Humility is the true message from Dunkirk
By avoiding banal, blockbuster special effects, Christopher Nolan creates an oppressive ambiance on the Normandy beaches, which allows the desperation and the determination in each and every soldier to take centre stage.
I grew up on 1960s and 1970s WW2 movies, classics such as The Great Escape (1963), Kelly’s heroes (1970), and Where Eagles dare (1968). They’re excellent films and I’d thoroughly recommend them. However, what is very powerful about Nolan’s portrayal of Operation Dynamo (the evacuation of 300,000 British Expeditionary Force/BEF troops from the Normandy beaches) is the replacement of predictably dashing war heroes, with a simple yet utterly soul-wrenching portrayal of humanity’s survival instinct.

Kenneth Branagh’s character is about as close as Dunkirk gets to the calm and composed military leaders to which we might have become accustomed. Yet Branagh’s character is understated, which helps to sustain the focus of the ‘land’ storyline on the geographical and emotional isolation of the soldiers, further enhanced by the breathtaking cinematography on location. Equally, Tom Hardy’s portrayal of an RAF pilot, forced to crash-land his Spitfire into the sea, could have been far more doted on in another WW2 blockbuster. In this ‘sky’ storyline (the second of three parallel tales cleverly intertwined by Nolan) Hardy’s character is on the brink of a humiliating death by drowning in the cockpit of his own plane, which leaves his character notably restrained, once he is pulled to safety.
Widely acclaimed as Hans Zimmer’s finest musical score, it is surely at its most powerful with the piercing violin motif that forebodes the approaching German Messerschmitt planes, a truly terrifying duet of melody and machine. Little wonder that Fionn Whitehead’s character (as a young BEF conscript) will take his chance to escape the beaches at any cost. He is helplessly flung from one catastrophe to another, as if his slight figure were but a feather being blown in the wind. For me, his miraculous survival, following the exhausting ‘sea’ storyline, is a metaphor for the entire evacuation: against all the odds, and through sheer desperation to survive; from the brink of total humiliation, a humility that seeps from the blood-soaked memory of Dunkirk.

I am sure that I am not alone in longing to see more humility in British society today. We, the British people, have an immense collective pride in the Allied victory in World War 2. We celebrate the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ as an emblem of national character, which showed our resilience and our spirit in the face of exceptional danger… Of course, far from forgetting our past, it is tremendously important to remember the tragic loss of life in the two World Wars and indeed, more recent conflicts. However, what I would say is that the poignancy of Nolan’s film lies not in the actions of brave individuals, but in the reactions of desperate souls in the face of almost certain destruction. The tidal wave of fear that engulfs the stranded soldiers does not recede until the last moments of the film, with a silence that mourns the tens of thousands who didn’t make it off the Normandy beaches — humility, lest we forget.
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http://www.parismatch.com/Culture/Cinema/Dunkerque-la-critique-en-avant-premiere-1310894#

