Dunkirk

Tick-tock. With­in sec­onds of Christo­pher Nolan set­ting the stop­watch on his tenth fea­ture, the unmis­tak­able metal­lic chat­ter of pass­ing time is momen­tar­i­ly drowned out by the pierc­ing crack of bul­lets as a young sol­dier scram­bles to safe­ty, over gar­den fences and past a sand­bag bar­ri­cade, before final­ly emerg­ing onto a beach. For the next 100 or so min­utes Nolan hits us with wave after unre­lent­ing wave of intense, vis­cer­al action, all the while keep­ing that same metro­nom­ic beat tick­ing – a reminder that even dur­ing war, time is con­stant and immutable.

Nolan is obsessed with time, and in Dunkirk he explores this abstract con­cept in typ­i­cal­ly grandiose fash­ion across three inter­sect­ing nar­ra­tive time frames: one week on land, one day at sea and one hour in the sky. In re-enact­ing this momen­tous bat­tle from mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives – pri­mar­i­ly through the eyes of Fionn White­head, Har­ry Styles and Aneurin Barnard’s rook­ie pri­vates, Mark Rylance and Tom Glynn-Carney’s civil­ian res­cuers, and Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden’s RAF pilots – Nolan strives to cre­ate an inti­mate and immer­sive view­ing expe­ri­ence. The result is awe-induc­ing on a tech­ni­cal lev­el. But does it stack up to any­thing more than pre­ci­sion-tooled spectacle?

From the first time we hear the omi­nous screech of Stukas over­head, to the heart-stop­ping, jaw-drop­ping moment when a plane engine sud­den­ly sput­ters to a halt in mid-air, it’s clear that every­thing about this ambi­tious­ly mount­ed block­buster has been painstak­ing­ly designed to leave a last­ing impact. Yet while Dunkirk is unim­peach­able as a for­mal exer­cise, it’s telling that the sense of scale you get from it is of the pro­duc­tion itself rather than what the film is depicting.

Despite the aston­ish­ing accu­ra­cy with which the film recounts the mass evac­u­a­tion of almost 400,000 men – an unprece­dent­ed mil­i­tary oper­a­tion that arguably tipped World War Two in the favour of the Allies – the full extent of the chaos and order which char­ac­terised this epic con­flict remains frus­trat­ing­ly out of view. Nolan has said that he approached Dunkirk ​“not as a war film, but as a sur­vival sto­ry”, although giv­en what he has attempt­ed pre­vi­ous­ly with the likes of Incep­tion, Inter­stel­lar and his Dark Knight tril­o­gy, the lean­ness and nar­row focus of the plot comes as a surprise.

What it lacks in terms of sto­ry, how­ev­er, Dunkirk more than makes up for in style. Whether he’s shoot­ing from the wing of a Spit­fire, the deck of a wood­en plea­sure yacht or the bow­els of a sink­ing naval ves­sel, Nolan infus­es each frame with daz­zling tex­ture and atten­tion to detail. His film may not boast a sin­gle cen­tre­piece action sequence to rival, say, the D‑Day land­ing scene in Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan, or even the sin­gle-take, five-minute track­ing shot of Dunkirk beach in Atone­ment, but it is effec­tive­ly one long unbro­ken set piece – sure­ly one of the most impres­sive ever com­mit­ted to celluloid.

It’s incred­i­bly loud, too. The sound design is a pulse-quick­en­ing cacoph­o­ny of deaf­en­ing in-cam­era effects mixed with the steady swell and thrum of Hans Zimmer’s score, which is more under­stat­ed but no less effec­tive than his pre­vi­ous col­lab­o­ra­tions with Nolan. Big on atmos­phere and mood, light on dia­logue and char­ac­ter, full of respect and com­pas­sion yet odd­ly clin­i­cal in its exe­cu­tion, Dunkirk is quite unlike any­thing we’ve seen from the writer/​director before. A bold, inten­tion­al­ly blood­less film that for the most part works spec­tac­u­lar­ly well.

There is some­thing miss­ing though. Cru­cial­ly and most con­spic­u­ous­ly, the Ger­mans them­selves aren’t shown – an under­stand­able deci­sion per­haps but one which serves to dis­tance us from real­i­ty instead of bring­ing us clos­er to it. This is the first Christo­pher Nolan film to be based on actu­al events, and as such he opts for max­i­mum real­ism at all times, aid­ed by the embar­rass­ment of rich­es at his dis­pos­al (spe­cial men­tions go to cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Hoyte Van Hoytema and pro­duc­tion design­er Nathan Crow­ley). It seems a strange deci­sion, then, to dehu­man­ise the ene­my by reduc­ing them to a spec­tral pres­ence, espe­cial­ly as Nolan ded­i­cates the film to the peo­ple whose lives were changed by what hap­pened at Dunkirk.

It’s not just the sen­ti­ment but the word­ing of this clos­ing mes­sage which res­onates, as it extends beyond those who per­ished between 27 May and 4 June 1940 to you and me and every­one else watch­ing. This is a stun­ning mon­u­ment to a great sac­ri­fice – one which will nev­er be for­got­ten – but con­sid­er­ing Nolan’s rep­u­ta­tion as a chal­leng­ing and vision­ary film­mak­er, you may be left want­i­ng more.