Film Review: Dunkirk

Christopher Nolan’s last two films not to feature a masked man with some serious parent issues have both been difficult.  I mean that in a good way; I am a fan of both Inception and Interstellar but both are long, bursting with ideas, and heavy on exposition.  Following a bit of success and granted some freedom by grateful studios, directors who do too much of this type of thing have a tendency to vanish up their own arses: for proof, see anything the Wachowskis have churned out since The Matrix (including the sequels), and anything Richard Kelly has done since Donnie Darko. Nolan has thankfully grounded his grandiose sci-fi forays in a Spielbergian connection to family and not allowed the CGI machine to sully his vision.  So how does he follow up a film in which Matthew McConaughey bent the known laws of space-time? He rescues soldiers from a beach.

Dunkirk tells a familiar and simple story: overwhelmed by the German army in 1940, 400,000 British troops are stranded on the eponymous beach awaiting rescue from a navy vulnerable to U-Boat attacks, and facing annihilation from German bombers and artillery.  The solution: hundreds of civilian boats sail the channel to rescue over 330,000 men.  A military disaster turned into a human triumph.

But that would be too simple a story for the man who made the thriller-in-reverse Memento or showed us dreams within dreams in Inception.  Showing us the story from three perspectives (soldiers trapped on the Dunkirk beach, a boat crossing the Channel, an RAF spitfire squadron), each occurring over different but converging time periods, Nolan shuffles his deck in a manner which results in one of the most tense experiences I’ve had in a cinema.

From the opening scene in which soldiers wandering the abandoned Dunkirk streets are fired upon by an unseen enemy, the viewer’s guts are rarely less than wrenched.  Wisely casting actors rather than stars (no room for DiCaprio, McConaughey, or Bale here) in key roles, Nolan at no time gives you certainty of anyone’s survival.  Even Tom Hardy’s stoic fighter pilot has moments of dread.  The ensemble cast is excellent: Hardy is more reserved than we’re used to, Mark Rylance continues his excellent form, Fionn Whitehead and, yes, Harry Styles are effective as the soldiers, terrified and then plagued with survivor guilt. And who could be better cast as officer class than James D’Arcy and Kenneth Brannagh, the latter giving his best stiff upper lip.

What Nolan does really well is fill each segment with pockets of suspense and then flit between them before anything is resolved.  Mark Rylance is the picture of quiet dignity (until the heart stopping moment when he raises his voice) as a civilian boat captain doing his part, but his rescue of Cillian Murphy’s unpredictable, shell shocked soldier causes tension.  Tom Hardy’s fuel gauge is damaged, leaving him (and us) guessing at how much flight time he has left for almost the whole film.  We find out early on that there is a U-Boat in the water, meaning nobody at sea is safe.  A squad decides to wait for high tide in an abandoned fishing boat; a solid strategy until German troops decide to use it for target practice, leaving a choice between being shot and drowned.  Every part of the film is designed to crank up the tension.

Probably the most effective tool in Nolan’s arsenal is Hans Zimmer’s score.  From the recurring ticking clock motif, jagged Bernard Hermann-like violins, to lengthy drone sounds, ascending in tone, it is designed to ensure that nails are bitten.  As one might expect, the film looks incredible. With Nolan admirably preferring to do things in-camera rather than rely on CGI, every bomb impact, bullet, dogfight, and sinking ship is real and visceral.  And while it may seem churlish to comment on a film’s running time, Dunkirk clocks in at a relatively nippy hour and 46 minutes, meaning there is no waste, no lulls, and nothing superfluous.

For a director who has for some time dabbled in the cerebral side of cinema, here he is as thrilling and emotive as a younger Spielberg (think the opening of Saving Private Ryan stretched to feature length, or Duel with added boats and bravery).  There are no Big Ideas on display here, just pure, edge-of-your-seat entertainment which makes the final denouement, returning soldiers feeling like failures but greeted like heroes, all the more rewarding.  That it plays out to Churchill’s famous “we shall never surrender” speech is on the nose but plays beautifully.  Victory from the jaws of defeat.