Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		5.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		4.5

Dunkirk 4K Blu-ray Movie Review

Technology Rules

Reviewed by Michael Reuben December 17, 2017

Dunkirk arrives on 4K amidst a full-court awards press by Warner Brothers and director Christopher Nolan, who are hoping to add a few statuettes to the film's impressive box office. The film is also the vanguard of a massive technical effort to present seven of Nolan's films on UHD, a format of which the director is such an enthusiastic convert that he has personally overseen the 4K preparation of all seven films. It's an interesting turn toward digital presentation for a filmmaker whose commitment to celluloid is legendary and whose movies routinely sport a credit indicating that they have been "Shot and Finished on Film". With even diehards like Steven Spielberg choosing the digital intermediate route for post-production, Nolan has become the most eminent holdout to remain committed to achieving his artistic vision by photochemical means.

Nolan is also rare among modern-day directors in preferring live action "in camera" effects over digital trickery, a predilection that is repeatedly stressed throughout the Blu-ray's extensive special features. As a triumph of filmmaking technique and innovation, Dunkirk stands favorable comparison with any of classical Hollywood's epic pre-digital achievements. The question is whether the film effectively grounds its vistas in an emotional immediacy that can breathe life into technical accomplishments which, by themselves, are impressive but soulless. On that score, at least for this viewer, Dunkirk does not succeed.

As anyone reading Blu-ray.com probably already knows, Dunkirk was shot with a combination of IMAX 65 and Panavision 65 cameras, and it was released to theaters in a variety of formats, including 70mm, IMAX and IMAX 70mm. It's an ideal source for 4K presentation in the home, and Nolan reportedly regards Dunkirk's UHD as its definitive representation on video. Warner is hoping that this new 4K disc will give the UHD medium a needed shove toward general acceptance, and their hope may pan out, because—whatever one's view of the film itself—the disc is a beauty.

After I saw Dunkirk theatrically—in 70mm, seated dead center in front of a three-story-high IMAX screen—I described it to friends and family as the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan extended to feature length. Having now rewatched Nolan's passion project on Blu-ray and UHD, I realize that my earlier description was inaccurate. Like Steven Spielberg in Ryan, Nolan has skillfully deployed vast cinematic resources to plunge the viewer into a maelstrom inspired by a historic World War II engagement. But Spielberg's effort remained anchored in a form of traditional storytelling that has all but disappeared in Dunkirk. Spielberg presented the D-Day invasion as experienced from the viewpoint of one Army officer, and he cannily cast Tom Hanks in the role, relying on one of film's most relatable everymen to establish an instant connection with the audience. After surviving the bloody battle, Hanks's Army captain is charged with an unusual mission, on which he is accompanied by a squad of men whose histories and characters we get to know intimately. Following the shock of its opening, Ryan settles into the familiar narrative pattern of a journey, punctuated by diverse encounters along the way and deepened by our increasing familiarity with the men and our growing attachment to each of them. The war matters to us because it matters to them.

Nolan has dispensed with all such narrative techniques. His characters are blanks, with many played by actors who are largely unknown. Throughout the film they remain almost entirely devoid of personal history or characteristics. The director moves them around the screen like chess pieces in a game that only he—and history—can see in its totality. (Yes, I realize the cast includes familiar faces like Kenneth Branagh and Tom Hardy, but bear with me.) In Nolan's rendition of this crucial moment in both the war and Britain's survival as a nation, individuals no longer matter, and neither do the leaders calling the shots from across the channel in London. (If you want to see what was happening at home, watch Darkest Hour.) What matters is the chaos, and Nolan aspires not just to re-create the chaos but also to subject viewers to an experience replicating the fear and uncertainty of the characters—but not because we are pulled into their world to feel what they do. In Dunkirk, it's not the events depicted on screen that shake us, but the dizzying sights and punishing sounds constructed for our entertainment. For all of Nolan's declared intent to honor the British soldiers and their civilian rescuers, he's recast the Dunkirk evacuation as a multiplex thrill ride that ends up feeling as artificial and self-referential as any of his Dark Knight movies or puzzle creations like Memento and The Prestige. This isn't the Dunkirk of history; it's Nolan's commemorative Tilt-A-Whirl.

The artifice begins with the film's three story lines, each of which runs at a different speed in a separate setting. On the beaches in France where 350,000 British troops have been cornered by the Nazi onslaught, the camera depicts the merciless bombing and strafing from German planes and the desperate (and futile) struggle to evacuate soldiers to the distant British destroyers. A message onscreen tells us that this ordeal lasts a week, although there's little sense of time passing, while Nolan keeps returning to an anonymous soldier identified as "Tommy" in the credits and played by Fionn Whitehead in his first feature film. Meanwhile, in a separate sequence that is said to occupy an hour, a fighter pilot attempts to offer air cover to the evacuation, battling superior forces and his own dwindling fuel supply. His name is Farrier, and he's played by Nolan regular Tom Hardy, but we barely see his face until the film's end, and he's such a generic figure that he could be played by anyone. In the seas below, a small private boat, the Moonstone, is part of the civilian armada mobilized by the British government to cross the Channel and attempt a rescue in waters too shallow for large Navy ships to navigate. Its captain is Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance), who is accompanied by his son, Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney), and a teenage acquaintance, George (Barry Keoghan), a diffident kid who just wants to be part of the war effort. En route, they rescue a shell-shocked soldier (Cillian Murphy) from a wrecked ship, who panics when he realizes that the Moonstone is returning him to Dunkirk. The sea sequence comes closest to traditional drama, simply because something has to fill the time during the day's length of the voyage.

Nolan orchestrates these sequences with precision, and editor Lee Smith, who has edited nearly all of the director's films, expertly cross-cuts among them, while Hans Zimmer's throbbing score generates a visceral sense of urgency that is accentuated by the ticking clock incorporated into the sound mix. But one is always aware of the artificiality of Nolan's temporal conceit, which demands the viewer's attention as much as—or even more than—the events being portrayed. As the three time periods converge, Dunkirk becomes an intellectual guessing game, challenging you to analyze where each strand will intersect the other and nudging your attention away from the perilous history that the film is working so hard to portray. The film's sights and sounds are effectively unnerving, but they also remain abstract. There's barely any sense of connection between historical events and the viewer.

The one exception to this chilly distance occurs in the seafaring segment, where the Moonstone's voyage effectively individuates several of the characters, notably Mark Rylance's Dawson. Much of the credit is due to Rylance, who is one of the finest actors working today, with an Oscar for Bridge of Spies and a shelf-load of theater awards too numerous to list. In Dawson's distinctive demeanor—simultaneously mournful, resigned, steadfast and determined—Rylance does what no other performer in Dunkirk manages to pull off, effectively willing into existence a specific and memorable character to which the viewer feels a connection, even if one can't say exactly what it is. (The connection becomes more concrete when key facts are revealed late in the film.) The particularity of Rylance's portrayal spreads to that of his son and of young George, whose involvement in the Dunkirk evacuation provides a poignant coda to the film. By contrast to Rylance and his makeshift crew, Cillian Murphy's traumatized survivor is a skeletal outline of a person, who has been inserted into the story to provide conflict. Similar abstraction befalls the naval officer played by Kenneth Branagh in the beach scenes, whose job is provide the bare essentials of exposition about the challenges of rescue. Branagh gives the part his all, and he's a fine enough actor to create the illusion of a full-blooded character for as long as he's on the screen, but his commander remains as generic as Hardy's flyer, and he leaves no impression once the film ends.

Ridley Scott has spoken of directing as a "performance", and Nolan's performance is certainly the star of Dunkirk. As the director coordinates aerial dogfights, stages perilous sea encounters and choreographs masses of extras on the beach in scenes of increasing desperation, his technical mastery always remains front and center. When the film's credits roll, you're not so much left with a sense of awe and admiration at the troops' survival as a grudging recognition of a filmmaker's virtuosity at bludgeoning audiences into admiring submission.

Dunkirk 4K Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Dunkirk was shot by Hoyte Van Hoytema, with whom Christopher Nolan first worked on Interstellar. As noted in the introduction, the movie was shot on film with a combination of IMAX 65 and Panavision 65 cameras, yielding a large-format negative, which has been scanned at 4K for this 2160p, HEVC/H.265-encoded UHD. Color correction and HDR grading were performed under Nolan's supervision, and the master went through numerous passes before he was satisfied with the image.

Dunkirk was released to theaters in multiple aspect ratios, including 2.39:1 for standard 35mm projection, 2.20:1 for 70mm exhibition and both 1.43:1 and 1.90:1 for IMAX venues. For the film's Blu-ray and UHD renditions, the director has chosen a shifting aspect ratio in which scenes filmed in IMAX appear at 1.78:1, while scenes filmed in Panavision 65 are framed at 2:20:1. Nolan has previously applied shifting aspect ratios to other films, including Dark Knight Trilogy, and the practice remains controversial. Some viewers find it unacceptably distracting, while others barely notice it. I fall somewhere in the middle, but the shifting aspect ratio has played no part in the disc's video or 4K scores.

Dunkirk's UHD image is stunningly vivid and refined, with a level of fine detail rarely seen on a home video display. Wherever one looks, the tiniest minutia are vivid and immediate, whether it's the fibers and strands in nautical ropes, the rivets of a Spitfire fusillage as it chases and evades German fighters or the understated patterns in the sweater vest worn by young George, as he tries to do his bit aboard the Moonstone. The large groups of soldiers on the beach remain distinct and separate even in the longest shots, and the effect of seeing all those individual helmets when the entire beach has to duck and cover against aerial attack is breathtaking. Dunkirk isn't a particularly colorful film, but the disc's HDR encoding has subtly differentiated its many shadings of blue and brown to provide a superior rendition of the chilly waters of the Channel, the sands of the beach, the brown bomber jackets of the Spitfire pilots, the worn khaki of the soldiers' uniforms and the civilian wardrobe of the Moonstone's crew. The dark blue of Kenneth Branagh's naval overcoat stands out against the pier on which his commander is standing, contemplating disaster. Every color and highlight in Dunkirk's frame appears to have been carefully tweaked for maximum impact.

Leaving aside my concerns about the film itself, the UHD of Dunkirk immediately leaps to the top of Warner's growing list of 4K presentations that fully deliver on the promise of the latest home video format. I don't know whether it will prove to be the 4K "killer app" for which the studio is hoping, but it certainly belongs in every UHD enthusiast's collection.

Dunkirk 4K Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

In addition to the shifting aspect ratio controversy discussed in "Video", Dunkirk's UHD and Blu-ray presentations have also attracted comment for their omission of a Dolby Atmos soundtrack. I have been advised by reliable sources that the decision to present the film's soundtrack in lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 was made by Christopher Nolan and reflects the director's choice of how he wants the film to be heard in the home theater. Rather than wade into this debate, I will simply report that the soundtrack is exceptionally detailed and powerful. Both the power and the detail are instantly in evidence as Dunkirk opens on a French village street, with the sounds of German propaganda leaflets gently swirling down from above and landing on the pavement. These modest effects are suddenly overwhelmed by thunderous rifle and machine gun fire, as the soldiers in the frame hightail it toward a French-manned barricade. Dunkirk's soundtrack offers a continual alternation of quiet and thunderous effects, but the soundtrack is also continuously loud and punishing, because Hans Zimmer's atonal score quickly takes over, weaving its mournful and foreboding strains so thoroughly into the mix, especially at the low end, that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the effects and the score. The bass extension of the music is often lower than the roar of armament or the hum of plane engines, subjecting the viewer to a continuous barrage that is presumably meant to induce a state of fear and anxiety, accentuated by the ticking of a disembodied clock. The elaborate sound design of individual set pieces like aerial fights and a particularly inventive sequence inside a beached trawler are rendered with precision. Regardless of any format considerations, this is a reference soundtrack that will challenge even the most capable systems.

Dunkirk 4K Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The 4K disc has no extras. Included in the package is the same separate disc of extras that accompanies the standard Blu-ray of Dunkirk. They are discussed here.

Dunkirk 4K Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Dunkirk is destined to become a demo disc du jour for 4K systems, certainly for its visual impact and quite possibly for its audio power as well. (Once you get past any disappointment at the choice of format, it's a remarkable soundtrack.) Whether the movie itself will enjoy long-term popularity is a different question. Big titles like The Matrix that helped propel DVD to universal acceptance were favorites that fans wanted to rewatch again and again, but I'm not sure whether Dunkirk will inspire similar devotion. It's an extraordinary technical achievement, but it's not an inviting world to which one yearns to return. There's more patriotic passion in Darkest Hour, more heroism in Saving Private Ryan and more battle fatigue in The Big Red One. For all its care and artifice, Dunkirk isn't nearly as moving as its creators obviously hoped. Its emotional temperature remains as chilly as the freezing waters across which Branagh's Navy commander can almost glimpse home.