Dunkirk
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Written by: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Aneurin Barnard, Harry Styles, James D'Arcy, Barry Keoghan, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy
Action/Drama/History - 106 min Written by Charlie Juhl on 18 July 2017
Written by: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Aneurin Barnard, Harry Styles, James D'Arcy, Barry Keoghan, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy
Action/Drama/History - 106 min Written by Charlie Juhl on 18 July 2017
Every military cadet, junior, and even mid-level officer confronts Carl von Clausewitz when it comes time to study doctrine. Clausewitz is the Prussian military thinker who gave us ‘the fog of war’. War is messy, confusing, things get stuck in the mud, and even the easiest of battle plans confront endless friction. Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk shows us the fog of war in three separate, yet connected, battlespaces during the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation. The German Army blitzkrieg steamrolled the British and French Armies surrounding them at the seaside town of Dunkirk. Perilously close to surrendering 400,000 men and costing Britain the entire war at its outset, the Admiralty resorted to civilian “little ships” to cross the U-boat infested English Channel under fire from Luftwaffe fighters and dive-bombers to rescue as many soldiers as they could before the Nazis completed their conquest of France.
Nolan, known for two and a half hour Batman marathons and the extended head-trips of Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014), says he purposefully clocks Dunkirk in at 106 minutes because the human body can only withstand so much intensity and cinematic onslaught before it becomes overwhelming. This might be the shrewdest directorial decision of 2017. Hans Zimmer’s score of tense strings and bass combined with the persistent stopwatch clicking in the background makes the audience unconsciously clench up. None of us have ever spent a week exposed on a French beach vulnerable to fire form the rear and from above, but Dunkirk is a convincing and realistic portrayal of the unrelenting terror and confusion of it all. Why won’t the British Navy sail on over and pick everybody up? Why doesn't the Royal Air Force fly over and do something about the enemy aircraft slaughtering thousands of British soldiers at will?
Nolan, known for two and a half hour Batman marathons and the extended head-trips of Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014), says he purposefully clocks Dunkirk in at 106 minutes because the human body can only withstand so much intensity and cinematic onslaught before it becomes overwhelming. This might be the shrewdest directorial decision of 2017. Hans Zimmer’s score of tense strings and bass combined with the persistent stopwatch clicking in the background makes the audience unconsciously clench up. None of us have ever spent a week exposed on a French beach vulnerable to fire form the rear and from above, but Dunkirk is a convincing and realistic portrayal of the unrelenting terror and confusion of it all. Why won’t the British Navy sail on over and pick everybody up? Why doesn't the Royal Air Force fly over and do something about the enemy aircraft slaughtering thousands of British soldiers at will?
The standard issue British rifleman is entitled to these questions. The officers, controlling the end of the solo pier, called the mole, suitable for large ships such as destroyers, furrow their brows and pace because that is all they have the power to do. The troop carriers cannot land on the shallow beach, the submarines are torpedoing those that even try, and the brass back at 10 Downing Street is saving what little war fighting materiel that is left for the oncoming Battle of Britain. Try explaining that to petrified 18 year-old kids who can almost see the English cliffs only 26 miles straight in front of them. Opting to make the officers into supporting roles, Nolan shows us the tactical level fog and friction through Tommy (Fionn Whitehead).
Knowing nothing about Tommy from the minute before we meet him, the audience will learn all about the instinct to survive from this kid. Separated from his unit and everybody he knows, Tommy scans the beach and dozens of lines composed of thousands upon thousands of men wearing uniforms just like his. The difference between them and Tommy, however, is these chaps look like they know what they are doing. Tommy forms an ad hoc friendship with Gibson (Aneurin Barnard), another lost soul. They try and stow away on a hospital ship by carrying a wounded man on a stretcher. Thwarted at every turn, knowing to give up trying is to most likely die, the two improvise schemes and ploys to put any distance they can between themselves and the beach.
Nolan recognizes there was more to Dunkirk than the stranded soldiers. Chopping the film up into non-linear thirds, we also witness action on one of the “little ships” at sea and from inside the cockpit of an RAF Spitfire. The men on the beach were stranded for nearly a week, the ships valiantly crossing the channel did so for a day, and the Spitfires were only able to provide the limited support they could for an hour at a time. To confront these conflicting timelines, Nolan gets fancy with the editing. Sometimes, we see the consequences of an action before we see what that action was. It sounds confusing, and often, it takes more than a second to puzzle out where in time we are at a given moment, but this is the fog of war.
Our RAF pilot is Farrier (Tom Hardy, The Revenant). Maintaining a steady demeanor in the cockpit while calculating his nearly depleted fuel level, the buzzing German Messerschmitts trying to put holes in him and his aircraft, and trying to protect the troops below from the dive-bombers show Farrier must be a veteran. Never losing his nerve while making decisions which may mean his life for his comrades, Farrier is the clearest personification of Dunkirk’s over-arching theme, personal sacrifice vs. the instinct to survive. In the trenches, the fight or flight instinct may reign supreme, but on higher planes of thought, the fight option reveals itself to be a one way trip so others may live.
Sailing beneath the buzzing fighters is Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance, The BFG), a retired civilian charting his pleasure yacht south through the channel swells. Assisted by his teenaged son, Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney), and local dock boy Georgie (Barry Keoghan), the three rescue a shell-shocked soldier adrift in the water, the only survivor of a U-boat attack, and continue on due course to Dunkirk. The shivering soldier (Cillian Murphy, In the Heart of the Sea) turns toward violence when he realizes the boat is headed toward Dunkirk instead of back to England. Mark Rylance delivers his explanations of the right thing to do and the duty of all Englishmen in such a convincing manner, he embodies the fighting spirit and can-do attitude which cemented itself in the British psyche for the rest of World War II.
Shot on IMAX cameras and 65mm film, Dunkirk is one of those event films which audiences should experience on the biggest screen they can find. The crystal clear image of three Spitfires in a perfect, unison formation, the panoramic wide shot of the beach reminiscent of Joe Wright’s cinematography from Atonement (2007), and the relentless pulses of the sounds of a groaning metal undertone watching a broken man shed his gear and plunge into the water to swim the channel are all reasons to avoid your local multiplex and spring for IMAX. When ships are struck, list, capsize, and go pitch black in the dark, the camera also shoots from oblique angles so none of us knows which way is up, least of all the hundreds of panicking soldiers about to drown. Dunkirk is affecting, unforgettable, and a respectful homage to an event which may have altered the entire world as we know it if those stranded men were not saved by the most unlikely of rescuers. Go experience how.
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