400,000 men spent over a week on that beach, pinned between the German forces on one side and the Channel on the other. Attempts to evacuate the soldiers were stalled by the Luftwaffe bombing any ships that came within range and periodically attacking the sitting ducks on the beach. How must it have felt to be standing there, trapped between the enemy and the sea, shivering against the cold, and knowing that another wave of attacks could come at any moment? Dunkirk puts us on the beach alongside those men and makes us feel their panic and fear, and their desperation to find a way home. Tommy and another young soldier (played by Aneurin Barnard) pick up a wounded man and attempt to jump the queue to a ship by being stretcher-bearers, but they know that even if they do make it onto one of those ships there's no guarantee of surviving the crossing, or even escaping the port. The view from the beach is desolate indeed.
Nolan approaches this story from three angles. The primary section takes place on land, where the young soldiers await their fate, while other narratives are introduced on sea and in the air. Dunkirk develops a gripping momentum as Nolan eventually draws these strands together with a clockwork elegance towards the end of the film but, this being a Christopher Nolan film, the clocks are all displaying a different time, and that's sometimes a problem. While the land-based section is introduced with the title “One Week”, the sea-faring exploits of Mark Rylance and his little ship get “One Day” and Tom Hardy's Spitfire pilot has “One Hour.” The three stories eventually overlap, with events sometimes being replayed from multiple angles, but every time Nolan and his editor Lee Smith cut between them it necessitates a mental reset to recall exactly where these characters are in the grand scheme of things. Until the narratives converge, Dunkirk has a habit of interrupting itself.
Still, it's not hard to reorient oneself and get pulled back into the movie, because on a moment-by-moment basis, Dunkirk is riveting in a way few films are. Each strand of the film contains its own little mini-dramas in which characters are forced to make quick life-or-death decisions. When the boat being manned by Rylance's intrepid fisherman picks up Cillian Murphy from the wreckage of his ship, the shell-shocked soldier refuses to return to the beach, and a tense, understated stand-off ensues between these characters and the two youngsters (Tom Glynn-Carney and Barry Keoghan) on board. Likewise, when Tom Hardy's pilot has to decide whether he should turn and engage with the enemy despite running low on fuel, the dilemma plays out entirely in the actor's eyes, the only part of him that's visible behind his mask. Dunkirk is a brilliantly cast film and Nolan uses his actors well, with the unfamiliar faces of the soldiers on the beach being complemented by these more experienced performers, who can help steer the drama and express a multitude of emotions with just a glance.
That kind of shorthand is crucial for Dunkirk. You might have noticed that I haven't mentioned many character names here, and that's because you won't know most of their names until the end credits. Dunkirk runs for just 106 minutes, making this the first time Nolan has come in below the two-hour mark since Memento and Insomnia, the two films he made before entering the blockbuster sphere. What has been elided in this tightening of focus are some of the more unfortunate hallmarks of his recent films; the burden of exposition, the narrative bloat, the clumsy dialogue. Instead, Nolan can put all of his energies and his considerable filmmaking gifts into recreating Dunkirk as an immersive experience. Since Saving Private Ryan in 1998 many war films have attempted to outdo each other in delivering a visceral experience for the viewer, with standard-bearers such as Black Hawk Down and Hacksaw Ridge being particularly indelible. Dunkirk lacks the ferocity and gore of those films, but it succeeds instead by overwhelming the viewer both sonically – thanks to the deafening sound mix and Hans Zimmer's bombastic score – and visually.
The main reason to see Dunkirk, and to see it on a big screen, is to drink in the images that Nolan and his talented cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema have created. The decision to eschew CGI wherever possible and shoot entirely on 65mm film gives the film an immediacy and depth that is frequently breathtaking. In particular, the aerial sequences are stunning; every time Nolan cut back to the spitfires swooping out of the sky and over the vast, deep blue of the ocean I was staggered both the gleaming beauty and the intimidating scale of the view. For all of the dazzling visual effects of contemporary blockbusters, little has made me gasp in a recent film of this scale as the way Nolan has filmed land, sea and air here. There are many reasons why Dunkirk feels like an anomaly in the summer movie season – the practical effects, the slender running time, the lack of any sequels, spin-offs or universes – but above all it feels like an essential cinema experience.
