It’s been 8 years since Christopher Nolan made a solidly good film…at least in my humble estimation, being a judgey-mc-judgerson here on the sidelines 😛 Dunkirk, at the very least puts Nolan back into that category. It’s not spectacular by any stretch of the imagination, but it is still well-done and worth seeing for those of us with any curiosity in what is, by all accounts, one of the biggest military miracles in modern history.
THE BLURB
In May 1940, Germany advanced into France, trapping Allied troops on the beaches of Dunkirk. Under air and ground cover from British and French forces, troops were slowly and methodically evacuated from the beach using every serviceable naval and civilian vessel that could be found. At the end of this heroic mission, 330,000 French, British, Belgian and Dutch soldiers were safely evacuated.
WHAT WORKED:
So, this story is told in (perfectly Nolan style) an interesting, if not always quite so effective, three-timeline-narrative manner. Timeline 1, dubbed “One Week,” involves a soldier who’s made his way inside the British/French perimeter to Dunkirk beach, which lies right across the English Channel from France. We follow his various attempts to get himself off that beach and to safety, of which there are many. Timeline 2, dubbed “One Day,” follows one of the thousands of requisitioned private vessels, crewed by a father, son, and local boy that are heading across the channel to Dunkirk to load soldiers and take them home to safety. Timeline 3, dubbed “One Hour,” follows a squadron of Royal Air Force fighter planes that have been dispatched across the channel to Dunkirk to protect the ships coming to rescue from German bombers and fighters.
The most interesting of those three story threads was #2, the private vessel. Mark Rylance plays the father, a regular citizen with a strong moral compass, and a determination to everything he can to go and save those soldiers who are in so much danger – a true hero. Storyline #3 is a close second; Tom Hardy plays the defacto squadron leader when their actual commander perishes in their very first engagement with German fighters. Tom Hardy is so, so freaking good it hurts. Another true hero…he flies his plane to the very end to try and do his job. Story #1 was harder to get into, but no less relevant to the experience of war: our main character, Tommy, is quite less the hero, and rather lies, hides, and does whatever it takes to get off the beach and away from the bomber runs…whatever it takes just to survive. He’s definitely not an outright coward, a quality that Nolan expertly crafts with a couple scenes that reveal some true character, and what HAPPENS to Tommy is probably, objectively the most dramatic of any of the three timelines…but the lack of an outright hero seems to suck some of the lustre away from his story.
It’s beautifully shot, as all Nolan flicks are. The score is fine, and the historical accuracy, particularly Hardy’s plane, for some reason, is really wonderful. The sound of their engines is deeply, deeply satisfying in a very…primal way 😛
WHAT DIDN’T WORK:
It’s hard to put a finger on EXACTLY where the movie falls short, even though I do have some specific gripes…but it does fall short in the end. It’s not terribly compelling. I can tell from the scoring and the various literary devices Nolan uses that this film was meant to be a very tense affair…and it’s not. It’s fine, but it’s comfortable, and it’s rather academic. I engaged with the story mostly in an intellectual way. There was really only one moment in the film that really surprised me, a scene where someone passes away unexpectedly, and an act of kindness that follows it…but, man, that was about it. Everything else was all rather expected and distanced. I think about Spielberg’s absolutely terrifying D-Day scene to start Saving Private Ryan, or even Coppolla’s deranged mayhem and insanity in Apocalypse Now…and Dunkirk has none of that horror or visceral quality. It certainly reverent and cognizent of the horrors and triumphs of war, but you never feel any of it crawling in your skin.
A specific gripe: the beach of Dunkirk is never filled with more than maybe a hundred or so soldiers. In the day and age of digial crowds, this seems like a horrible, gross oversight. Apparently, in real life, there were four hundred THOUSAND soldiers on that beach. For nearly a week. We never ever got that sense from this film. Far too many sequences with handfuls of men.
Same thing with the ships sent to load men from the beaches. It looked like maybe a couple dozen craft, when apparently there were literally hundreds. Scale, which Nolan usually does so well, was missing entirely.
The next specific gripe was the timelines. Again…going back to accounts of the real-life ordeal have soldiers on that beach for a LONG TIME, slowly being picked off with absolutely nowhere to go by German bombing raids. The three timelines, varyingly compressed, really undercut that fact and feeling of time and helplessness. It was a good idea to try that framing device, and we all know how Nolan loves to play with time, but it didn’t work here.
So, yeah…Dunkirk is a competently made film, guys. If you want a walk through a very dramatic point in history that has a (relatively) happy ending, this movie is worth you watching. But it is no classic. It’s just “fine.” All that said…I enjoyed myself watching it, and you probably would, too. With the right expectations 😛
6/10 – recommended for the right viewers