Christopher Nolan slaps us in the face to wake up at the very first scene of his first war epic with. “Dunkirk” (2017). This film is about 400,000 Allied soldiers who are trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk, France, and need to get off before the Germans annihilate them. It stars Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, and Kenneth Branagh who all play British servicemen who need to defy the odds to survive and get home. They all have different stories to tell and Nolan does it with precision and great attention to detail. He definitely did his research to get all of the details right with this film to get us hooked and involved.
Any director that can successfully mix movie genres and be successful with it deserves the upmost respect in my opinion. Quinten Tarantino did it with “Inglourious Basterds” (2009) by mixing a World War Two movie with a western, and now Nolan mixed a WWII movie with a thriller. He does this by never showing the Germans. We never see their faces, and the only evidence of Germans involved in this battle are the Luftwaffe bombing and mowing them down, and bullets zipping past the protagonists’ heads from the German infantry. Not having any visual of the enemy, but yet they’re still killing you is terrifying!
Some of the most horrifying scenes in this movie doesn’t involve any devilish villains, intense action, or gory images, just some bullet holes and scared faces of British soldiers. That kind of film making and storytelling takes a lot of patience and direction to have it pulled off effectively. It’s a smaller movie with very little dialogue. To be honest, it doesn’t need to be big like other war epics I’ve seen. Nolan did it just right with the cast he had, the budget he had, and the production that he had. He did a lot more with less.
One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard from others who’ve seen this film (my wife included) didn’t like this movie because of lack of character development. You never remember nor do I think hear any of the soldiers names. For me, I never got annoyed with that concept. I argue that you don’t need to know their names. What you do need to know are their faces. It’s their faces you care about throughout this whole event. It’s their eyes that tell their history and their situation. Every time these characters were trapped or struggling to survive, I gripped my chair praying they get out alive. No matter what they did Germans were trying to kill them. Whether it be with rifles, planes, or submarines, the Germans were determined to destroy them.
This isn’t much of a spoiler, but I went into this movie blind, and was surprised that this movie took a non-linear approach to the story. I was confused at first with night and day scenes crossing over with different smaller events going on inside the bigger plot of the evacuation. I finally put two-and-two together when I saw one character in one scene, then at a completely different scene that took place in the past. I loved it! I as the audience was putting all of the pieces of this movie together without the help of subtitles spoon feeding it to me. That’s why I love Nolan films because he knows that the audience is smart enough to get it, and arguably he has the smartest movie fans (me included).
Kenneth Branagh in “Dunkirk”
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