Nolan’s Dunkirk is the Film the Event Deserves

Michael Zhang
Jul 23, 2017 · 12 min read
Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

When I told a friend I was excited to see Christopher Nolan’s new World War II epic Dunkirk, he responded by asking “Why do we need another World War II movie? There are already so many.” This is true. In the intervening years, the second world war has been portrayed on the big screen more often than any other historical event. It has been done so often that the interpretations have, in many ways, replaced the actual event in our popular imagination, to the point where we have become numb to them. World War II films have become the kind of movies we make fun of grandparents for liking. The camaraderie between an unlikely band of brothers, the grieving wives, the generals huddled over maps, the last stands, overlaid by images of American flags set to brass band scores ripped off from Aaron Copland. We see the same tropes and clichés time and time again on film, on television and in video games. Why tread over trodden ground? The answer is simple: We think we’ve exhausted the source material. But the truth is, American popular culture, specifically American cinema, has just barely skimmed the surface of the most violent conflict in human history. Within that conflict, there are so many stories that have yet to be told on screen.

In America, we celebrate World War II like a Superbowl victory. The events that have been canonized in our history books are Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, Iwo Jima. What we forget is that these stories that we continue to tell are just a small fraction of a conflict that engulfed the entire world, and involved every major nation on every continent except Antarctica, and it began long before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. When I was in 6th grade, my history teacher wrote the years 1941–1945 on the chalkboard when she taught us about World War II. I raised my hand and corrected her, reminding her that the war actual started in 1939 with the invasion of Poland (If you count the Japan-China conflict, it actually began in 1937). She hated me. The sad thing is, Americans all over this country are taught this narrative, and any part of the war that did not involve American troops was left out of our education. Growing up, I knew nothing of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Siege of Leningrad or the Warsaw Uprising. If not for my Chinese heritage, I would not have known of the Rape of Nanking. And I knew nothing of the evacuation of Dunkirk.

So, to answer my friend’s question, why do we need another World War II movie? Specifically, why do we need a movie about Dunkirk? The answer is, because people need to know this story and too few (Americans, at least) do. When telling friends and coworkers about this movie, I was shocked to learn that almost no one I talked to had ever heard of Dunkirk, which is amazing given that what happened on that beach in May and June of 1940, a full 18 months before the United States entered the war, changed the course of human history. Imagine if, 60 years from now, your 25-year-old grandson told you he had never heard of 9/11. You’d slap that ig’nant motherfucker upside the head. What do we always say? “Never forget.” Dunkirk is on that level of importance and it’s unacceptable that we have allowed our society to forget about it.

Imagine if, 60 years from now, your 25-year-old grandson told you he had never heard of 9/11. You’d slap that ig’nant motherfucker upside the head.

Within weeks of launching their invasion of France and Belgium, the Nazis had completely surrounded the British forces and pushed them into a small pocket on the French coast, near the town of Dunkirk on the Belgian border. The British and allied forces were completely surrounded and standing between them their home island were 20 miles of water. British naval vessels were unable to approach the beach as they would get stuck in the shallow water, so evacuations had to be made via a mole (a long breakwater extending out from the beach), which was a massive bottleneck, not to mention an easy target for Stuka dive bombers. In this moment of crisis, British civilians vessels—the “Little Ships of Dunkirk”—mobilized and crossed the channel and ferried the stranded soldiers from the beaches onto the naval ships or directly back to England. Over the course of a week, almost 400,000 British, French and Canadian troops were evacuated from the shores of Dunkirk and brought back to England. That is the equivalent of evacuating the entire population of the city of New Orleans.

The evacuation of Dunkirk is a critical inflection point in the war. Knowing what we know now, it’s easy to discount Dunkirk as a rather embarrassing retreat for the allies early on in the war. But we must remember that for the people on that beach, defeat seemed almost imminent. For the British Expeditionary Force, this is their Falcons vs. Patriots 28–3 moment. If you asked anyone at that time who was going to win the war, almost everyone would have put their money on the Germans. It looked like it was going to be the greatest defeat in British military history. The fact that they survived is, in itself, an act akin to divine deliverance. The fact that they would go on to win the war, five years later, is a tale of ultimate triumph. Had the evacuation failed, all those troops would have either been annihilated or captured by the Germans, and become a valuable bargaining chip. It is very likely that, low on morale, with their French allies collapsing, the British would have negotiated an armistice with the Nazis in exchange for the release of their captured troops. With France and Britain down for the count, the Nazis would be able to devote their full energy to their Eastern conquests. They might have defeated the Soviet Union. Once the United States entered the war, without their British allies, they would not have a staging ground to launch the D-Day invasion that is so hallowed in our lore. Without British advances in North Africa, we would not have had a staging ground to invade Italy from the south. Without Dunkirk, it is conceivable that the Nazis might have controlled Europe for decades to come. It is conceivable that we would have had to use the atomic bomb on Germany, in addition to Japan. The dominoes that fall without the success of the Dunkirk evacuation would have rippled through the centuries. It is one of the most amazing stories of the war, and it demands to be told.

And there is no one better suited to tell it than Christopher Nolan. Having produced big budget hits like the Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception and Interstellar, Nolan has the credibility, the studio blessings, and most importantly, the money, to give the Dunkirk story the film it has always deserved. And this is important. Because if you can’t tell a war story right, you shouldn’t be allowed to tell it at all (Remember Pearl Harbor? Michael Bay might as well have whipped out his dick and pissed all over a bunch of Pearl Harbor veterans). The beaches of Dunkirk, like the beaches of Normandy, the fields of Gettysburg and the trenches of Verdun, are hallowed ground. And with Dunkirk, there are men alive today who were on that beach in May 1940, who remember what it was like not to know if you would ever see home again. Today’s filmmakers have an obligation to these survivors to to handle these stories with the gravity and responsibility that they deserve. That doesn’t just mean getting the uniforms, the planes and the military maneuvers right. That means portraying the experiences of the soldiers on the ground and the pilots in the air as true to reality as possible.

Remember Pearl Harbor? Michael Bay might as well have whipped out his dick and pissed all over a bunch of Pearl Harbor veterans

One thing I can’t get behind is a fucked up historical movie. I like Quentin Tarantino but I could never fully get behind Inglorious Basterds because it made World War II seem like some kind of Nazi shoot ’em up revenge porn rather than the horrific tragedy that it was. Similarly Captain America: the First Avenger and Wonder Woman bastardized historical stories that should have been left alone. I don’t give a fuck about Red Skull or Doctor Poison or whatever bozo villains you create because the true story is always so much more compelling. Why add all this nonsense when people don’t even know the real story?

Even war movies that aim for verisimilitude still usually fall flat. I remember watching Fury starring Brad Pitt and Shia LaBoeuf and being thoroughly disappointed. Despite having a couple excellent battle sequences, and using real Sherman and Tiger tanks, the film eventually falls back on the same old war movie tropes (Warning: Fury spoilers ahead): A naive young newbie is thrown into a tank with a crew of grizzled veterans. Over the course of a day full of killing Nazis and deflowering virginal German milk maids, the young pipsqueak morphs into a full-on badass and develops a strong bond of camaraderie with his tank-mates and they decide to selflessly hold off an entire SS battalion, even though there is no indication that it is necessary or practical. The final act of the film devolves into all out absurdity in which our five heroes, in a tank that literally can’t even move because it’s broken, mow down wave after wave of breathtakingly incompetent SS soldiers that have worse self-preservation instincts than Medal of Honor NPC’s.

Other war movies attempt to tell stories that have been left out of the history books but end up fucking them up. When I heard that LucasFilm was producing a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, black fighter pilots of World War II, I was initially excited. I didn’t even end up watching Red Tails because the trailer was so bonkers. The aerial dogfight scenes looked like a straight up video game, with planes doing all kinds of impossible shit.

Which brings me back to Dunkirk. Christopher Nolan certainly has his flaws, but he is, if nothing else, an OG visual storyteller, committed to using practical effects over CGI whenever possible. Remember the midair plane heist at the beginning of the Dark Knight Rises? Remember the dizzying rotating hallway fight scene in Inception? This is the kind of impressive filmmaking that separates Nolan from any of his big budget contemporaries (except perhaps George Miller. Sidenote: does Tom Hardy pick the best roles or what?). He churns out summer blockbusters, but with the eye of an auteur. He knows that, in order to pull off a good war movie, you need to sell it. You need to put the audience on that beach, make them feel what those soldiers felt. Nolan knew that the only way to truly put the audience in the pilot’s seat was to bolt an enormous 65 mm IMAX camera onto a real life Spitfire. When he couldn’t use the real planes for certain scenes, he opted to use large-scale remote-control models rather than CGI. Watch the aerial dogfight scenes in Dunkirk, then go on Youtube and watch the dogfight scenes in Red Tails when you get home. Red Tails straight up feels like Spongebob Squarepants. In Dunkirk, the pilot, played by Tom Hardy, chases the enemy plane without ever firing a shot. Then, in the split second when the enemy plane veers into his crosshairs, he taps the trigger for a 1–2 second burst of bullets. In Red Tails, apparently everyone has infinite ammo and no one gives a shit about friendly fire because the bullets are literally flying during the entire dogfight sequence. In Dunkirk, the pilots spend half the time trying just to spot an enemy plane. In Red Tails, it looks like someone on the graphics team just went balls out with the clone tool and wallpapered the whole fucking screen with planes. I watch historical movies because I want to get an idea of what it was like to be there. A movie is of no use to me if it can’t give me that. If you go on Youtube you can find dozens of video compilations of archival footage of World War II aerial combat. That shit is intense as fuck. You have no excuse to get it wrong, unless, of course, you don’t give a shit about accuracy and just wanna feed the audience a bunch of CGI explosions like you’re throwing peanuts into the gorilla enclosure at the zoo.

In Dunkirk, Nolan manages to avoid one of his frequent flaws: lengthy setup, longwinded exposition dumps and obtuse philosophical themes. He manages to trim the film down to its most essential elements, forgoing character development in favor of giving the audience a bird’s eye view of the battle. Dialogue is minimal and half the characters go the whole movie without ever being named. By breaking up the story into three distinct timelines that slowly intertwine as the tension rises, minute by minute, Nolan paints an impressionistic portrait of an epic historical event that is both intimate and grand in its scope, lingering just long enough on individual stories to make the zoom-out all the more effective. As the audience, we get enough information to understand what’s going on, without getting bogged down in the politics or context. Some may find this a turnoff, especially since viewers who are not familiar with the history, will leave with critical gaps in their understanding. How did the soldiers get here? What happens afterwards? But I don’t think Nolan can play filmmaker and history teacher all at once. If Dunkirk succeeds in gripping moviegoers for its 106-minute runtime, hopefully, it will encourage them to learn more about the event and its aftermath after they leave the theater.

All this said, Dunkirk is not a perfect film. The pounding score by Hans Zimmer is relentless, oftentimes drowning out dialogue, and flooding moments that might have benefitted from some silence. While I mostly enjoyed the nonlinear narrative structure, I found that, toward the end, as the timelines drifted closer and closer together, moving toward an inevitable convergence, they began to spillover into one another, causing a bit of confusion. Certainly, a second viewing would clear this up, but audiences shouldn’t have to see a film twice to pick up all the narrative breadcrumbs. In Memento, Nolan’s distortion of time is fundamentally central to the story, and he does it brilliantly. In Dunkirk, Nolan uses it to build tension to a crescendo but it is not really necessary to the narrative and some may find it convoluting. Nolan bucks war film convention by keeping on-screen violence to a minimum, but at the cost of verisimilitude. While I’m not exactly thirsting for blood and viscera all over my screen, I do think some of the horrors of war are erased and sanitized without the blood. There’s something eery about seeing a beach littered full of bodies supposedly struck by dive bombers without an ounce of blood in sight. Lastly, there are some very minor historical inaccuracies.

Despite its flaws, Dunkirk manages to deliver a compelling, gripping and original story while still being (mostly) true to the historical source material. Most importantly, it tells a story that deserves to be told on the big screen. Hopefully Nolan’s credentials as a blockbuster filmmaker will propel Dunkirk to box office success and help rescue Hollywood from the pit of reboots and tentpole superhero franchises that it’s currently trapped in and show the studio heads that a war movie does not have to be a conventional story of victory and triumph to be great. A film about a defeat can still be great, if told right. The second world war is a million individual tragedies all woven together to form the greatest single conflict in human history. If Dunkirk succeeds in the box office, it will hopefully open the door for more obscure and unconventional stories from the war to finally be given their due on the big screen.

Final Thoughts:

In a few years, World War II will no longer be living history. The last few people who experienced this titanic event that shaped our modern world will soon be gone, and so will their stories. I greatly appreciate that Nolan took the time and effort to interview dozens of veterans of Dunkirk before making the film, and screened it for them afterwards, to make sure that he had done the story justice.

If you like realistic historical World War II films like Dunkirk, but were disappointed at the lack of horrific violence, rape and subtitles, might I suggest a few foreign language films:

The City of Life and Death: An incredibly sad film about the Rape of Nanking by Japanese occupying soldiers in 1937. Basically Schindler’s List but with Chinese people instead of Jews.

A Woman in Berlin: This film focuses on the little-known story of the mass rapes of Berlin women by Soviet occupying soldiers after the end of the war. It gives us a rare glimpse of the war crimes committed by allied soldiers.

For real, though, over half the people who died in WWII were civilian noncombatants. As much as I love stories about the soldiers, it would be great to see more stories of the people who were just caught in the middle of all of it and trying to survive too, specifically the women and children.

    Michael Zhang

    Written by

    Graphic designer, illustrator, writer

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