I’m eternally fascinated by Christopher Nolan. He seems to connect the dots between the mainstream powerhouses of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas with the offbeat video generation of Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh; and he seems to be equally beloved and hated by fans of both sides. Equal parts David Lean and Jean-Luc Goddard, yet he doesn’t appear to be faithful to the sensibilities of either of them. His films are complicated, both narratively and thematically, and yet still have a broad appeal for American audiences. Simply, he knows how to make a hit without sacrificing the intellectuality of his scripts. His latest film, Dunkirk, might be his least ambitious film as a screenwriter. He does not employ the same labyrinthine plot structures that propelled his previous films, instead relying on a straightforward story. As the title suggests, Nolan’s film covers the World War II Battle of Dunkirk, a notable military failure that nonetheless concluded with the rescue of over 300,000 Allied soldiers.

Of course, it would not be a Nolan film without a bit of a flourish with regards to story structure, and he does this by using an intricate editing structure, intercutting three stories at once: one on the beach at Dunkirk, one at the sea between Dunkirk and mainland England, and one in the air. The first story takes place over a week, the second over one day, and the third over a single hour. Nolan and editor Lee Smith blend these stories into a single narrative, with a non-linear order that gives us different perspectives of the same events. I cannot overstate how incredible the editing in this film is, and the economy with which Nolan and Smith choose to provide the audience with information. Since he no longer needs to provide audiences with the backstory of an overstuffed plot, Nolan is free instead to focus on the suspense of the details and shows us a procedural on survival, and the many ways these soldiers go about achieving it.

Fionn Whitehead plays Tommy, a young British Army private trapped in Dunkirk as German soldiers push the Allied forces toward the beach with little escape. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers wait like sitting ducks as German fighter planes drop bombs killing hundreds at a time. Tommy is the closest thing Dunkirk has to a protagonist, and his name is unimportant as it is hardly spoken if at all, but he is our voyeur into the existential terror of the predicament of these soldiers, whose minds are completely preoccupied with escape. The beach is periodically sent destroyers meant to help evacuate the soldiers, but with German forces always on the offensive and the Battle of Dunkirk all but lost, Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh) has to relay the bad news: the Royal Army will not sacrifice anymore military vessels to help save these men, instead preserving them for the large battles to come. The British government instead commandeers the commercial boats of British civilians to be sent to Dunkirk to save the soldiers while they have a chance.

One of those boats is owned by Dawson (Mark Rylance), a middle-aged mariner who chooses to pilot his own boat on the way to Dunkirk with his son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Peter’s friend George (Barry Keoghan). Before reaching the French shore they find shivering soldier (Cillian Murphy) perilously lost in the middle of the ocean. When he learns that Dawson’s plan is to return to Dunkirk to save lives, the shell-shocked soldier warns that nothing lies ahead but death and begs him to turn back around. As this proceeds, we are introduced to Collins (Jack Lowden) and Farrier (Tom Hardy), two Royal Air Force pilots flying above the fray attempting to prevent German pilots from killing more Allied troops as they try desperately to escape. As hundreds of men die underneath them, Farrier and Collins do their best to take down the German planes while keeping considerations on preserving fuel and ammo as they are the only Air Force planes in the area.

Nolan keeps the dialogue minimal, and a lot of what is said is easily overshadowed by the screeching noise of German planes and exploding bombs. There’s a specific kind of efficiency that Nolan directs with here that creates a tension that seems matched only by the brilliant third act of his 2010 film Inception. The brilliant Dutch-Swedish cinematographer, Hoyte Van Hoytema, is behind the lens here and the two decided to shoot Dunkirk on large format 65MM, which has allowed Warner Bros to distribute the film with select screenings in the once-forgotten 70MM format. The sheer vastness of the 70MM image suits Dunkirk in a way that didn’t totally serve Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master or Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (this decade’s first two attempts to bring this format back). Of our contemporary 70MM films, Dunkirk is the first to truly embrace the epic connotations that the format has to offer. As sparse as Dunkirk is as a narrative, its equally as prosperous as a cinematic spectacle. It gives you an experience that you can only get in the theater.

Dunkirk is a masterful piece of filmmaking, and it is Nolan’s greatest triumph as a visual storyteller. There are, of course, moments when Nolan’s more sentimental side cannot help but rear its head, and the film’s third act utilizes Hans Zimmer’s booming score toward a manipulative effect that betrays the film’s previous efforts, but Dunkirk‘s straightforward use of practical effects earns that kind of feeling more so than Interstellar‘s complex explanations of tesseracts and black holes. This is a great director restricting himself in ways that only boost his creativity as a filmmaker. Without the frills of noir plot devices, Nolan allows himself to really showcase all that 70MM has to offer. The film’s cast, with its mix of acting veterans and relative unknowns (and One Direction’s Harry Styles), plays its part in pushing the film’s egalitarian feel, with only Rylance having an occasional moment of flourish in his performance.

The film’s message – that the reality of Dunkirk’s military failure was actually a showcase of England’s moxie and stiff-upper-lip-edness – can be debated, and Dunkirk is not an anti-war film in its soul. But the way Nolan’s film empathizes with the functions of both bravery and cowardice feels enlightening in contrast to most World War II films. He understands that bravery is not the absence of fear, but the overcoming of fear, and often characters throughout Dunkirk are behaving on both ends of that spectrum, sometimes even within the same scene. When everything is settled, most people are motivated by their need to survive, which is why Tommy’s perspective is the film’s most potent. His bravery is not in the battles his chooses to fight, but the ones he decides to avoid. The film’s stirring opening sequence shows him running from German bullets before ending up on the beach next to another soldier (Aneurin Barnard) who is taking the boots of a dead British soldier. Neither at that moment, nor throughout the film, does Tommy reproach this soldier for his misdeed, because he – like the film Dunkirk itself – understands that the true value in being a soldier is surviving.

 

Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan