Dunkirk
Why it is probably Christopher Nolan’s best film yet
Film cameras were built for war. They are rugged machines developed to deal with extreme conditions. They are a large, heavy, and loud technology, a technology that was largely aided in its improvement and evolution by The Second World War. Like those war photographers of old who captured images of Hell-on-Earth, Christopher Nolan wants to place us on those bloody beachscapes of The Second World War, in the shoes of those that experienced it first-hand. We are simultaneously the camera and the witness. With his almost fetishistic love of celluloid — Dunkirk was shot on 70mm IMAX — perhaps Nolan is paying physical homage to those who braved the battlegrounds of one of history’s bloodiest portions in order to capture what only some could dream of in their worst nightmares. Nolan’s Dunkirk is not just an attempt to preserve and continue the tradition of the best looking image quality ever, but an attempt to preserve the stories that those images can carry. Film is a magic lantern show; filmmakers are the magician. And the illusion of movement generated by light hitting a series of still frames can not only depict stories of courage and heroism based on truth, but transport the viewer back to that moment in history.
“What I love about movies is that they allow us to share subjective experience with other people,” says Nolan. “You’re sitting there with the audience, and everyone is engaged in the same subjective experience.” German fighter planes scream overhead like banshees and for a moment we forget where the screen ends and the sand begins. The beaches of Dunkirk are massive in their size, but cramped and claustrophobic in their scope. We never see the Germans but we can feel — sense — the effect of their encroaching presence upon the stranded Allied soldiers. And yes, for a moment we are sharing that experience with those who are seated around us in the cinema, but for a moment it also feels like we are having the subjective experience of those who truly experienced some of Britain’s darkest days mainlined into our cerebral cortex.
It is an urgent and experiential film: the kind of movie that focuses on an event shown through the physical and emotional reactions of its characters. Dunkirk wants you to walk out of the darkness feeling shellshocked, giving you a history lesson not through dates, facts, and figures, but through involvement and primal understanding. It’s about as close as traditional cinema comes to virtual reality. And this is why Dunkirk is Nolan’s strongest effort so far. It is a film completely stripped of the fat. Rather than having characters standing around explaining the plot, some of them only placed in the film as a guised vehicle for exposition, we have characters that can only be understood on a humanistic and feral level. We analyse them through comparisons to ourselves. How would we react? It is storytelling in its purest, most visceral form, arousing emotion through a succession of insistent events.
This is of course something that Dunkirk still shares with many of Nolan’s previous films. The effect (or the in-effect) and the immediacy of time is often felt. Think, the nonlinear structure of lost time that is Memento; and the dream levels that operate on different temporal planes yet all running towards one fixed point in Inception; or the 60 days of Alaskan midnight sun that haunts the town of Nightmute in Insomnia. Nolan has always understood that cinema is a practice of sculpting in time, and Dunkirk is perhaps the first time that this concept truly transcends the narrative of the film. In this ‘plotless’ film, the form carries. The desperation of the situation is best explored when a film is stripped down to a stressful time crisis, and felt best when the extra is disregarded. Has there ever been a war film quite like this genre-bending thriller?
And Han Zimmer’s magnificent score keeps the ticking of the clock rumbling on. It is at times quiet and methodical, and at others cacophonous and explosive. Nolan’s and Zimmer’s relationship has been a long-lasting one, and the difference between the director and the composer, and how that relationship informs their films, are often hard to differentiate. It is almost as if Nolan is a composer himself, collaborating with Zimmer in order to deliver a pure audiovisual spectacle. For a director so fascinated with images and the power that they can carry and evoke, Nolan spends a large portion of Dunkirk exploring the sonic landscape of the beach. The sharp bang of a gunshot snaps you out of the tired, hypnotic lull that you share with the film’s soldiers. Have gunshots ever sounded this good? The sound of Garands firing off around us are a shot to the head of the stock Hollywood gunshot sounds that we’re all so used to. They have a transportive quality, evoking the sonic unpredictability of war.
Not only does Nolan rely on his long-time collaborative composer Zimmer, but he relies on his established cast of actors, with a few newcomers thrown in there for good measure. Nolan favourites Tom Hardy and Cillian Murphy deliver — as well as Oscar winner Mark Rylance with a fantastically measured performance of a weekend sailor who does the right thing — but it is perhaps newcomers Fionn Whitehead, (pop sensation) Harry Styles, and Barry Keoghan who are most memorable here. All we need to know about these characters is how they react to the distressing situations that Nolan places them in; we aren’t served a crumpled photo of a loved one back home in place of character depth because its not that kind of film. Many of the characters remain fairly anonymous — some of them aren’t even credited with proper names — because Nolan is using the cinematic medium in order to show the effects of war, as opposed to a character study or developed exploration of those who might have fought in it. Nolan once again threads multiple narrative strands into a cohesive whole, this time as a way to grapple with the idea of an event that was too big for individuals to fully comprehend in the moment. This polyphonic narrative not only reflects the cacophonous audiovisual experience that Dunkirk is, but the collective psychology of a small city’s worth of people that were trying to escape France. By providing contrasting viewpoints, he hopes to capture the multifarious and fragmented nature of war, and in turn, a sense of all-encompassing and cohesive realism.
It is Nolan’s stretch for realism that places us there on the beach like those old, jittery, black-and-white Pathé images of bodies crammed into boats spilling out into the water. It’s perhaps in its final moments that the film shows its sole weakness, overlaying the quoted words of Winston Churchill with heroic and patriotic images of British soldiers returning home. Ultimately that was not the point of the film. Though it does stir up feelings from the depths of any stiff-upper-lip-Brit, it is attempting to divulge a meaning that wasn’t really there. For most of the film, Nolan had displayed the difficulty to make a neat little narrative out of war, showing it to be the tense, brutal, desperate, free-for-all that it truly was, and it is a shame that Nolan attempted to tie it up with a little Churchill shaped bow. Regardless, Dunkirk is the filmmaker’s magnum opus in the sense that you can imagine Nolan preparing for its production by rewatching and reevaluating his own filmography. He has taken his greatest strengths — powerful images that snowball into an explosive ball of third act momentum — and not overcomplicating them with convoluted plot. Such a film seems unimaginable after seeing this one. Dunkirk is visual storytelling at its purest, and often at its best. Though it is a not a perfect film, it is as close as Nolan has ever got to that impossible watermark.
