I BEGAN TO WONDER WHY WE CAN’T HAVE MORE PICTURES LIKE DUNKIRK.

taken over, the result is a sort of flattening of the available quality: There aren’t so many truly awful blockbusters being made anymore, but there aren’t so many truly great ones either. Indeed, there aren’t so many big movies being made at all, because studios find it much more attractive to rake in cash off of a predictable comic book film with a big global audience and serendipity, because the bets were reasonably small, and even an oddball picture might find an audience somewhere. But if the old studio system was a well diversified industry placing lots of bets — the cinematic equivalent of an index fund — the modern system is looking more and more like a hedge fund taking a few giant positions. When all the bets are potential firm-killers, the investment committee is going to want to oversee every detail, leaving less room for genius to emerge, much less thrive.

One reason Dunkirk is such a joy is that here is a film in which the deadening hand of the committee is nowhere evident. A committee would have wanted something with more merchandising and tie-in opportunities (“Just a thought: What if the captain of the destroyer is drinking a Diet Coke? Then we could give his action figure a detachable can that fits in his right hand.…”) A committee would have wanted a lovable band of misfits who could be taken into sequels. (“No, this is terrific: Next time, instead of fleeing France, they invade it!”)

A committee would have wanted all the mawkish paraphernalia of the modern war picture — the rumpled photograph of the girl back home, the square-jawed lead who learns a Very Important Lesson about leadership and loyalty, and the speeches, oh Lord, the speeches, about what war is, and what it all means. Even the pictures that explicitly reject the cheap and easy sentimentality of the modern war movie are still hung up on rejecting it. Nolan simply ignores it, and does something infinitely more interesting.

That this movie got made at all in modern Hollywood strikes me as a minor miracle, an undeserved blessing for which we should all be intensely grateful. But it also makes me a little sad. It’s not that “no adult movies” get made anymore, as you sometimes hear: There are indie films, small films, studioproduced “Oscar bait” for the season between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But the franchise pictures keep sucking up more of the oxygen in the room, threatening to strangle both the mid-budget “serious” films and the large summer blockbusters featuring one director’s original vision — ironic, considering that it was two such pictures, George Lucas’s Star Wars and Spielberg’s Jaws, that started Hollywood down its current road. (Never mind that one was retroactively franchised as Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope and the other was followed by sequels more painful than being eaten by a shark.)

As the “tentpole” picture increasingly becomes the main product of Hollywood, and directors are selected for their ability to please a committee, how many more memorable big films can we hope to get? When a legend like Spielberg has so much trouble getting Lincoln into theatres that it comes “this close” to ending up on HBO, you have to wonder if the days of the original creative project are numbered within the studio system. If the flotilla of small craft disappears, all we’ll have left is a few big ships drifting inoffensively in international waters — and a lot of moviegoers stranded on the beach.