‘Dunkirk’ Is Not a Franchise and Has No Expanded Universe. See It Anyway.

There was no 3-D showing of it, because evidently Mr. Fancy Pants Christopher Nolan doesn’t believe in 3-D. Instead, he shot it in something called “70mm.” Whatever that is.

There were no movie stars in it. It’s supposed to be a war movie about this giant event, but there aren’t any awesome, epic battle scenes where hundreds of thousands of CGI cartoons run around and kill each other. I stayed all the way through the credits and there wasn’t even a stinger! I kept waiting for one of the characters to pop back onscreen and tease the next movie in the franchise. But there was nothing except for the Dolby and Panavision logos at the end.

But my big gripe is that there was no pre-awareness built into the experience. I like comic books. I like board games. I like TV shows from the 1980s. What’s a “Dunkirk”? How does Hollywood expect me to care about something I’ve never heard of before?

And besides, they played Dunkirk on this enormous screen the size of a building. Doesn’t Hollywood realize that I only want my content on my phone?

I’m kidding. You knew that, right? There are people out there who really hated Dunkirk because—here I am not kidding—it didn’t have enough “people of color” in it.

So here’s my real view of Dunkirk: If you don’t love this movie, then you don’t love movies. Period.

Normally I have a pretty tolerant view of cinematic tastes. What works for me onscreen may not work for you, and vice versa. But whether or not you like or enjoy this Nolan film, you can’t help but love what it is: Hollywood at its most competent, working to tell an original story in an interesting way that’s specific to the medium.

Dunkirk is a movie.

It’s not an intellectual property play. It’s not a franchise or an expanded universe. It’s not based on a Milton Bradley game or a TV show from the ’80s. It’s not a special-effect monstrosity with an “epic” battle consisting of thousands of computer-generated pixels that we care nothing about. Heck, most of the military confrontations in Dunkirk are between handfuls of men. And Nolan’s “special effect” is somehow getting an Imax camera into the cockpit of World War 2-era planes.

And by the same token, you couldn’t make Dunkirk for the TV. You couldn’t put it on YouTube. You cannot—under pain of death—watch it on your phone. It’s not “content.”

It’s a movie. And if you love the movies, Dunkirk is the kind of picture you dream about. You sit through week after week of Fast/Furious in Space and Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of the League of the Justice Universe: Beginnings and you don’t check out of the movie business entirely because you hope that somewhere in the system are a few mature artists who still care about making movies.

Christopher Nolan cares. And if you love movies, you should care, too.