Review Detail

UPDATE: The editor has improved the audio quality substantially so I've raised my scores for A/V, audio, and enjoyment. My original review is below.

I definitely recommend checking this out!

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Limbo is a compelling concept, but I think it's let down by some technical issues and a storytelling device that disrupts the flow of the movie.



NARRATIVE

Watching Dunkirk purely from Tommy's perspective on the beach is an amazing way to experience the movie. Nolan's three-layer, three-speed format is fascinating, and does work, but it also continually pulls me away from the beach and reminds me I'm watching a movie ("Oh, that's right, we're in the plane now, so one minute = one hour...or is it one day?"). Having said that, by removing those gaps, and staying in the timeline of the beach, it becomes more evident it's just a sequence of fairly contrived failures. Maybe all those things happened, but it seems unlikely they happened to one person. It's easy to suspend disbelief on this point, though.

The opening moments really shine. The way 6 becomes 1 becomes 2 becomes 3, with almost no spoken lines is great, and I wish there was more of that wordless tension on display. I think the choice to minimize dialogue but still have it present in some places is brilliant, but the switch to "silent movie" text for some of the dialogue felt forced and disruptive. I found myself wishing I could hear the characters speak. Each text card pulled me out of the experience, and their frequency seemed to increase as the story progressed.

I'm not sure about including Farrier's scenes (the pilot). It seemed to break the concept when we switched to his perspective, even though we were technically still at the beach. I'd be interested in seeing a version where we never see inside the cockpit. It's just one aircraft that does a deus ex machina and exits stage left.

I'm also not sure about the inclusion of the epilogue on the train. Because we never experience the perspective of the civilians, we never really feel like the outside world should have one thought or another about the situation on the beach, so Tommy's concern feels unmotivated, and the newspaper article a little random.


VISUAL EDITING

I didn't notice any issues with the visual cuts aside from the blackout at 24:23 which felt just a touch off, timing-wise.

The delayed title at the 14min mark was amazing!

As far as the B&W presentation, I really enjoyed it, and some early scenes looked great, but I think it could have used some contrast adjustments in places to create more depth.


AUDIO EDITING

There were some audio pops here and there. I recorded two timestamps in my notes: 11:23 and 24:23


AUDIO/VIDEO QUALITY

The video quality is fairly good, but there is some banding in the underwater scenes, and also in some of the shots of the sky. I watched the 1080p version which is 1.4GB. It's possible these issues aren't present in the larger files, but as I only have a 1080p display, it didn't seem fruitful to download one of them.

The audio quality was quite poor, and I found it uncomfortable to listen to in places. Everything sounded heavily compressed.
Explosions sounded crushed and without much low-end oomph. I think this is due to the encoding settings, as the audio bitrate on my file is only 253Kbps, which may be too low to capture a proper six channel soundscape. It may be an easy fix for the editor to render it out again at a higher bitrate (eg. 512Kbps). I would be VERY interested in watching this again with improved audio.


ENJOYMENT

I'm afraid I have to mark this down somewhat due to the low quality audio and the way the text cards disrupted the flow of the story for me.