Dunkirk: The Final Act In A Horror Film

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Hopefully, most films about war use the facts of history to weave a rich and moving tapestry of lost causes and heroic gestures that end up being, in some rather inspiring, narrative sense, “worth it.” You will feel the chaos and lost hope and you’ll wonder, with your protagonist, what some poor young person’s sacrifice was really about, but there tends to be a more poignant answer. The story of the world will go on, and it’s that much more poetic for those lost and broken threads of life cut short.

Dunkirk is a hollowed-out version of this kind of film.  It’s the final act of a horror film.

The film’s director, Christopher Nolan, has applied his unique storytelling style and knack for mind-blowing visuals to subjects as diverse as interplanetary science fiction, dark superhero origin stories and vengeful 19th-century magicians.

In “Dunkirk,” Nolan captures the intensity, desperation and triumph of the World War II evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940, when British civilians were called to help rescue 400,000 trapped Allied soldiers pinned on a French beach and about to be driven into the English Channel by German forces.

Nolan splits the rescue narrative into three threads: The Mole, The Sea, and The Air.  In the first, a British soldier named Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), separated from his decimated patrol, scrambles to find his way off the beach. Teaming up with another infantryman (Damien Bonnard), Tommy dashes from one seemingly safe haven to another, only to find it destroyed by an unseen enemy that has them surrounded.

The second thread follows a British civilian named Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance) and his two sons George (Barry Keoghan) and Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney), who answer the call to rescue and pilot their family boat across the English channel in the hopes of bringing a few of the abandoned soldiers back with them. Along the way, they pick up a shell-shocked lone survivor of a U-Boat attack (Cillian Murphy), whose reluctance to return to Dunkirk leads to unexpected complications.

The final, and most spectacular, thread follows Farrier (Tom Hardy) and Collins (Jack Lowden), a pair of British spitfire pilots trying to clear the air of German bombers so the ships in the water can evacuate the soldiers off the beach. In a series of shots that alternate between intense closeups and vast wide-angle seascapes, Nolan pieces together dog fights that feel incredibly powerful for their comparative simplicity.

Intense is probably the best word to describe a film that uses a persistent stopwatch sound on its soundtrack to underscore the insistence of each narrative. Tommy fights the clock after getting trapped in the rapidly flooding hold of the ship that was supposed to carry him home. Mr. Dawson presses toward Dunkirk even after George is injured on a fall on the boat. Collins finds his cockpit jammed after a rough water landing, and Farrier spends most of the movie flying with a broken fuel gauge, estimating how long he’ll be able to stay in the air before landing himself.

Nolan has traditionally bent his narratives around non-chronological timelines to create suspense and add drama to his stories.”Dunkirk is no different, weaving its three threads together to make them feel simultaneous, even though some of the events we see are happening days apart. The film’s pace hardly takes a breath, and its total running time comes in under two hours.

A dominating score has been another go-to element in the Nolan toolbox, and Hans Zimmer almost comes through too well. While punching up the scope and emotive quality of the visuals, at times “Dunkirk’s” sound is so overpowering that it obscures character dialogue, particularly in places that might have been better served with a little quiet.

Still, even if you miss some of the spoken word, “Dunkirk” is such a visual experience that you won’t have too much trouble keeping up. With such a simple premise to work with, Nolan lets his camera tell the story for him, leaping from one dramatic set piece to another, whether chasing through the abandoned streets of the city, clamoring over a sinking destroyer or clinging to the side of a spitfire as it sweeps, dives and sails over the vast English Channel.

The performances reflect that; as good as they are, they’re secondary to the film’s formal experiments in sound, anachronic juxtapositions, and exquisitely claustrophobic, selective, disorienting and stunning cinematography.

Dunkirk is far more sensory than documentary or educational; it’s less about the history it depicts than the attendant panic.The real Operation Dynamo, it’s worth saying, succeeded thanks in part to the 40,000 French troops who waited till the British had evacuated and surrendered, becoming prisoners of war. Dunkirk pointedly ignores them; the only character who winds up a POW is British. I don’t know how much these flirtations with the truth matter.

Dunkirk may actually be closer to an art film than a typical war film, and it’s certainly the strangest, most ambitious summer blockbuster you’re likely to see.

While some of its minor flaws may keep it from reaching the highest levels of Nolan’s directorial catalog, as a portrait of a pivotal moment in world history, “Dunkirk” is the kind of gripping and powerful experience that Imax and XD screens were made for.  Don’t miss it.  I give it five stars.

“Dunkirk” is rated PG-13 for intense war experience and some language; running time: 106 minutes.

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Professor Mike

Professor Mike is a left-leaning, dog loving, political junkie. He has written dozens of articles for Substack, Medium, Simily, and Tribel. Professor Mike has been published at Smerconish.com, among others. He is a strong proponent of the environment, and a passionate protector of animals. In addition he is a fierce anti-Trumper. Take a moment and share his work.
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Barleycorn
6 years ago

Bloody good movie~!!

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