Dunkirk: A Styl(es)istic Masterpiece

War films of old - the 1958 Dunkirk film included - have always had a bit of a novelty to them, despite their dark subject matter. Only after Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan have films depicting World War II and the like really focused on the negatives of hard-fought victories rather than the positives. I’m sure everybody reading this has a dad or other relative who switches on Turner Classic Movies not in order to lament on the futility of conflicts past, but to enjoy themselves with a jingoistic, quaint dramatization. Sure, older films never presented war as a good thing, but they were certainly a far cry from the hopelessness of Enemy at the Gates or the shellshock-flecked chaos of Private Ryan’s opening scene.
Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk certainly falls on that darker side of war films, but it in no way rides on the coat tails of those that have preceded it. In fact, never before has a historical film been this experimental and stylistic while still respecting its subject matter.
For starters, it’s essential to note that Dunkirk is a non-linear film. While told from three different perspectives - the soldiers on Dunkirk beach, a group of civilians in a boat coming to rescue them, and an RAF squadron protecting them - that ultimately intersect, we’re told that the soldiers’ story takes place over a week, the civilians’ over a day, and the pilots’ over an hour.
This stylistic choice is in itself an excellent way to show the perception of time for each group. For the soldiers, time moves quickly with or without them, every second bringing the German advance closer to them - and the soldiers themselves closer to death or capture. The pilots, on the other hand, seem to have all the time in the world as they glide free of gravity, but also become extremely isolated, silence punctuating their loneliness.
Silence seems to be Nolan’s main narrative device in Dunkirk, as the majority of scenes are packed with it. It’s remarkable how much a lack of words can say in a movie, as most of the film’s most suspenseful and engaging scenes are devoid of sound. On particular moment, in which RAF pilot Farrier (Tom Hardy) glides silently over Dunkirk’s abundance of skeletal wrecks, shows sound design - or, in this case, a lack of - and cinematography at its most effective.

Arguably Nolan’s most bold choice, however, was the complete lack of an enemy presence. Yes, the constant bombardments of Allied soldiers and boats is shown, flinging them from one desperate attempt at escape to the next, but the face of the enemy is never shown. With excellent camerawork, German planes are always either shown as being in the mirror of a Spitfire plane or from the perspective of the Allied soldiers - not so much as a mid shot, let alone a close-up, is allotted to them. By doing this, Nolan presents them as a distant menace, choosing to focus solely on the British side of the conflict and representing the Germans as the British saw them. Even at the end of the film, when German soldiers are finally shown, they are blurred beyond recognition.
Despite there being a very clear enemy in this situation, Dunkirk focuses on the internal struggles of the soldiers just as much as it does on the fight between Allies and Axis. Soldiers push in line to get evacuated first, scrambling up the netting of ships as they try to pull each other down. The two main soldiers that we follow, Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) and Gibson (Aneurin Bernard) manage to skip the long, deadly queue of soldiers through deception. Another soldier called Alex (Harry Styles. Yes, that Harry Styles. Yes, he’s actually quite good!) is quick to point fingers at his fellow soldiers when he’s put in peril.
Even Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance) his son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and his friend George (Barry Keoghan) despite being heroic and venturing to Dunkirk, saving many soldiers in the process, are forced to leave more behind to die horrible deaths. One soldier suffering from shellshock (Cillian Murphy) even does an outright horrible thing - though he can hardly be blamed for it thanks to his condition. Yet despite the moral ambiguities of both the officers and the soldiers, Nolan still presents them as heroes who banded together in the face of certain defeat and came out with a far better result than expected - whatever it took to get there.
In fact, the question of whether the evacuation of Dunkirk was a victory or not is tackled within the film. Alex, having seen the dehumanizing effects that the events had on him and his peers, is confused by the celebrations he’s greeted with upon his return to Britain. It certainly feels like a victory, and to the civilians it’s definitely perceived that way, but the ending is bittersweet in all three perspectives of the film.
It’s a testament to Christopher Nolan’s filmmaking that Dunkirk has so much to interpret and write about without even going into the performances of the actors themselves. Never before has a historical film been this experimental, this dramatic, this suspenseful, but still true to its source material. It’s heartening to see that one of 2017’s biggest films is about history, something that arguably hasn’t happened for a long time. In this film, Nolan and his team have laid the foundations of a whole new way of historical filmmaking, bringing the war genre up to speed with the rest of the industry without sacrificing its commitment to realism.


