Engaging and tense, ‘Dunkirk’ captures a gripping story of survival
Christopher Nolan brings his unique aesthetic to a war film, creating an intimate and visually immersive experience
Dunkirk doesn’t spend a lot of time on expository dialogue or on the historical context around 400,000 soldiers trapped on a beach in northern France. Instead, Christopher Nolan’s latest epic drops hard and fast into the action and tension of war. It’s a fully immersive and visceral experience, driven by hauntingly quiet moments disrupted by the faint and ominous sound of a distant plane approaching or a sudden and devastating torpedo strike. It can be startlingly loud, making the quiet moments all the more eerie, with dizzyingly vast aerial views and seascapes, and a somewhat disorienting narrative. With Dunkirk, Nolan isn’t telling a story about survival so much as he’s showing it — the desperation of soldiers trying to get off the beach, the urgency with which civilians answer the call to help, the steady concentration of a pilot surveying the horizon while calculating how much fuel he has left.
It’s no surprise to see Nolan bring his own complicated aesthetic to tell this war story. Although he strips this story down to its baser elements — there’s no cutting away to war room plans, or so much as an info dump on the events leading up to this — Nolan makes an interesting narrative choice by letting this story unfold across three different timelines. The first takes place across one week and focuses on Fionn Whitehead as Tommy and several soldiers attempting to get off the beach; the second takes place across one day and focuses on Mark Rylance as Mr. Dawson, a civilian responding to the call for civilian vessels to come and rescue the soldiers; and the third takes place across one hour and focuses on Tom Hardy as Royal Air Force pilot Farrier, providing air support for the troops on the ground. While these stories cover different timeframes and are paced differently, the film never feels disjointed or confusing. As is evident in films like Memento, Following, Inception, and even Interstellar, Nolan is exceptionally great at playing with timelines and chronology; he knows how to anchor scenes and establish timeframes without losing his audience.
Nolan’s narrative approach works incredibly well here. Despite a modest 106-minute runtime, Dunkirk still feels like a sprawling epic. Whereas many war movies sometimes have a pacing problem, unable to strike a balance between character moments and big action set pieces, Dunkirk uses its time effectively. Rather than break away from the action for long stretches of dialogue, Nolan builds tension in the quieter moments, making those scenes more uncomfortable than when the soldiers are actually taking fire. In doing so, he captures the chilling sense of uncertainty and fear.
By focusing the film in this way and not filling time with backstories and context as to who these people are and what’s waiting for them back home, the characters are developed and defined purely through what they do on screen. This is as much a credit to the cast as it is to Nolan — as usual, Tom Hardy does a hell of a lot with very little (I have yet to leave a movie without thinking “Tom Hardy is such a badass,” and I’ve seen This Means War). He’s in a cockpit the entire movie, his face is partially masked for most of the movie, but just as his character maintains a steady focus on using his limited fuel as effectively as he can, Hardy uses every moment of screen time to reflect the level of careful concentration that requires. Similarly, despite limited dialogue, Fionn Whitehead carries the majority of the movie, particularly some of the tenser, more nerve-racking scenes. He’s often called on to play panicked, pensive, relieved, and desperate, but he never overdoes it. His struggle to survive is never over-dramatized because it doesn’t have to be; Nolan has established an overwhelmingly haunting environment marked by an ominous and unseen enemy, and Whitehead perfectly conveys the hopelessness of his circumstances.
Nolan truly has proven himself to be one of the modern masters of filmmaking, consistently pushing the boundaries of both narrative and visual storytelling while still keeping his films grounded. There’s always an internal logic to his films, even when he’s doing sci-fi/fantasy, there’s an implicit set of rules that make them feel believable and real (this is the guy who ensured there was a functional logic to every part of Batman’s suit). After honing his narrative and visual skills for the last decade on sci-fi and fantasy, with Dunkirk, Nolan puts those same skills to use as he turns his focus to a historical subject matter.
His narrative approach to the story isn’t gimmicky, but rather makes the tension and anticipation of watching how or if the stories converge all the more compelling. More importantly, Nolan’s skill as a filmmaker is further evident in that he doesn’t lean on history or dialogue as a crutch to provide context — he makes Dunkirk an absorbing experience by telling a very visual story. Using dizzying visuals to capture vast scope and scale, he makes the soldiers seem all the more stranded and further from home. But he also takes close care to show more intimate moments, letting the camera linger just a bit longer to catch a character’s reaction, and whether it’s a moment of hope being lost or hope being found, he really lets the emotional weight of it sink in.
Christopher Nolan’s films have always challenged the norms of style in a variety of genres, and with Dunkirk he’s now challenged the norm of how war stories are told in film. He chooses to focus his narrative and visual skills on capturing the energy and emotion of being present in a specific moment in time rather than bog it down with too much historical context and too many extraneous details. In Nolan’s tradition of pushing boundaries and challenging norms, Dunkirk continues to do so, while hopefully serving as a mission statement that Nolan, too, will continue to do so.