Dunkirk (2017)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
The story of the miraculous evacuation of Allied soldiers from Belgium, Britain, Canada and France, who were cut off and surrounded by the German army from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk between May 26th and June 4th 1940 during World War II.
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What critics say influenced Dunkirk
This is the most visceral, shocking opening to a war movie since Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan.
One might expect such a canvas to be accompanied by Saving Private Ryan-esque panoramic carnage, but rather than giving scope for large-scale violence, it simply serves to amp up the tension.
In choosing to hone in on the action and functioning as a survival film, Dunkirk does lack the cinematic surrealism of Apocalypse Now or the poignant quirks of something like Saving Private Ryan (I'm thinking when the soldiers are sitting around in a demolished town listening to Édith Piaf on a gramophone).
It’s a breath-taking reveal, yet ideas of Saving Private Ryan or The Longest Day are quickly dissipated as Dunkirk then cleaves into three distinct parts and timelines.
No war film you’ve seen before – from Das Boot to Saving Private Ryan to The Thin Red Line – comes close to what Nolan has created here.
It doesn’t have anything like the gore of Saving Private Ryan, but that doesn’t lessen its power.
Christopher Nolan is back on the auteur footing of his Dark Knight Trilogy and Memento.
Nolan, who wrote the script too, makes the action immediate, captivating and unbearably tense through the smart use of close-up camera work and varying timelines in a way that's reminiscent of Memento.
Here flying (i.e., writing) solo, Nolan is once again drawn to narrative labyrinths, as he has been from “Memento” to “The Prestige” to “Inception” to “Interstellar.”
Dunkirk is an unusually linear film from the writer-director (Memento, The Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar), centering exclusively on the evacuation of Allied troops who found themselves surrounded in Dunkirk, France during the Second World War.
While unnecessarily confusing at times (and not especially satisfying as a puzzle — at least not in the way the ingenious backward-logic of “Memento” was back in the day), by splintering these three storylines, the director allows us to experience the Dunkirk evacuation from multiple perspectives.
(Something Nolan himself did in the pre-YouTube days when he put out a restructured cut of Memento on DVD.)
No war film you’ve seen before – from Das Boot to Saving Private Ryan to The Thin Red Line – comes close to what Nolan has created here.
Like a more restless cousin of Terrence Malick , who infused the combat picture with Transcendental philosophy in " The Thin Red Line ," or Robert Altman , who painted microcosmic panoramas of civilization in such films as " Nashville " and " Short Cuts ," "Dunkirk" treats every English soldier on that beach and in assorted nearby planes and boats as part of a collective organism, less interesting for their biographical details than for the roles they play in the drama of history, however large or small they may be.
A phenomenal score by Hans Zimmer (the renowned composer for The Thin Red Line, Gladiator and Interstellar) creates a prodigious wall of sound made up of ticking clocks, heartbeats and engine noise that enhances the tension of the countdown.
In terms of storytelling, Nolan’s impressionistic approach places “Dunkirk” close to Malick’s “The Thin Red Line”: It’s not about dialogue, specific characters or story arcs as much as it is about a gut level feeling, which Nolan delivers as a full body sensory explosion.
By comparison, “The Thin Red Line” and “The English Patient” seem like lumbering soap operas.
Some reviews see parallels to Terrence Malick and The Thin Red Line, but Nolan seems just as influenced by macro-scale documentaries like John Ford’s The Battle of Midway and John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro.
The events of the battle have been dramatized stirringly several times since — most notably in the 1958 movie Dunkirk , the 1964 French film Weekend at Dunkirk , and the 2007 Atonement , with its indelible five-minute sweeping shot over the beach.
Atonement (2008), for instance, captured the emotion of World War II and, specifically, the evacuation at Dunkirk in one monumental, continuous shot, while also embedding its audience in a heartbreaking love story.
Capturing the “military disaster” of Dunkirk has been done on film before, recently in 2007 by Joe Wright with a memorable five-minute one-shot in Atonement.
Nolan's film gives us an impression of the waiting, the desperation, the hopelessness and hope of those days in early June, 1944, but it is not as permeated by the 'spirit of Dunkirk' as Lone Scherfig's "Their Finest" nor as overwhelmingly moving as Joe Wright's five minute tracking scene in "Atonement."
There have been film treatments of Dunkirk before, including a rousing reference in Mrs. Miniver , the 1942 film credited with helping to draw the Americans into the war, and an astonishing standalone sequence in 2007’s Atonement .
A couple of films have referred to the evacuation, notably Joe Wright’s Atonement , whose famous tracking shot took place there, and Their Finest from this past spring, a charming film about a group of British filmmakers trying to make a movie about Dunkirk.
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"Dunkirk" is one of the great war pictures of our time, deserving of being in the same conversation as Oliver Stone's "Platoon," Terrence Malick's " The Thin Red Line ," and the 22-minute D-Day sequence from Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan."
Go ahead and put “Dunkirk” in the same class as “Apocalypse Now,” “Platoon,” “Saving Private Ryan,” and “Braveheart.”
Just look at "Apocalypse Now," "Platoon" and "Saving Private Ryan" for just a few examples of that.
“Dunkirk” instantly enters the pantheon of great modern war films, like “Platoon” and “Saving Private Ryan.”
Dunkirk feels like the movie Christopher Nolan was preparing us for when he made Inception and Interstellar.
They are as vague and violent as the dream projections in “Inception,” less of a literal force than a deadly abstraction that lives under our skin, feeds on our fears, and erodes our shared purpose.
Emotionally devastating, cinematically stunning – with visuals easily rivalling Inception – it's a character piece with an enormous cast and very little dialogue, it's a thriller with no real plot, and it's a tale of heroes where the very best they can hope for is just to not die today.
Even when The Dark Knight trilogy and Inception auteur crafts a rare miss (cough, Interstellar), he takes ambitious risks.
Here flying (i.e., writing) solo, Nolan is once again drawn to narrative labyrinths, as he has been from “Memento” to “The Prestige” to “Inception” to “Interstellar.”
It’s not unusual for his world to pivot and turn upside down (shades of Interstellar, or Inception), the dread shifting from night to day, from fast action to classical tableaux, underwater to overground, to leave the viewer as disorientated as the characters they follow.
Nolan looked to silent films for inspiration, and more than once during the dogfights I thought of Hell’s Angels.
The air section of “Dunkirk,” in particular, is a visual wonder—less because Nolan’s direction of the sequences is distinctive than because solo flight in combat is irresistibly, sensuously fascinating to watch, and has been so since William Wellman’s “Wings” (1927) and Howard Hawks’s “The Dawn Patrol” and Howard Hughes’s “Hell’s Angels” (both from 1930)—and the expanse of sky is all the more engulfing, thrilling, terrifying on a screen the size of an apartment building.
At times Hoytema’s footage, particularly the aerial dogfights, resemble scenes from legendary director John Ford’s WWII films like The Battle of Midway.
Some reviews see parallels to Terrence Malick and The Thin Red Line, but Nolan seems just as influenced by macro-scale documentaries like John Ford’s The Battle of Midway and John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro.
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For all its visual splendour, Dunkirk is a masterclass in dextrous temporal elasticity, a recurrent theme for Nolan, sparked by his love of Graham Swift’s novel Waterland and explored most recently in Interstellar .
(It’s classic Nolan, as he’s always had a propensity for layering stories, in this case stories rooted in Graham Swift’s novel Waterland.
Dunkirk feels like the movie Christopher Nolan was preparing us for when he made Inception and Interstellar.
Dunkirk reveals the absolute opposite – it's a big, beautiful, beating heart of a movie that draws you deeply into the lives of its many characters with skill, while avoiding any of Interstellar 's sentimentality.
Even when The Dark Knight trilogy and Inception auteur crafts a rare miss (cough, Interstellar), he takes ambitious risks.
Here flying (i.e., writing) solo, Nolan is once again drawn to narrative labyrinths, as he has been from “Memento” to “The Prestige” to “Inception” to “Interstellar.”
Dunkirk is an unusually linear film from the writer-director (Memento, The Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar), centering exclusively on the evacuation of Allied troops who found themselves surrounded in Dunkirk, France during the Second World War.