Believe The Hype: 'Dunkirk' Could Be Christopher Nolan's Best Film Yet

dunkirk

Christopher Nolan’s 10th film, Dunkirk, is his shortest since his first, Following. After his three-hour shrine to time, love, and intergalactic yearning, Interstellar, Nolan scales things back to a mere 106 minutes; meaning, the last time he made something so short, production was funded by his credit cards, and catering meant mum making sandwiches.

It’s an unexpected running time given how Dunkirk is being billed, and sold: as a war epic. It’s not. Though it’s set during the Dunkirk evacuation, and is populated entirely by members of the armed forces, the film is, really, a survival thriller.

All the trappings of the war-movie —the bonding between men, tales of sweethearts back home, flashbacks to wholesome childhood memories, scenes of strategising men in war-rooms, interactions with local civilians, moments of shared humanity between enemies— are absent, completely. There’s no real characterisation, barely any back-story, only a few ephemeral females. For long stretches, there’s no dialogue.

Instead, we’re dropped in the thick of it: on the streets of the titular French/Belgian border town. The English and French armies have been driven back to the Channel coast by the meth-powered German troops; and are trapped in this tiny, final outpost, awaiting evacuation back to the safety of Britain. We tail after, at first, Fionn Whitehead, who really needs to take a shit, but can’t find a quiet place amidst the barrage of machine-gunfire. He, eventually, flees to the beach, where hundreds of thousands of Allied troops have gathered, hoping to escape with their lives. But, there, they’re in the wide-open, sitting ducks; forced, in the face of incoming German fighter-planes, to try and take cover where there is no cover. With each dive-bombing raid, fewer and fewer men get up.

Nolan never shows us the attacking Germans; makes them, only, an unseen menace. The terror comes from the sound: the howl of the swooping Stukas, descending with their sirens blaring; the blast and shudder of detonating bombs; and the pop and shred of incoming gunfire, especially when the bullets tear through metal. This sound-terror is doubled by another monstrous, pompous, ear-drum-rattling score from Hans Zimmer, which uses discordance, harsh electronics, ever-escalating tempos, and lack of compositional resolution to create mounting tension.

We’re not invited the get to know these men, to identify with the enemies, or to muse on the grander narratives and themes of war (even though a swift one-man-needs-to-get-off-the-boat scene fleetingly evokes the self-preservation-versus-greater-empathy moral-quandaries of The Dark Knight). Instead, we’re borne witness to their simple attempts to survive; to keep their heads, often literally, above water. Dunkirk, in such, resembles few recent blockbusters, whose bloated running-times are often puffed up with origin and back-stories. Even the recent tentpole picture it most reminded me of, Gravity —a survival-thriller not on war-torn beaches, but in a space station— still had to burden its sensory theme-park-ride experience with a leaden dead-daughter trope.

Like Gravity, Dunkirk essentially functions as a chain-reaction: one thing goes wrong, which leads to the next, and the next, and the next. Just when you think you’re safe on a ship bound for Britain, it gets bombed; and the action, and camera, plunges underwater. In one particularly tense scene for those with a fear of drowning (or who have recurring drowning dreams), Nolan cross-cuts between soldiers inside the hull of a strafed ship, where water is pouring in through the bullet holes, and a pilot trapped in a downed fighter-plane, where he his panic rises as the sea floods into the cockpit, inching towards his chin.

Nolan divides the narrative in three: the land (the boys on the beach, whose ranks do indeed include Harry Styles and Harry Styles’ hair; and where Kenneth Branagh wears a dapper turtleneck as navy officer); the sea (where Mark Rylance, Tom Glynn-Carney, Barry Keoghan, and a shell-shocked Cillian Murphy arrive on a civilian “leisure yacht” requisitioned by the navy for the evacuation), and the air (Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden piloting their Spitfires into dogfights with German dive-bombers).

At first, you assume that all the action is parallel, only, Nolan sets the chronology just off, at slightly different times. The three narratives then intersect and re-intersect in an approach that adds to the tension; as they grow closer and closer to wrapping, together, in a singular instant of ‘coming together’, this has the feeling of a tightening winch.

The tautness of both the narrative and the generated tension make Dunkirk feel lean and mean, even as the filmmaker piles on the grandeur. Nolan being a man who claims to have neither email nor mobile phone, it’s no surprise to learn that the production leant entirely on practical effects. There’s really thousands of extras on the beach, the explosions aren’t done with the safety of CGI, those are real WWII vintage boats and planes, and, when a Spitfire crashes at sea, the plane was really fucking crashed!

For those who want to get really nerdy about all this Nolanism: the film was shot on 65mm celluloid, and framed to be projected in IMAX format on 70mm (which is how yr old bean Film C saw it). It’d be great to say that the near-square boxiness of the full IMAX frame (1.43:1) was used to increase the feeling of the characters —and the audience— being imprisoned, but, knowing that the film would get more regular aspect-ratio screenings, Nolan rarely uses the whole IMAX frame for effect, never putting important information in the ‘cutaway’ margins at the top and bottom (there are a few on-the-ocean moments, too, where the full frame falls away; it, evidently, having been impractical to take the IMAX camera out onto the high seas).

But all this is getting too far into the weeds, really. Nolan’s film can be discussed in relation to its technical craft, but the film is essentially experiential.

Following the grand philosophising and quantum physics of Interstellar, Dunkirk gives you only a simple binary: entrapment or escape, life or death. It’s based on a famous moment of British military history (and carries due patriotism, be warned), but it’s an instant in which history, itself, carried the simplicity of a thriller. The Dunkirk Evacuation may’ve been a catastrophic defeat, but on the ground, and in this film, mere survival is victory enough.