[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Severian

I just rewatched Dunkirk and I think it’s pretty much perfect. I feel like that movie almost intentionally diverted from too much connection with specific characters to drive home the point of, “Hey, war, amirite? It’s bloody chaos and I don’t mind telling you.”

Also I love the 3 different timeframes/speeds. Really well executed. Honestly it’s probably his best film. But Interstellar is probably the one I love the most on an emotional level, and Dark Knight is the one I watch the most, as you know.

I haven’t seen 1917.

Haven’t seen Oppenheimer either.

the fragmented war thing and multiple perspectives i get implicitly of course, it's not a new device. and i love some of these small narratives, the pleasure yacht one was my favorite, very thrilling. and they all connect with each other of course, so it's not like they are meant to happen separately. they are multiple perspectives on the same thing.

but i come out lacking an overall sense of unity in the work. a sense of an ending not for this or that story but for the film itself, and from the larger story overall. there is a larger story of course, churchill wants his 30,000 but gets 300,000, the british army could have been annihilated right there but was rescued by a myriad small ships, and that is just told with words. i would have liked to see it. we see a few small pieces, and the pieces connect, but where the pieces fit in the overall scheme remains invisible; we're just told how things ended.

i have not seen interstellar, but my favorite of his movies continues to be memento. it is gritty, heartbreaking, philosophical, and well acted. when it came out it was like nothing else out there. it still feels like that. for me nolan is and will continue to be the memento guy until he blows my mind again with something else. but the thing is, artists tend to have their themes and they revisit them over and over. for example, scorsese is the guy from taxi driver and raging bull and goodfellas. he's made a lot more but those 3 rise very high and sort of define the rest of the work. similarly, yeah, memento ftw, for me.

anyway, 1917 is fucking great. there is a terrible chaos and much confusion as well, most of the time you don't know what the fuck is going on, but what brings it all together is the mission that drives through the middle of it. for this at times it feels like a video game, and i'm sure there is an influence of fps games in it, but it's not limited by that in any way, it just uses the device very very well. holy fuck, i love that film. i'd rewatch it this second.