Dunkirk

            Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is much better than the director’s recent work (Interstellar and The Dark Knight Rises). Rather than boring his audiences with pseudo-intellectual babble about farming and love overcoming all obstacles, Nolan instead offers an ode to the determination and resilience of Britain’s Greatest Generation. The sheer scope and scale of Dunkirk borrows less from recent war films and more from the 1960s spectacles like The Longest Day and The Great Escape. Nolan fills his movie with recognizable actors whose characters barely speak, let alone have names. Instead of talking and philosophizing, they’re primarily interested in staying alive and escaping the onslaught of the Germans. The result is a film replete with tension that refuses to let the audience off the hook.

            Nolan’s Dunkirk tells the story of the British evacuation from the eponymous French port in 1940. The Western front has collapsed and the Germans have overrun the French and English armies, forcing them into a pocket around Dunkirk. Meanwhile the British navy is desperately trying to evacuate as many men off the beaches as possible to prepare for the upcoming German invasion of Britain. Nolan constructs the film along three parallel stories of land, sea, and air taking place over the course of a week, a day, and a single hour. The land portion of the film follows the efforts of two soldiers to make it off the beach. They hide on ships, get torpedoed, and desperately try to save themselves. The sea portion of the film features a middle-aged Brit, his son, and his son’s friend piloting the family boat over to Dunkirk. During their day-long journey, they pick up the lone survivor of a U-Boat attack. Finally, the air portion takes place over the course of a single hour as two Spitfire pilots try to protect the Dunkirk beaches and British ships from German attack.

            Dunkirk doesn’t offer much in terms of characters. Most of them, in fact, are unnamed. Many of them, especially the soldiers on the beach, barely speak at all. The cast is populated with lots of famous English actors and musician Harry Stiles (though I couldn’t tell you what he looks like). Kenneth Branagh and Mark Rylance, two of England’s greatest Shakespearean actors, have the closest thing to actual characters. Branagh, armed with a fantastic white turtleneck, plays the naval commander in charge of evacuating soldiers from the beach. His job is keep order as the Germans bomb the British army on land and torpedo the British fleet at sea. Rylance is the civilian sailor who takes his vessel across the Channel to rescue the stranded soldiers. Standing in for that cliché of stiff-upper lipped Brit, Rylance conveys determination and humanity in the face of the shell-shocked U-Boat survivor demanding that they turn back to England.

That's some strong turtleneck action right there. 

            The names of the characters and lack of dialogue don’t really matter. Dunkirk is about more than the individual survival of any individual character. Rather it’s about England’s lowest point during World War 2 and the efforts of the entire nation to survive. Nolan fills the movie with a constant and never-ending sense of dread. Whistling bullets kill soldiers on their way out of Dunkirk. German planes strafe the beaches, attacking those waiting to be evacuated. Those lucky few who make it onto a ship wind up drowning after being torpedoed. There seemingly is no escape from the enemy. Nolan conveys this sense of perpetual and inescapable dread without ever showing a single German soldier until the very end of the film (although the Germans are out of focus). The Germans are the unseen but seemingly omnipotent enemy.

            The film’s ending is a little clichéd, with the requisite Churchill speech about British resilience in the face of adversity as the soldiers from the beach find themselves safely back in England. This sentimentality undermines the effective ending of the air portion that sees Tom Hardy’s Spitfire pilot guiding his flaming plane onto the beach for a safe landing after destroying a German plane. After being captured by the Germans, Hardy’s plane burns in the background. His safe landing lifts the tension that dominates the film. He—and, by extension, England—survives.