Their finest hour or so
With Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan delivers some of the most authentically immersive war sequences in cinema history
Starring Fionn Whitehead. Rated PG
The Second World War was almost over soon 2
after it started. Annexing France and much of Europe by June of 1940, Hitler pushed the bulk of England’s army onto a beachfront in northwest France. Churchill had been prime minister for two weeks, and there was already talk of a conditional surrender—perhaps what the German dictator was angling for when halting his army’s advance on the stranded Brits, while still allowing the Luftwaffe to pick off boats and soldiers stranded in waters too shallow for large vessels to navigate.
Little of this background is included in Dunkirk, mostly to its benefit. Exposition comes from title cards and a few scenes with Kenneth Branagh as a naval commander conveying Churchill’s hopes to save maybe 30,000 out of roughly 400,000 soldiers.
In the end, an expeditionary force of small civilian boats aided the navy in rescuing about 330,000.
Here, writer-director Christopher Nolan eschews Batman-esque grandiosity, not to mention irony and blatant special effects, to pursue a more authentically immersive view of this historical turning point. In a surprisingly compact 106 minutes, he divides what happened that June—exactly four years before the Allies would return to nearby Normandy—into sea, air, and land theatres.
The RAF portion is handled by Jack Lowden and a mostly unrecognizable Tom Hardy as Spitfire pilots battling Messerschmitts and Heinkel bombers in the English Channel. Cast standout Mark Rylance, as a pleasure-craft captain, is the privatecitizen counterpart to Branagh. And connecting all three settings is newcomer Fionn Whitehead as a hapless Everysoldier who manages to encounter pretty much everything that goes wrong. (He also hooks up with popster Harry Styles, not bad as a more mean-spirited fellow private.)
The film’s opening gambit, following that soldier through increasingly harrowing settings, is surely one of the finest war sequences ever shot.
With its limited colour palette and fluid 70mm lensing, the film is crammed with stunning shots—underlined by Hans Zimmer’s tense, frequently atonal score—many of which tip the images towards the surreal.
Nolan’s decision to cut the stories into nonsequential time frames, as in Memento and Inception, doesn’t really enhance the experience, however. A subplot with Cillian Murphy as a shell-shocked soldier feels forced, and there’s so much repetition near the end that a sameness sets in, blunting the movie’s emotional impact.
Its relative lack of gore is appreciated, and viewers resistant to Michael Bay levels of bombastic sound will certainly find the NON-IMAX version of Dunkirk easier to survive.