Everyone talks about Oppenheimer – but Christopher Nolan’s best film is something completely different

Oppenheimer dominates this year’s Oscar nominations with 13 categories. Christopher Nolan’s previous performance at Oscar Awards is, however, more than poor. Although his films are regularly nominated, they mainly win in the more technical categories such as Best Film Editing or Best Sound Mix.

He received his first Oscar nomination for the script for Memento in 2002. It was only 16 years later that he received his first nomination for Best Director, for the war film Dunkirk, which was also nominated for Best Film. However, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences failed to award both awards to the best film of the year. Sorry Guillermo del Toro, but Dunkirk is not only the best film of 2017, but also overall Nolan’s best film ever.

Dunkirk is Nolan’s cinematic spectacle at its best

Christopher Nolan makes films for the cinema. He says that again and again, into every microphone and in every interview. For him it’s not just about a story, he’s about the experience on the big screen, the big spectacle. Dunkirk is this cinema experience in its purest form. The film begins abruptly and hardly gives us a second to breathe during its surprisingly short running time of 106 minutes. Nolan has dealt with the theater of war chose what was probably the greatest cinematic spectacle he could bring to the screen.

In his typical manual work, he implements the events of Dunkirk with great technical effort. More than 6,000 extras were used during filming. In one scene, 62 real ships gathered at the original locations. During an evacuation scene, Nolan and his team coordinated a camera crane, a Spitfire fighter plane and 1,5000 extras at the same time.

He brought all of this to the big screen as a 70mm print, making Dunkirk only the third film of the 2010s to receive such a large format presentation, after The Master and The Hateful 8. All of this ensures that Nolan’s preference for big cinema pictures is here perfect symbiosis with the re-enactment of a major turning point of the Second World War and thus harmonizes with the history of the 20th century. It is incomprehensible that the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did not honor his performance.

Dunkirk is not only Nolan’s best film, but also Hans Zimmer’s best score

The long-standing and legendary collaboration between Christopher Nolan and film composer Hans Zimmer reaches its absolute climax with Dunkirk. Admittedly, the bombastic character melodies from the Dark Knight trilogy or the swelling final moments from “Inception” have burned themselves into film history. The highlight of the Dunkirk score is that all of the music carries the film. From the first second the score pushes the film’s pace forward. On the one hand, this is because large parts of the film are accompanied by music. Of the 106 minutes of film time, Hans Zimmer’s music takes up almost 60 minutes.

On the other hand, it lies in the structure of the music. Zimmer relies on an auditory illusion, the “Shepard scale,” which simulates an infinitely increasing scale. This means that Dunkirk’s score seems to continue to swell and become infinitely more dramatic. Zimmer’s score perfectly captures the structure and dramaturgy of the film. No wonder Nolan and Zimmer went their separate ways after Dunkirk. It just doesn’t get any better than perfect.

The war film relies on Nolan’s strengths

Christopher Nolan is an acclaimed director, but not without controversy. In Dunkirk he makes full use of his strengths and puts his weaknesses in the background. One of his strengths has always been the connection between film form and content. With Dunkirk he manages to adapt his established game to the content with different time levels and an unconventional narrative structure.

Dunkirk simultaneously recounts the events of a week (ground troops), a day (sea rescue) and an hour (air mission). In this way he brings together the three natural forces of earth, water and air as well as the three British military units Army, Navy and Air Force through the film form. In typical Nolan style, this is a bit confusing at first. But it resolves itself more quickly than, for example, the complicated forward-backward game of Tenet or the rather flat time games from Interstellar.

Dunkirk’s trick of showing relatively unknown faces in relatively insignificant individual fates in order to tell a major historical turning point in world history works. Pathos and kitsch are not aimed at individual people, but to the great moment of triumph. This impersonal narrative style works better for Nolan than, say, the father-daughter relationship of Interstellar or the family drama of Inception.

In general, with Nolan the great myth is more important than the personal story. At least that usually works better in his films. Oppenheimer shows the problem quite clearly, because here Nolan tries to tell both levels. With his script, he tells the Oppenheimer myth more comprehensibly than the inner conflict of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy). Instead, we experience this level of the story through Murphy’s strong acting.

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Dunkirk avoids Nolan’s weaknesses

One of the biggest criticisms of his cinematic work is how obvious it is Problem with female characters. In his films they are either dead, so that they characterize the male protagonist as an absent accessory (Memento, Interstellar), or they die at the hands of the protagonist and provide motivation and doubt for him (Prestige – The Masters of Magic, The Dark Knight, inception).

In Dunkirk, women simply don’t play a role and Nolan can explain away the fact with real events. That’s not progress, but at least it’s not a step backwards for him either. Or both at the same time, as in Oppenheimer. Here Nolan finally manages to with Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt) to present a complex female figure. However, she once again only remains on the sidelines and in the second row behind her husband. This may also correspond to the historical clichés, but it should not have had to be reproduced on film.

Nolan’s scripts aren’t exactly characterized by eloquent dialogue either. On the contrary, he often explains the clever film form using clunky monologues instead of giving us a closer understanding of his characters as people. Dunkirk, on the other hand, is a silent filmwho tells with looks instead of words.

With Dunkirk, Nolan strikes a perfect balance between his strengths and weaknesses as a director. To do this, he relies on the experiences of his previous filmography and brings form and content into a perfect symbiosis for the first time. Unfortunately, he hasn’t been able to do that as well since then.

With Tenet, he disappointingly lost himself too much in his formal games and delivered a complicated, cerebral film draft that has too many rough edges. Oppenheimer does continue many of the lessons from Dunkirk. However, the film lacks the symbiosis of large-scale spectacle and narrative focus, Zimmer’s magnificent score and the finely tuned balance between Nolan’s strengths and weaknesses.

Nevertheless, Nolan is justifiably the big favorite in the Oscar race. It’s just a shame that he… long overdue awards not received for his actual masterpiece.