dir./written by Christopher Nolan
In recent years, superstar director Christopher Nolan has fancied himself a technician. The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar were undeniably theatrical experiences, and now, his Dunkirk is the first major film to be shot with IMAX cameras. Nolan has gone as far as to refer to his films as "theatrical experiences," and would implicitly prefer if you saw this new one on the format which he designed it for. However, the risk of designing a film around technology is that it will lose its power in a lesser format, so for all of Dunkirk's acclaim, I approached with trepidation.
In truth, appreciation of Dunkirk is likely to come easy no matter what format it's experienced in, as while the sound and image of the IMAX cinema serves to enhance the film's cacophonous, claustrophobic beauty, those elements are built into the film enough that they will come across clearly no matter how diminished they may be. Dunkirk is a harrowing, disorienting, and genuinely astonishing experience, and it successfully recreates the sheer panic which must have accompanied this evacuation. It looks and sounds like a masterpiece, and had it just a little more of a human core or fully resisted patriotic sentiment, it would be there. As is, it's merely excellent.
The narrative of Dunkirk is assembled from three different time frames. Over the course of a week, we follow a soldier named Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) surviving German bombardment on the beach and mole (i.e. pier) of Dunkirk, France until he can be extracted. Over the course of a day, we follow the crew of a civilian vessel ordered to help evacuate the soldiers: Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance) sails the yacht, accompanied by his son, (Tom Glynn-Carney), and a friend of his son named George (Barry Keoghan). Over the course of an hour, we follow a pilot (Tom Hardy) and his wingmen providing air support for the evacuation as their fuel supply dwindles. There's also Kenneth Branagh as Commander Bolton, who does a magnificent job of looking from the Mole over to England, which can just barely be seen over the horizon.
Don't worry about keeping this straight. The timeline is intentionally scrambled so entire days of survival feel exactly as long as mere minutes in the air. The land storyline, titled "The Mole," is truncated into a series of crises, a week's worth of survival appearing as just a couple days, just as it was most likely remembered after the fact. By contrast, the sea storyline ("The Sea") builds heavily on anticipation of the horrors to come, and the aerial storyline ("The Air") emphasizes all the little details which these pilots needed to keep track of. The only explanation for the movie's timeline comes in title cards at the very beginning, and while the subsequent time distortion provides another of Nolan's ever-popular puzzles to solve, it also serves to emphasize the present, as the only thing which is entirely clear is the immediate threat and the distant goal of evacuation.
In this sense, Dunkirk is able to recreate the sensation of being in the midst of an event this chaotic, where a bomb could drop at any moment, and at any given time you're simply trying to navigate whatever the latest crisis is. Admittedly, attempting to untangle the chronology can be distracting, but for the most part that complements the constant unease, and some awareness of how close the different stories are to each other helps bring attention to the film's clever parallel storytelling. Again, the three storylines all take place over different time frames and contain different amounts of detail, and yet each has the same sense of immediacy, and each feels like the same amount of time.
It can be hard to identify where characters are in relation to each other, but that the film demands patience from a summer blockbuster audience is one of its merits. Indeed, one of Dunkirk's best aspects is how it manages to avoid repetition. Despite all the similarities between the various blasts of shrapnel throughout the film, the scenarios differ wildly. Tommy at the Mole hops between a variety of different environments, the sea storyline is complicated when the crew pulls a traumatized soldier out of the water, and the air storyline grows increasingly desperate as the pilot's fuel tank empties. There's a lot of variety in the film's anxiety-ridden scenarios, each of which transitions rhythmically between scenes of heightened paranoia and sudden outbursts of violence.
The film's rhythm is aided greatly by Hans Zimmer's exquisite score, anchored on a near-constant ticking clock and rising strings which change tempo to fit the scene. The score is constant and homogenous, but that is to its benefit, as it never ceases even when the film jumps to another storyline. If the film's anxiety is anchored on its images, the score elevates them to something altogether more poetic, and that synthesis is successful in sustaining a visceral feel which many films save for their climax. Zimmer has often been criticized for his loud, abstract drones, but his soundtrack here is filled with guttural growling, wailing sirens, and intense string crescendos which contribute significantly to the film's intensity.
As successful as Dunkirk is in evoking a state of mind, its light characterization can feel a little cold at times. Because everyone's so lightly characterized, the only characters who are truly distinct are Mr. Dawson and Hardy's character, and the latter mainly stands apart because he spends the entire film masked and airborne. Without sufficient investment in these soldiers as people, some of the scenes can lack the exact tension intended, but Nolan is notoriously disinterested in people, and here he successfully creates less a feeling of caring about these people than one of actually being there among them. These people are largely ciphers for the battle's existential anxiety, caused by an enemy who is never seen yet omnipresent. With war movies, people like to throw around terms like "immersive," but Dunkirk truly does recreate a state of mind which at least feels similar to being in a war zone. When it's all over, the sheer intensity of the experience delays the relief; spectres of the war linger in mind.
The film's biggest drawback is its blatant nationalism, which informs about half of its emotional core. This will be a very subjective point, as some people clearly respond more than I do to demonstrations of heroism from abstracted symbols of the nation, but this isn't something everyone will connect to. The film emphasizes a unified "Englishness," to the extent where anyone who isn't English is treated as an outsider, and as such the characters frequently stand in as ciphers for the English people. (There are no major Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish characters in this film, to my memory.) Tommy escaping from one bad situation after another, Rylance's character continuing forward in the face of imminent danger, Hardy's pilot blasting German planes out of the sky despite running on fumes, and even the eventual appearance of the civilian fleet are all symbols of English bravery and perseverance. Personally, I find patriotism silly at best, so I found little pathos in this, but people more nationalistic than I will likely find this incomparably powerful, especially within England itself.
Dunkirk is rated a mere PG, containing the constant threat of bullets, fire, and water but rarely showing actual signs of injury, and yet it still succeeds by keeping its deaths offscreen and emphasizing danger in abstract, visually grandiose ways. Bullets pierce metal, ships fall in the background, planes crash into water, but we never see any actual burns or bullet wounds, and while we do see someone drown, it's through murky water which hides the more graphic elements. Watched in 70mm IMAX, the film has an unconventional aspect ratio which is as tall as it is wide, filling the entire wall of the cinema in an immense square which somehow enhances both the film's claustrophobia and its beautiful use of negative space. Perhaps even more essential is the sound, which makes every thud, blast, and pop jarring, and every groan of Zimmer's score can be felt through the shaking of your chair. It's obviously the best format to see the film in, but I can't imagine it being any less intense in any other format.
After being disappointed by The Dark Knight Rises and bailing after an hour of Interstellar, I'm glad to say that Nolan is back on form. In Dunkirk, he's unshackled from the demands of a story and allowed to verge farther into abstraction than any other blockbuster in recent memory, and as a result has created a fresh, visceral action thriller which exists as a monolithic accomplishment of visceral terror, and while his attempts at an emotional core are as subjective as ever, this is the kind of demanding yet rewarding cinema which major studios simply don't produce often enough anymore. Dunkirk is perhaps a little too cold to be a masterpiece, but it's an undeniably impressive achievement, and it deserves to be seen on the largest screen possible.
My current score is slightly conservative and might grow even higher on revisits, depending on whether the film's patriotic core does more for me. For now:
8/10
+ Scrambled timeline is ingenious.
+ Unparalleled visceral intensity.
+ Harmonious, beautiful blend of images and music.
- Light characterization can be a tad distancing.
- Patriotic themes might be divisive.
- Untangling the chronology can be distracting.
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Todd Throndson
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I just like the style.
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