The movie Quentin Tarantino needed to watch three times to understand: “The spectacle almost numbed me”
You always know when you’re watching something Quentin Tarantino had a hand in making.
His style is one of the most recognisable in modern cinema, with the various tropes he employs often being used against him as much as they are to praise him. Snappy, pop culture-infused dialogue; ultra-violent fight scenes caked in blood; shots of people’s feet; he produces his work by his rules and his rules alone, and some people absolutely love him for it.
As well as making a lot of famous movies, Tarantino is also known for giving his opinion on pretty much everything in the industry. He regularly makes lists of his favourite (and the ones he can’t fucking stand) movies, genres, actors, you name it, and it always gets attention. He is particularly active when it comes to the modern cinematic landscape, often releasing a list of his favourite films (that fanboys always scramble to add to their Letterboxd watchlists) of the year once the calendar has come to an end. It’s always good to keep an eye on the competition, I suppose.
One contemporary that the controversial auteur has an interesting relationship with is Christopher Nolan. During his early days as a script reader, Nolan actually saw an advanced copy of Pulp Fiction, something he later said he regretted, because it ended up ruining the goddamn movie for him. As for Tarantino, he’s expressed strong admiration for the British star’s work, especially his 2017 war movie, Dunkirk.
“I had an interesting experience with it the first couple of times,” he told IndieWire. “The first time I saw it, I don’t know what I was thinking the first time. I just dealt with the spectacle of it all. I couldn’t deal with anything else but the spectacle of it all. I liked the movie, but the spectacle almost numbed me to the experience. I don’t think I felt anything emotional. I was awed by it. But I didn’t know what I was awed by… It wasn’t until the third time that I could see past the spectacle and into the people the story is about. I finally could see through the trees a little bit.”
Nolan’s tenth overall feature film, Dunkirk is inspired by the real-life evacuation of British soldiers from the titular French port by a fleet of non-military small boats piloted by ordinary people. The movie follows three distinct groups: a platoon of young soldiers stranded on the beach, an older man and his young assistant sailing to reach them, and a lone Spitfire pilot assessing the situation from the air.
It’s hardly surprising that Tarantino didn’t fully click with Dunkirk after just one viewing. In true Nolan fashion, any ideas about linear narrative structures are immediately relegated to the fucking bin. Each storyline begins at a different point and counts down at differing speeds, until they all converge in one epic finale. Hans Zimmer’s acclaimed score makes use of a special tone to further increase the tension and sense of time distortion. Some viewers complained that the movie was too hard to follow, but they should have been grateful. Nolan’s next movie was Tenet, which makes Dunkirk look like an episode of Scooby-Doo.
If even the great Quentin Tarantino can admit that he needed a few attempts to fully understand Dunkirk, then maybe we all owe it to ourselves to give it another try.
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