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.
A teenage kid named Tommy (newcomer Fionn Whitehead, whose wide-eyed performance channels Christian Bale in “Empire of the Sun”) barely makes it to the shore with his life intact — rejoining the rest of the troops, he spots a fellow Brit (Aneurin Barnard) and the two boys wordlessly agree that their only hope for survival is to earn passage aboard the hospital ship that’s about to set sail for England, so close but so far away.
…the conclusion, which refuses sentimentality, and recalls the deep ironies and sadness of Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.
Sure, most people will inevitably compare “Dunkirk” to “Saving Private Ryan” but in this particular respect, watching the various storylines pinball off of each other reminded me more of a more serious version of Spielberg’s great WW II epic “1941.”
There's no comic relief, so the consistently serious tone becomes monotonous---even Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan had some levity to counterbalance the heaviness.
Even the great, gray, grim “Schindler’s List” had scenes more in common with “Keystone Kops” than Greek tragedy.
Just as some of the velociraptor vocalizations in “Jurassic Park” had elements of human groaning, the dive-bombing planes and whistling bombs are accompanied by an earsplitting human/banshee shriek that will stand your hair on end.
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.)
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.
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.
Even when The Dark Knight trilogy and Inception auteur crafts a rare miss (cough, Interstellar), he takes ambitious risks.
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.
Though the subject matter is leagues (and decades) removed from the likes of “Inception” and “The Dark Knight,” the result is so clearly “a Christopher Nolan film” — from its immersive, full-body suspense to the sophisticated way he manipulates time and space — that his fans will eagerly follow en masse to witness the achievement.
Even by the standards of his own work – The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception – it’s an epic ride.
Nolan’s films, especially in his post– The Dark Knight phase, have often tended toward operatic maximalism.
With a career that has spanned such treats as “The Dark Knight,” “Inception,” and “The Prestige,” Nolan has found a way to tap into two different cultures with a story that speaks to both American and Europeans alike.
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.”
With a career that has spanned such treats as “The Dark Knight,” “Inception,” and “The Prestige,” Nolan has found a way to tap into two different cultures with a story that speaks to both American and Europeans alike.
Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, like The Prestige, Dunkirk isn’t trying to trick the viewer into believing something, only to pull the rug out from under them.
While The Prestige (2006) is also deserving of masterpiece status, that was an entirely different experience, as were Interstellar (2014) and Inception (2010).
Nolan has previously honed his mastery of working with time in films like Inception, The Prestige and Memento.
You wouldn’t think that would also be the case in a relatively straightforward war picture, but in reality Dunkirk is as slippery an experience as Nolan triumphs like The Prestige , Inception , and Memento.
Editor Lee Smith has helped the director tell the tale in a brisk 106 minutes, making this Nolan's shortest film since his small, homemade 1998 first feature, Following.
In fact, at a mere 106 minutes, Dunkirk is the first Nolan movie to dip beneath two hours since Insomnia, and is only undercut by his micro-budget 1998 debut Following.
Aside from Nolan's 1998 feature debut Following, Dunkirk – at a tight, transfixing 106 minutes – is the shortest entry in the filmmaker's back catalog.
But it is noteworthy that this is Nolan’s shortest film, at 106 minutes, since his indie debut Following clocked in at 70 minutes (and $6,000 budget).
In fact, at a mere 106 minutes, Dunkirk is the first Nolan movie to dip beneath two hours since Insomnia, and is only undercut by his micro-budget 1998 debut Following.
I’d love to have seen Nolan’s Insomnia, for one, done more in this style.
Despite their often incoherent action sequences, gimmicky time muddles, and turgid humorlessness, Nolan’s previous pictures usually remain watchable because of the presence of a well-deployed star: Ledger and Hathaway in the Batman films; Ellen Page in Inception; Al Pacino and Robin Williams in Insomnia.
Personal favourites include Inception , Memento , Insomnia and The Dark Knight .
…out of Memento Insomnia Batman Begins ( June 14/05) Batman returns in this film from acclaimed director Christopher Nolan, and while there's no denying that the movie is far more effective than either of Joel Schumacher's installments ( Batman Forever and Batman and Robin ), Tim Burton's Batman still remains the most intriguing and entertaining of the Dark Knight's adventures.
The ace flier is played by Tom Hardy, whose face is once again largely hidden behind a mask (as in Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises as well as in the more recent Mad Max: Fury Road).
His final Batman picture, The Dark Knight Rises (2012), had extended passages that interlaced suspense set pieces with time-condensing montages, two modes that require totally different kinds of pacing; that the director would cross streams so flamboyantly in a superhero flick indicated his willingness to push stylistic boundaries, not to mention the power he wielded as a producer.
As much as we all respect The Dark Knight Rises it's the weakest of his Batman trilogy, and does anybody really talk about Inception anymore?
He’s keen to show how ordinary people choose to act in dire circumstances, and we see in these movies vignettes that stand as mini-referendums on human decency: the passengers on the ferry boats rejecting the Joker’s kill-or-be-killed game in The Dark Knight, the dilemma of the refugees seeking to cross the bridge in The Dark Knight Rises (drawn, surely, from a similar incident that occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina).
The ace flier is played by Tom Hardy, whose face is once again largely hidden behind a mask (as in Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises as well as in the more recent Mad Max: Fury Road).
(We hope the Working Girl namecheck is an intentional nod to Harrison Ford.)
(We hope the Working Girl namecheck is an intentional nod to Harrison Ford.)
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.”
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.
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.
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Nolan's borrowing from Hitchcock is a series of studies of the cornfield scene in North By Northwest, with a plane's machine guns taking your measure as they wheel and descend.
While lengthy sections of say, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo could pass for film that is “complete”, pure cinema rarely escapes its avant-garde origins.
Top directors from Spielberg (“Saving Private Ryan”) to Tarantino (“Inglourious Basterds”) to Eastwood (“Letters from Iwo Jima”) to Verhoeven (“Black Book”) have all taken on the second World War and used it to hold up a mirror to their personal styles.
Unlike such contemporary WW II epics as “Saving Private Ryan,” “Letters from Iwo Jima” or even “Pearl Harbor”—which shoehorned in the Doolittle Raid in order to give audiences something resembling a happy ending—“Dunkirk” does not use a key Allied victory as a stepping-off point for its storyline.
Nolan no es Eastwood, que en Sully hacía suspenso con lo ya conocido: hay un abismo de magia narrativa entre ambos.
It’s possible that Nolan, having created an audience of Millennial pessimists, is uninterested in the fellow feeling that Ang Lee made so intimate and that Clint Eastwood’s Sully and Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge made affecting as well as spectacular.