Is it just me? Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk has bowled over critics and taken $100m (£77m) at the global box office in barely a week, but it left me cold.



The subject sounds enticing: the legend of Dunkirk tells of an array of unprepared civilians assembling an armada of fishing boats, pleasure craft, yachts, motor launches, paddle steamers, barges and lifeboats to rescue an army from a battle-swept beach. What might cinema reveal of the logistical skills, resourcefulness, courage, doubts, arguments and fears of the citizenry involved?



Yet Nolan’s film chooses to ignore tales such as that of the Medway Queen, a paddle steamer that brought home 7,000 troops in seven round trips and shot down three German planes, or the Royal Daffodil, which returned 9,500 soldiers after blocking a hole below the waterline with a mattress. Instead, we encounter just one boat, skippered by a saintly Mark Rylance, comically attired in his Sunday best. The travails such a figure might have endured were apparently not dramatic enough. Instead, Rylance’s character is subjected to a bizarre set of events garnished with grating sentimentality.

For it is not the dynamics of the people’s armada that interest Nolan. He is more concerned with what is happening on and above Dunkirk’s beaches. What’s mainly happening, however, is that lots of soldiers are waiting around. Escapades, not altogether convincing, are therefore contrived for a few of them. Some bombs fall, some ships are sunk. Commanders mutter briefly but sagely to each other. In the skies, fighter pilots conduct what seems like an endlessly repeated dogfight. One plane runs out of fuel, although not as quickly as audiences might have hoped. And that’s sort of it.

Film-makers usually instil interest in their protagonists by giving them backstories and meaningful dialogue, thereby creating characters who can be engaged in drama. In Dunkirk, these things don’t happen.

The film also denies filmgoers any context. We’re told little about how the army has come to be beached or the threat it faces. We never see a German soldier, let alone the generals and politicians of either side who are masterminding events. We don’t even get the customary three sentences of text at the end, explaining the outcome. This is deliberate: Nolan has said he didn’t want to get “bogged down” in politics.

Another flaunted absence is CGI. Scale is the essence of the Dunkirk myth. There were more than 330,000 soldiers on the beach, and 933 British vessels, naval and private, plying the waves. It is for this kind of situation that computers were invented, but according to Nolan CGI counts as giving up.

So, in spite of his film’s $150m budget, the Royal Air Force seems to consist of three Spitfires, although real-life pilots flew 3,500 sorties at Dunkirk. The Luftwaffe, which Hitler made solely responsible for wiping out the beached Brits, seems able to summon up little more than a couple of Messerschmitts, three Stukas and one bomber. The Royal Navy appears to comprise just two destroyers; in fact, it deployed 39 destroyers and 309 other craft.

Women are excluded from the action by being confined to stereotypical roles, such as providing tea for the homecoming menfolk. In real life, female Auxiliary Territorial Service telephonists – who received two-thirds of a male soldier’s pay – were some of the last military personnel to leave the beach. The evacuees also included female civilians, including girls, caught up in the turmoil.

Nothing to get … Tom Hardy in Dunkirk. Photograph: Warner Bros/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

The restrictions Nolan places on himself have been cited to demonstrate his brilliance as a director. Not for him the humdrum apparatus of lesser directors. His film must be pared back so it can home in on its true subject. Which is what, exactly? Don’t be silly, the reviewers groan: it is the horror of war as never before. OK, got that, another stab at war-is-hell. Except that Dunkirk is no such thing. It is a 12A effort that avoids blood and guts as thoroughly as it avoids so much else. In the film, people hit by bombs die discreetly, with no unseemly dismemberment. Even abandoning a torpedoed ship doesn’t seem too unpleasant. So the movie doesn’t, as claimed, make you feel the terror of those it depicts. Why not?

Well, Dunkirk isn’t actually a war film at all – Nolan tells us so. That is why it doesn’t concern itself with “the bloody aspects of combat”. Instead, it is “a survival story, and first and foremost a suspense film”, according to the director.

A survival story, like Gravity, perhaps? But Dunkirk’s soldiers are denied the means of effecting their own survival, and it is in this that their pathos resides. Their unheroic fate is to mill around on a beach and get ferried home by non-combatants. Signaller Alfred Baldwin, who was at Dunkirk in 1940, recalled: “You had the impression of people standing waiting for a bus. There was no pushing or shoving.”

Or is it a suspense film, like Rear Window? We all know the outcome of the event, and know that nothing terribly bad was ever going to happen to Harry Styles, Captain Rylance or our plucky pilots. Even Hans Zimmer’s manipulative score can’t make that brick out of this straw.

But at least I now understand why I didn’t get it: there was nothing to get. Nolan trades on a mystique fuelled by affectations such as mangled timeframes and Imax cameras. In the film, the complications of chronology seem silly, and the naturalistic environment exposes this. I trekked to Leicester Square in London to get the full benefit of the 70mm picture, but I didn’t notice any. Indeed, I thought the subject would have been better suited to the cold, TV-news glare of digital than the lushness of film.

Still, Warner Brothers and the world seem happy to indulge Nolan. Good luck to him, not that he seems to need it.

