The flicks
If you thought you’d seen enough war movies, think again. Don’t miss DUNKIRK, which portrays the epic weight of an unbearable wait
DUNKIRK (M)
Director: Christopher Nolan ( Inception) Starring: Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Harry Styles, Kenneth Branagh Rating:
THIS is what a masterpiece looks like. Sounds like. Feels like. Not only is Dunkirk one of the finest movies to happen along in the 21st century so far.
It is one of the greatest war movies of alltime, period.
Acclaimed director Christopher Nolan has crafted a complete vision here.
A vision that not only captures the sweeping historical significance of the subject at hand, but also its intimate human essence.
It is late May 1940 in the small French coastal town of Dunkirk.
An estimated 400,000 Allied troops, most of them British, have been penned in by the Germans on a swatch of beach marked only by a solitary pier.
If this unprecedented mass evacuation is to be successful to any worthwhile degree, it will take a miracle. This film is the chronicle of that miracle. Make no mistake. This is a gargantuan undertaking for any filmmaker looking to do justice to what transpired at Dunkirk.
So it is downright astonishing to witness the immense storytelling risks that Nolan as writer and director takes with this material. There are no backstories in play. No on-the-spot exposition in the dialogue. No space is allowed for convenient cliches or any other narrative shortcuts.
Instead, Nolan audaciously divides the story among three competing time frames of radically differing lengths.
Across the space of a week, we will follow a young British soldier named Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) as he moves from one hotspot to another up and down the Dunkirk beach.
His is a marathon bid to get away from this hell on earth by any means necessary.
Across the space of a day, we will remain aboard the Moonstone, a small wooden yacht that forms part of a British civilian armada on its way to retrieve as many soldiers as humanly possible.
Moonstone is piloted by Mr Dawson (Mark Rylance), a stoic, humble patriot who has already lost one son in the war, and has brought along a teenage two-man crew to help him on his noble mission.
Finally, across the space of one hour, we are cooped up in the cockpit of an RAF Spitfire with a masked pilot named Farrier (Tom Hardy).
With fuel supplies dwindling and fellow wingmen falling all around him, Farrier stays locked in battle with the Luftwaffe bombers to bring some measure of protection and respite to his countrymen below.
The sophisticated manner in which these three time frames not only overlap each other, but also underscore the overall magnitude of the Dunkirk retreat, casts a transfixing spell.
Unusually for a war picture, Nolan holds back from unleashing a visceral onslaught of battlefield forensics at any point.
The full horror of war is forcefully implied, but rarely directly depicted here.
The same state of mind shared by those 400,000 souls on Dunkirk beach becomes a similar preoccupation of anyone immersed in this extraordinary viewing experience: before you can live to fight another day, you must first fight to live another day.
“This is a gargantuan undertaking for any filmmaker looking to do justice to what transpired at Dunkirk”