Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Dunkirk

Christopher Nolan has been something of a populist fringe director for years. His comic book adaptations and sci-fi spectacles have been technical bonanzas, but whatever their qualities, they’ve all been hobbled by their genre roots. With Dunkirk, Nolan has made a valiant attempt to define himself as more than just a genre director covering the rescue of English troops from the shores of Dunkirk before they can be picked off by German aircraft.

With few familiar names in the cast, Nolan zeroes in on the fear, the apprehension, and the tragedy of those trapped against a superior land force. Fionn Whitehead’s Tommy becomes the audience surrogate for the film, representing all the hope, terror, and weariness of the average soldier. He is the audience’s rallying point throughout the film, a figure whose tragic circumstances highlight the brutality of war from the ground. In the air, the film’s surrogates are represented by Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden as fighter pilots protecting the soldiers on the ground and at sea from the German assault by air.

Rounding out the triumvirate of narrative focal points is Mark Rylance as a soldier’s father who takes his fishing boat across the English Channel to try and rescue as many men as he can. Although he is not officially part of the eventual flotilla of private citizen boats that perform the formal rescue, he embodies the homefront attitude of wanting to do anything to protect their men in harm’s way, of which one is his son.

While various characters enter an exit the drama and become focal points of their own, these three stories help ground the narrative so the audience can best sympathize with the situation. Apart from some parallel storylines that get ahead of and eventually sync up with the narrative, the drama plays out fairly straight forward, following the dramatic events as the soldiers await salvation that none of them are certain is coming. While emotional connection is a challenge in a number of places, a scene on the train near the end of the film provides one of the best emotional catharses Dunkirk has to offer.

The Greatest Showman

One of the biggest problems that movie musicals suffer from is the inability to feel larger than the stage to which they are confined. That is a common issue with stage-to-screen adaptations, but musicals that originate on the big screen don’t typically have that problem. The Greatest Showman does. Although there are a few scenes that take place in the exterior world, much of the production is stage-bound, locked inside various locales that create a modestly claustrophobic effect.

Hugh Jackman takes on the role of P.T. Barnum, the man who revolutionized entertainment through his celebration of the bizarre and the macabre that eventually became the modern day circus. The real Barnum was exploitative, but that is a subject the film doesn’t seem interested in exploring, focused instead on the celebration of diversity that a more altruistic individual than Barnum might have been able to achieve at that point in history.

Surrounded by a diverse cast of characters, The Greatest Showman explores prejudice and wealth inequality in mid-1800s America. While the events of Barnum’s life, from promoting Jenny Lind’s tour to the establishment of his circus took place over a 20-plus year period, those events are compressed into this production.

Barnum may have been exploitative, but he was also a promoter of liberal ideas, namely racial equality even in spite of some of his questionable past behaviors. While getting into the weeds on this figure would be better suited to a traditional biopic, it is worth noting when examining the portrayal of an individual of Barnum’s celebrity and ilk.

The Greatest Showman is filled from stem to stern with boistrous music and joyous production numbers, reminiscent of the heyday of big screen musicals in the 1960s. That the connective tissue in the narrative is circumstantial and thin is of minimal consequence when the exciting musical elements almost entirely make up for those shortcomings. The performances aren’t great, but they are so thoroughly entertaining that they can be forgiven for not being the absolute best that’s ever been.

“This Is Me” is a wonderful track that celebrates diversity by saying we are unique and that’s OK. It’s this tune that gets to the central crux of the film, namely that you may not be what society deems normal, but that doesn’t matter. Live out loud and rejoice in that originality and that’s why the film resonates so well.