8.8

Nolan’s beautiful history lesson is brutal, exasperating and intensely heart-wrenching from start to finish, producing a minimalist, highly immersive, cinematic masterpiece that further corroborates Nolan’s status as one of the most versatile directors of this generation.

Over the past years, Nolan’s cinema has established a sort-of theme. Excluding The Dark Knight trilogy, the writer/director has graced the film world with sci-fi epics, handled with such a beauty and grace that he and his colleagues (Zimmer and the like) manage to push emotional boundaries at the most unexpected of times, as shown in his most recent sagas Inception and Interstellar. His earlier works, the likes of Memento and The Prestige show remnants, or beginnings rather, of this same idea, so why has Nolan embarked on developing Dunkirk, a brutal, unrelenting war epic set in the midst of an evacuation from surrounding Nazi forces? To put it simply, Nolan and his collaborators bring back the aforementioned idea of a beauty and grace that is incomparable to many other filmmakers of the modern generation, so much so that embarking on such a topic is no mean feat for him to undertake.

Despite this garishly different setting, the film shows fragments of “classic Nolan” throughout; from the opening scenes, we see three aspects of the evacuation taking place at different times in a non-linear narrative, “The Mole” lasting one week, “The Sea” lasting one day, and “The Air” lasting one hour. Nolan is no stranger to messing around with time, in fact it is often integral to the concepts of his storytelling. From the beginning, we also hear a resounding, electrifying score by the great Hans Zimmer, a frequent collaborator of Nolan’s having directed the music for his previous two films as well. But these similarities are not without their differences, most importantly through the lack of a clear plot structure, as well as minimal dialogue and writing.

But these differences do not hinder Nolan, but rather assist him, in creating a devastatingly brutal, triumphant war film. What culminates from Nolan’s unusual, and somewhat controversial directing is (quite intentionally) a war film, but it is like none other that has stood the test of time. Whilst it doesn’t have the gore and aggression of your Saving Private Ryan-type films, instead it opts, successfully, for a minimalistic approach, which uses a “saying a lot without saying much” concept that has proven victorious, especially so last year, in films such as Moonlight and Manchester by the Sea, but more so in Dunkirk. But, why does the minimalist approach work so well in Dunkirk? It does so because it contributes towards creating a highly immersive experience for the viewer, leaving you staggering by the time the credits roll.

From the get-go, we are thrown in to Nolan’s interpretation of minimalism; we begin behind a group of British soldiers and a few lines of context. From the film’s inception (hah), we are met halfway; this isn’t the origin of a hero preparing to defy the odds against him or some other trope, instead we are thrusted into the action of the war, where there are already thousands of soldiers waiting to remove themselves from the beaches of Dunkirk. This makes the film seem all the more visceral and immersive, and informs us of how the film plays out; this isn’t a story of one man, one hero, this is an insight into an experience of ordinary soldiers on the beach, which is especially shown in a triumphant ensemble cast that is brilliantly tied together by the film’s impeccable direction.

While there is no standout breakaway performance (though Harry Styles has definitely been turning some heads; not just in the Directioners, and rightly so), the cast works well together, enforcing the normality of each soldier on the forefront. Instead of John H. Miller and Desmond T. Doss, we have Tommy, Alex, Peter, George. For the large part, however, we focus on Tommy and Alex (played impressively by Fionn Whitehead and Harry Styles respectively) on the ground, Farrier (Tom Hardy) in the air, and Mr Dawson and his son Peter (Mark Rylance and Tom Glynn-Carney respectively) on the sea, but this focus is not superfluous. Instead, it enforces the message that we could be following anyone who is sharing the same experience, we could be following anyone’s civilian pleasure-boat, not just Mark Rylance’s, and we could follow any Spitfire that screeches through the air above the infamous French coast. It’s all too normal, it’s all too quiet, and that’s what makes it all too harrowing to give us a perspective.

Despite Nolan’s successes, the same compliments must be said about his collaborators, specifically with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and the incomparable composer Hans Zimmer. The trio previously came together with Nolan’s last release, 2014’s Interstellar, and whilst they were highly successful in creating an emotionally satisfying experience, it is in Dunkirk where their efforts make for a truly heart-wrenching piece of cinema. Hoytema’s camerawork buries us deeper in the brutal intensity of the film, for example as the camera follows the surface of the sea travel closer and closer to a sinking ship, or as we cut back and forth to Tommy and Alex, and a beleaguered soldier walking heavily into the sea, ripping another shred of his uniform off his back after each step he takes. This couples with Zimmer’s outstanding musical score, making full use of the Shepard tone and his director’s pocket watch to produce something beautifully intense, enhancing the viewing experience greatly so, making it one of the reasons that this review has come across as a bit of a Nolan circle-jerk. Dunkirk doesn’t hold back on its sound either; when you first hear the sharp, shrill tones of Spitfires whirring above the air, you flinch and immediately go to cover your ears. But, as the viewer becomes accustomed to it, it’s clear as to why it’s done in such a way. On the forefront, the planes are not muted, the crashing of the waves isn’t mixed and mastered with the speech, it is pure, ear-piercing sound that resonates throughout your body, bringing us back to his idea of an immersive, minimalist experience.

Through his conventions, Nolan has created a piece of war-time cinema that focuses largely on perspective, rather than propaganda. His usage of non-linear narratives coupled with technical mastery from his film-making companions culminates in one of the most original war films made in years, showing that a minimalist approach can still give you the same, if not a more prominent effect that a war film should, and that it can still adopt a brutal, unrelenting nature with less of the gore and aggression, with the film saying a lot to us without saying too much.