A war film without heroes

A war film without heroes Dir: Christopher Nolan 1hr 46mins (12A)

Most of us know the basic facts about the Dunkirk evacuation: how in May 1940, 300,000, mainly British, troops escaped from the beach of a northern French port while being bombarded by the Luftwaffe. The achievement of Christopher Nolan’s harrowing new film is that it makes these events seem impossible to predict, said Dave Calhoun in Time Out. With a short running time and minimal dialogue, it exposes us to a concentrated dose of the “oddness and horror of war”. One moment, we see Nazi propaganda leaflets, bearing the words “We surround you!”, falling like snow from an empty sky. The next, we’re plunged into the churning sea with panicking soldiers, struggling to keep our heads above water. A war film “without heroes or a straightforward story”, Dunkirk is also a “staggering feat of immersive terror”.

From Memento to Inception, Nolan has always liked to challenge our linear concept of time, said Mark Kermode in The Observer. Dunkirk continues the theme, skilfully blending three distinct timescales. There’s one week on land, following Fionn Whitehead’s soldier as he waits to be rescued from the crowded beach. There’s one day at sea, as Mark Rylance joins the civilian flotilla, skippering his pleasure boat across the Channel to France to do his bit. Lastly, we spend an hour in the air with Tom Hardy’s hard-bitten fighter pilot, relentlessly shooting down enemy planes as his fuel gauge dips towards zero. And then, of course, there’s the pop star Harry Styles, said Jamie East in The Sun. He has a significant role in the movie as another soldier fighting for survival. And against expectations, he proves a “confident and watchable” actor. Yet for all its glittering cast (which also has Kenneth Branagh as a grizzled naval commander), this isn’t an “actory” film, it’s a director’s offering. But “what an incredible treat it is”.

I’d recommend doing a bit of historical research before you see it, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. Tricky structure and mumbled dialogue (itself drowned out by Hans Zimmer’s ear-shattering score) often make the narrative confusing. These “106 clamorous minutes of big-screen bombast” are so taken up with spectacle, said Kevin Maher in The Times, they neglect “the most crucial element – drama”. There’s plenty of tension and explosions galore, but where’s the character development? At least that spares us the melodrama of a Pearl Harbor or Titanic, said Nick de Semlyen in Empire. If anything, Dunkirk “hews towards the art house”, its “spume-flecked tableaux” beautifully photographed by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema. The film is “effectively one enormous, stunningly rendered and thunderously intense set piece stretched to feature length”. There have been many WWII epics, but “never one like this”.