This was Nolan's first Best Director nomination; it is an achievement movie, like Titanic for Cameron, and one answer is yes for all those reasons.
An Apex heat check would be The Dark Knight or Inception, but Dunkirk showed how great he could be and put him with the greatest.
A dissent: the next film is unseen, and Inception showed an original story could be as big as The Dark Knight.
The reply calls Inception a marketed product; Inception is loved by one participant and lukewarm for another.
The Dark Knight is called the most important movie of the century for resetting the industry, the academy and moviegoers.
Granting the point, he asks whether that makes The Dark Knight Batman's apex and not Nolan's. — Quentin Tarantino
Asked outside Apex, Dunkirk is called best and favorite Nolan film; another participant warmly regards Memento and ranks Dunkirk, Batman Begins, then The Dark Knight but enjoys The Prestige more; one participant says he is on "Inception Island" alone.
The agreement is that it is Nolan's Apex Mountain for now, one participant defers; Dunkirk is his 2001 and he is Warner's Kubrick.
The guest knows the category but not who Dion Waiters is. — Quentin Tarantino
Harry Styles was written down but the film may not be that kind of movie; Hardy could be an inverted case, doing the most with the least while masked.
Leads cannot win: Rylance on the boat, Hardy in the air and the unnamed kid.
Branagh and Murphy are considered; Rylance is a lead over Murphy, so there is a case for Murphy, though PTSD performances are tricky.
The Murphy section is one participant's least favorite part, compared to not liking every story in Magnolia or Slacker, though its brevity makes it work and his first reveal is great.
George is picked, and a second voice says it will go George too: "Barry Keown" (transcript spelling).
The structure is brilliant, still elusive in its construction, and rewards rewatching; nothing is out of place in the first half and the middle is a symphony.
The film deserved its Best Editing Oscar and it is a crime the score did not win; the score may define the decade.
Zimmer recorded the ticking from one of Nolan's pocket watches and processed it through synthesizers; the clock does not stop until Alex and Tommy sit safely on the train.
Zimmer and Nolan are compared to Leone and Morricone; the score works as sound filling a palette left open by sparse dialogue.
The film is framed as a Hitchcock movie masquerading as a war movie, a suspense puzzle about who will survive, with the question whether that had been done before.
The closest predecessor offered is It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: cross-cutting held together by the "earnest gold" theme, Hardy's plane recalling Buddy Hackett and "Mickey Runy" (transcript spelling), the trapped boat recalling Sid Caesar and Edie Adams in the basement, and both being convergence movies.
The sound design, especially the dive-bomber overhead, is separate from the score and visceral.
Mark Rylance, seen in Wolf Hall and known for female Shakespeare roles, brings stillness to the old man going to sea.
Nolan's virtuosity: Dunkirk, rather than The Dark Knight, is called his Apex Mountain; it dealt him in as a great filmmaker beyond Gotham and science fiction and brought Warner Brothers along as Kubrick did; Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet are original big-budget studio stories.
It is hard to imagine the film imitated or topped; a linear cut would not hold together; the faces look like photographs of British soldiers in 1940. — Chris Ryan
Harry Styles, covered in oil, plays the soldier most aggressive toward the French character and is good despite being a huge pop star.
