Dunkirk

Why it is probably Christopher Nolan’s best film yet

Film cameras were built for war. They are rugged machines developed to deal with extreme conditions. They are a large, heavy, and loud technology, a technology that was largely aided in its improvement and evolution by The Second World War. Like those war photographers of old who captured images of Hell-on-Earth, Christopher Nolan wants to place us on those bloody beachscapes of The Second World War, in the shoes of those that experienced it first-hand. We are simultaneously the camera and the witness. With his almost fetishistic love of celluloid — Dunkirk was shot on 70mm IMAX — perhaps Nolan is paying physical homage to those who braved the battlegrounds of one of history’s bloodiest portions in order to capture what only some could dream of in their worst nightmares. Nolan’s Dunkirk is not just an attempt to preserve and continue the tradition of the best looking image quality ever, but an attempt to preserve the stories that those images can carry. Film is a magic lantern show; filmmakers are the magician. And the illusion of movement generated by light hitting a series of still frames can not only depict stories of courage and heroism based on truth, but transport the viewer back to that moment in history.

“What I love about movies is that they allow us to share subjective experience with other people,” says Nolan. “You’re sitting there with the audience, and everyone is engaged in the same subjective experience.” German fighter planes scream overhead like banshees and for a moment we forget where the screen ends and the sand begins. The beaches of Dunkirk are massive in their size, but cramped and claustrophobic in their scope. We never see the Germans but we can feel — sense — the effect of their encroaching presence upon the stranded Allied soldiers. And yes, for a moment we are sharing that experience with those who are seated around us in the cinema, but for a moment it also feels like we are having the subjective experience of those who truly experienced some of Britain’s darkest days mainlined into our cerebral cortex.

It is an urgent and experiential film: the kind of movie that focuses on an event shown through the physical and emotional reactions of its characters. Dunkirk wants you to walk out of the darkness feeling shellshocked, giving you a history lesson not through dates, facts, and figures, but through involvement and primal understanding. It’s about as close as traditional cinema comes to virtual reality. And this is why Dunkirk is Nolan’s strongest effort so far. It is a film completely stripped of the fat. Rather than having characters standing around explaining the plot, some of them only placed in the film as a guised vehicle for exposition, we have characters that can only be understood on a humanistic and feral level. We analyse them through comparisons to ourselves. How would we react? It is storytelling in its purest, most visceral form, arousing emotion through a succession of insistent events.