialize 80% of the Oasis' playing surface before his flashing graphics induce seizures in players.

The High Five's—Sho, Aech, Parzival, Art3mis and Daito—
talk to the Curator of the Oasis archives.

That's the hissable villain. Who are the heroes? They are the "High Five," competing gamers who form their own coalition to study notes, compare strategies and research Halliday's life—in the Oasis' virtual archives—to gain an advantage in the competition, dubbed Anorak's Quest. They are Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a somewhat doughy 18 year old who plays as the avatar Parzival, his mechanic friend "Aech" (revealed to be Lena Waithe), the brothers "Daito" and "Sho" (Win Morasaki and Philip Zhao) and the mysterious "Art3mis," (she's ultimately Olivia Cooke), Wade's chief rival and finally partner in the quest for the keys. While they're all putting their minds together virtually, Sorrento is trying to learn their secrets in the real world to gain an advantage in the game.

Aech blows away Freddy Krueger and sets his sights on Duke Nukem.

Spielberg sets up the duel-matches as full-tilt battles royale whether in the neon -graced corridors of The Oasis or the begrimed back-alleys of Oklahoma City—it's just that the Oasis side has so much merch and copyrighted imagery that it's tough for the real world to compete (it's not too distant from another Spielberg production—Robert Zemeckis' Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—where the real world suffers mightily in comparison to the wonders of "Toontown"). And the three game-set-pieces are so splendidly realized (especially, for me, the second one which I won't reveal other than the clue that inspires it—"The creator hates his creation") that one's interest is drawn to the world within a world, which is probably the point, even while Spielberg is showing the exploitable madness of it all, frame by meticulous frame. I mean, didn't you rather live in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory—the thread and thrust of which this film has in its digital marrow.

So, yeah, everybody wants to be in the Oasis—it's bigger, flashier, and something of a shit-storm for the hyper-active and hyperbolic. So, why is the movie so melancholy, especially when, after the solving of every puzzle, the film goes into a post-traumatic depression when contemplating the inner life of Halliday, The Man Who Built Everything? It's because the whole thing is an Oz-ian "there's no place like reality" info-mercial designed to teach the sad lessons of Halliday's life...by example. By the end of it, the most deserving will win the prize, but only by appreciating the clues along the way and learning the lessons to the keys of life that are merely trinketed as competition goals. The ultimate victory in the competition is in appreciating life beyond the Oasis. He who desires it least wins the most.

There's something almost biblical there. And, as with the Bible (or Willy Wonka and Chocolate Factory), in Spielberg's fable, the winner is the one who can look beyond the competition, and look deeper to the lessons inherently learned, and—in that gaming environment—put away childish things, including hero-worship, to become one's own hero, avatar's be damned.

Ready Player One is a smart little reflection of one of the simplest goals of a game—to get a life. And walk away from the table.

* He did, basically, the same thing back in 1990, where, while prepping the special effects for Jurassic Park, he oversaw the production of Schindler's List—which he was only allowed to make if he did the more popcorn-oriented film.

Dunkirk (2017)

Stranded on the Beach
or
"This Was Our Finest Hour/Day/Week"

The events of the evacuation of Dunkirk are well known (at least they SHOULD be, whether or not you're a student of History). In May of 1940, the Nazi's had pushed British and French troops to the continent's edge with nowhere else to go but the ocean. And across that channel was home...and safety. Unless you're a member of The Channel Swimming Association, there is no way out. You have literally been "pushed to the sea." 

The Tribal Wisdom is what the imagination produces and what propaganda encourages without attention to detail—thousands of troops stuck on the beach that are rescued by the efforts of the maritime industry and common Brits with boats who saw the need and took to the sea to do their part and bring "the boys" home. Very dramatic. Very inspiring. 

And quite false...to a degree. There's less drama if you know that the evacuation took over a week (unless you're on the beach waiting, of course). There's less inspiration if you find out that the "little ships" of the rescue were mostly commandeered by the British Navy and piloted by sailors to Dunkirk with or without the help of the owners. But, not all of them; civilians did take part. Just not in the numbers the wisdom of the tribe can accommodate and be pleased and amazed and proud of itself and have the story go from happenstance to legend. Inspiration for a war that still had a long way to go.

So, how does writer-director Christopher Nolan handle this? He has it both ways. Quite ingeniously.

We start by following a small patrol of British troops walking down a Dunkirk street in the rain. A rain of leaflets. Dropped by German Messerschmitt's strafing the area, they are propaganda fliers telling the Brit's to give up because their position is untenable. They are surrounded. There's just enough time to take in this message when truth is given to the threat—bullets start flying sporadically and the patrol changes their pace from a casual march to a disorganized run.

We will never see the advancing Nazi army throughout the movie—their presence will only be noted by bullets, bullet-holes and the presence of Messerschmitt's in the air.* Despite sprinting to the sides of the streets, climbing over fences, taking the cover provided by the back-alleys behind the brownstones, one by one, the patrol is cut down leaving only Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), to dart for the French lines crouched behind sand-bag enforcements defending the sea and makes it towards the beach.

The Mole/ a Week

Talk about a beachhead: acres of beach stretch between the open sea and the sea-wall, expanding and contracting with the tides, enticingly narrowing the gap between entrapment and home by mere yards. That beach is covered by meandering soldiers, the transports they came in, beached boats uselessly stranded, and bodies, waiting for a burial that might occur by the shifting sands if they cannot be transported to an internment at home. Even that represents a evocation of time, a slow race of forces that will be decided one way or another...given time. Time is a major player in Dunkirk.

The time on the Dunkirk beach is taken up with two activities—waiting for the ships to dock by the mole (the long pier that juts out into the channel at high tide) and trying to survive, as the area is strafed by German planes that make periodic runs trying to inflict as much damage on the soldiers on the mole and the beach, with an arsenal much more damaging than leaflets. For the soldiers, the time is spent just trying to survive until rescue arrives. But time and tide wait for no man and one has to work to increase one's chances, given the opportunity.

On the beach, Tommy connects with another soldier who he encounters burying one of the soldiers on the beach. Gibson (Aneurin Barnard), is one of the thousands waiting for the transports that seem to take forever to cross the Channel. Together, they conspire about how to get on the next ship at the earliest possible opportunity. It doesn't take long for them to see that the wounded, for whom time is the shortest, are given priority on the mole. They "volunteer" themselves and one of the many wounded left unattended to "cut the lines" and get on the next ship. They are dismayed to find that even though the wounded are given priority, their attendants are not.

Their next step is to hide in the cross-beams under the mole to try to smuggle themselves on the next ship. While doing that, they are shocked to see the ship they had planned to take destroyed in a bombing attack. They manage to help another soldier named Alex (Harry Styles of "One Direction"). With Alex, their next attempt is more successful, managing to scramble onto the next ship, but once in the channel, the ship is struck by a torpedo and sunk. A number of skiffs, one commanded by a soldier played by Cillian Murphy, start the journey back to the beach...and more waiting.

And at this point, things may get a bit confusing for the audience. We have already seen Cillian Murphy's unnamed soldier, but earlier, in another section of the film, plucked from the sea and suffering from a debilitating shell-shock. This will take some explaining (even though Nolan announces his intentions with a mathematical economy).

Dunkirk is Nolan's shortest feature, save only for his first, Following. That economy of time is split up by three points of interest: The Mole/One Week (which we've been talking about), The Sea/One Day, which takes place over a single day (fudging history a bit), and The Air/One Hour. All sequences are spread evenly throughout the film's 106 minute running time, creating a juxtaposition of events that doesn't match a linear timeline. Nolan plays with the sequence of events, cutting across the ones that took a week to play out, the ones that took a day, and that only take an hour of time, warping the chronology in a consciously planned jumble to create the biggest pay-off for the film, a strategy he used in Following, Memento, Inception, and—thanks to the time-warping abilities of black holes—Interstellar. And so that 106 minutes contains the week of the stranded soldiers on the beach, the day of one particular mariner, Mr. Dawson (the ever-reliable Mark Rylance), who, with his son (Tom Glynn-Carney) and his friend (Barry Keoghan), takes on the rescue journey himself rather than have his boat conscripted by the military, and an hour of time for two RAF pilots, Collins (Jack Lowden) and Farrier (Tom Hardy, who continues to show why he's amazing), who are attempting to knock out the stuka's from making their withering attacks before their own fuel runs out.

The Sea/ a Day

The Air/ an Hour

Even though Nolan puts a title to the beginning of each sequence, that strategy might not sink in—or will be long forgotten by the time linear discrepancies start popping up, leaving some in the audience, like the soldiers in the film, feeling stranded on the beach. With an awful lot of actors of limited fame on-screen, the audience might have long given up trying to follow the details of who's who/what's what/ and when's when and find themselves not caring, or even thinking that the careful film-making has gotten terribly sloppy. That's not true, but in its conception, Nolan might have over-estimated his audience. But, the studios said the same thing about Inception and no one had a problem with that (and if they did, the visuals made people go back for a second viewing).

That may happen with Dunkirk, too, although the material is far more bitter and tragic, even if sometimes you have to shake yourself to realize what it is you're seeing. The set-pieces and episodes of each time-line are of a piece, although of the three, the one that has to do the continuity heavy-lifting is The Mole sequences—Nolan plays each one to its logical conclusion of where it is safe to cut away, usually once one of the beached trio achieves some sort of safety. The other sequences—The Sea and The Air—being much shorter through-stories afford to have hanging themes that are interrupted by The Mole sequences without doing much damage.

If The Mole is a survival story, The Sea is drama, with conflicts between the participants as Rylance's Mr. Dawson forges ahead with his part, despite arguments and set-backs, especially once Murphy's shell-shocked soldier is dragged aboard. Rylance is a versatile and cunning actor and his devotion to the enterprise is communicated with an unwavering tone to his voice and a purpose behind the eyes, the source of which is only explained eventually. Such is Rylance's skill that never once does one suspect him of being crazy, although he is clearly setting off on a channel-crossing that may prove suicidal.

And the shortest of the film-length sequences—but the busiest—is the very compact one in The Air, which is pure action, and unrelenting action at that. Three RAF planes attempt to take out the clutch of German planes interfering with the evacuation. Before long, the squadron leader is taken out, leaving two pilots to take on the Germans. If Nolan's work in the other sequences is stately (in the Mole) and shaky-cam personal (in the Sea), The Air is a tour de force of aerial acrobatics and keeping a tight reign on camera positions to keep the audience focused on who has whom in one's sights. It is also testament to how good an actor Tom Hardy is, as, for the most part, he does most of his acting with his eyes, his face hidden behind an air-mask (not unlike his Bane character in The Dark Knight Rises).

Nolan manages to make it all mesh and come together for a final fifteen minutes that makes it feel like a love-letter to the British Isles, warts and all, certainly to the souls who came together, conscripted or not, to actually "bring the soldiers home" rather than just paying lip-service to it. At that point, civilian and military become one, an idea that seems almost unimaginable today with lengthy adventures half-a-world away. It displays an unselfish, even heroic, payback from the protected to the protectors that our global conflicts make practically impossible. These are the things one thinks about during Dunkirk, with its long stretches that go without dialog or exposition, but just let events play out visually, without having some chatty by-stander keeping the audience informed about what's at stake.

At the same time that Nolan is messing with the filmic space-time continuum, he's also saying something about the dichotomy of truth and the greater good. In more than a few occasions in the film a character will come to a conclusion that just isn't born out in fact, or withhold a truth because it is the right—the decent or most practical thing—thing to do. It's like with so much sacrificing going on, the actuality of things becomes just another casualty, even if it's to keep a person without hope to keep going, to provide solace to the wounded, or to shore up a country in desperate need of solidarity, when truths are anything but self-evident.

Dunkirk takes chances, sometimes in thrilling ways. It's good to see Nolan find a bit more footing and discipline—a discipline that involves experimentation—that marks his work at its best. But, one becomes weary of the film around the half-way mark. Perhaps it's Hans Zimmer's concretish, thudding score, which seems to have as its major instrument a metronome—in case anyone hadn't figured out the whole time-motif thing—that more often interferes with the story-telling than it supports. It creates a disconnect that fights against Nolan's immersive experience, creating irritation more than something that pulls the movie together.

* Not precisely true: we do see them at the end out of focus and mere presences, but despite their constant threat and actions, to reveal anything else would be a spoiler. Another Nolan dichotomy.