Dunkirk —One of a Kind
Dunkirk does not merely tell you a story, it does something more — it makes you live it. When you hear the Luftwaffe’s Stuka howl devilishly, diving on you with a singular purpose, you too lie down flat on the sand with the soldiers. When you see a ship get struck by a torpedo and start to sink sorrily, gurgling out pockets of air and oil, you too jump from the starboard and suffocate for breath alongside the soldiers. When you see hundreds of civilians sail with fortitude towards the very shore men with guns are fleeing from, you too cheer, rejoice, and salute them with the soldiers.
There are no explicit heroes in Dunkirk, nor are there explicit villains. Only you and the enemy. The enemy is supposed to shoot, and you are supposed to either survive or die. That is it. The movie is as indifferent as a mirror that reflects the past, but hardly is there an object that can reveal to us more.

It is probably a sin to watch Dunkirk in any other format besides IMAX, for the depth IMAX offers tremendously adds to the experience. The shots are not only gorgeous but also an important element of the movie. Each time you see a faint dot of the German Ju-87 get bigger on the vast horizon, and the Jericho-trumpet getting shrieker and louder by the second, you are terrifyingly reminded of the ridiculous exposure of the English and the French men who are punily reduced to the mercy of the rain of bullets from above. We are often shown the rising SOS smoke at Dunkirk from afar visible from ‘home’ across the English channel, reminding us the ludicrous geographic propinquity of it. When the Colonel impatiently puts, “But we can see it-”, the Commander succinctly interrupts, “Seeing home doesn’t help us get there, Colonel.”
Nolan has played with the nonlinearity of time yet again and just as craftily! But unlike in Interstellar where Relativity naturally beckoned it, Memento where the protagonist’s damaged mind beckoned it, and Inception where the nature of dreams beckoned it, Dunkirk is perhaps the only Nolan movie where the nonlinearity has been employed for the sake, and enhancement, of story-telling. When we see an event happen in one story line, we see it again in another story line, and once again in the third story line. For instance, we see the attack and capsizing of the same minesweeper thrice, seen from each of the three story lines, and this gives us as complete a picture of the happenings as possible. And even more so because the three cover all the fronts a war comprises of: land, sea, and air!
Besides the grand setting, there are also many memorable scenes that are very telling of the plight the soldiers are in. Halfway into the movie, we see a man unhurriedly walking towards the waters, tossing his helmet away, undoing his gears, and throwing himself into the waves, starting to swim. He probably knows he won’t make it across the channel, but he does it anyway — the war had successfully desensitised death. We hear Mr Dawson say to his boy about Cillian Murphy that may well apply to everyone on the screen, “He may never be the same again.”
There is another subtle moment on Mr Dawson’s boat where his son contemplates locking the shell-shocked Murphy in the cabin after the soldier’s remonstration upon learning they are sailing to Dunkirk. Never has bolting a brass-lock been so suspenseful! But that little pause makes us wonder who the real enemy is. I am reminded of Denzel Washington in Crimson Tide, “In my humble opinion, sir, the true enemy is war itself.”
But these are straws I’m drawing for myself, wholly unintended by Nolan. Unlike Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket or Oliver Stone’s Platoon, I do not think Dunkirk strives to make so much a point against war. That is not its goal. Nolan intends to rather take us there, show us, and immerse us in the experience of the Dunkirk. This might be the boldest ever experimentation in the genre of war movies — ‘character-less’, devoid of any enemy portrayal, short in running time, and purely living on the moment.
And nothing presses that last aspect more than Hans Zimmer’s riveting score, the seed for which is a mere ticking sound we hear almost throughout the movie (purportedly recorded from one of Nolan’s pocket watches), constantly reminding us the relentless march of time (ergo, of the enemy). That ticking even ticks at different paces in all the three story lines! We also hear the Shepard tone that takes the intensity of a scene perpetually higher — if you felt like having a heart-attack sometime during the movie, Zimmer has as much a part in it as Nolan. The musical score maybe the only character in the movie you will have unknowingly known the best!
Speaking of characters, many seem to complain about the almost complete lack of characterisation (which would form the blood and bone of a Nolan movie on a normal day) but I think they are missing Nolan’s point on this one: characters don’t matter. When you think of it, you get to know the characters only as much as the characters get to know each other, which in and of itself is very little. You don’t see men sitting around in campfires drinking and exchanging stories about their waiting fiancés, because it would only lighten the gravity of the situation and not enhance it. Nolan has chosen petrifying realism in place of character development in the screen time, and it would have been less gripping (and undeservedly of the event, even) had he done otherwise. You don’t see litres of blood or dozens of dismembered limbs or a full blown bullet-feast like in the opening of Saving Private Ryan or exploding aircrafts like in Pearl Harbour. You instead see stoic white streams of smoke after an aircraft is hit, and see it plummet and smash into the waters quietly, which is weirdly more terrifying. Nolan makes you connect with the characters not out of a sympathy or care stemming from a personal story but out of natural empathy evoked in us all on seeing the grave perils the characters are in.
Dunkirk shows us that war is a game where everybody inadvertently sacrifices, and the reason is simple — you would succumb otherwise. When Murphy yells at Mr. Dawson, “YOU BELONG AT HOME,” Mr Dawson replies calmly, “If we don’t help, there won’t be any home.” From the stewardesses attending to the soldiers on a Destroyer, to RAF pilots turning his Spitfire back to possibly the most dangerous place they can ever be, to the aiding civilians wagering their life to rescue complete strangers (quarter of whom wouldn’t return home), to even teen aged boys swallowing their spite in avenging the death of a boy to save the burden of guilt from an already shell-shocked soldier, this movie is a testament to all the untold sacrifices a war so cruelly calls for.
In the end, as the train enters an obscure English village with Alex reading from papers the now-famous Churchill’s House of Commons speech “We shall fight on the beaches…”, as Mr Dawson gets off his boat to appreciate and bid goodbye to the pilot he rescued, and as Hardy frantically levers down the landing gears of his gliding Spitfire just in time, gently touching down on the wet sand in the backset of the glow of dusk and is taken prisoner, Britain catches a moment of deserved respite, and we realise that Dunkirk, the sum of three stories, is greater than its parts.