21 Jul Dunkirk Analysis

DUNKIRK ANALYSIS

[UPDATED REVIEW – 6 April 2019]

Dunkirk is still amazing. Still stressful to watch. And remains a masterpiece. The only change is that Joe Wright and Gary Oldman’s Darkest Hour was released later that year and is generally accepted as the perfect companion piece to this movie, showing the political aspect of Churchill’s trial by fire handling of Dunkirk. Still waiting on Nolan’s next movie…

[ORIGINAL REVIEW – 4 August 2017]

Dunkirk is a focused masterpiece that relies on a unique narrative structure that allows director Christopher Nolan to almost constantly ramp up the tension for the entire 107-minute runtime. I can’t think of any movie I’ve ever seen that built up and maintained the level of intensity that Dunkirk managed. The movie is one of the best of the year (which says a lot, given how many great movies have been released) and demonstrates the greatest combination of perfectly executed filmmaking techniques. Dunkirk is exhausting, intense, entertaining, and a wonderful tribute to one of the most crucial historical events for Great Britain in the 20th century.

Dunkirk relates the events of the titular evacuation of the entire British army (and a sizable portion of the French army) after the Nazis circumvented France’s defenses and surrounded the British and French forces on the beaches of Dunkirk. Over 400,000 soldiers were stranded on the beach with no way to cross the English Channel and get home. The British Navy was kept in England to defend the homeland against a likely possible invasion by Nazi forces; the Nazis made the decision to hold back their ground forces and let the Luftwaffe pick off the retreating forces from the air. The British RAF did their best to help but suffered serious losses and were largely kept back to defend the homeland.

The film Dunkirk is historical fiction that tells the events of the Dunkirk evacuation through the intertwining, and eventually colliding, storylines of three separate groups of characters. While this cinematic technique is hardly new, Nolan’s unique take has the three stories divided between land, sea, and air while also beginning at three separate times: one week, one day, and one hour prior to evacuation, respectively. Nolan loves shifting time frames in his films, but it is usually reserved for flashbacks from a main storyline (see Batman Begins). He also loves manipulating time for narrative purposes, as he masterfully demonstrated in Inception. With Dunkirk, one of the most satisfying experiences for the viewer is keeping a watchful eye for when and how all three storylines cross paths and eventually meet up at the moment the true evacuation begins.

In addition to the challenge of tying together three storylines from different timeframes from a true, real-life event, Dunkirk is very nearly a dialogue-free film, with the majority of storytelling done visually. This is generally considered a far more challenging way of telling a story, but Nolan pulls it off seamlessly. The underlying philosophy for the film seems to have been ‘Put the audience through the experience of the men who were at Dunkirk’, and all of his unique and commonly-held tools are brought to bear in doing so–to magnificent effect. The audience feels the chaos and confusion and is only given the barest amount of expositional information to keep context.

So let me run through a few of the best aspects of the movie.

First of all, Dunkirk is one of the best war movies (and WW2 movies) I’ve seen in years. It breaks from the trend of the last 19 years (since Saving Private Ryan) of trying to shock and induce emotion through hyper-realistic portrayals of gory violence. Last year’s Hacksaw Ridge was a great cinematic achievement, in large part because it tells a true (and truly remarkable) story. But the centerpiece of the film relied heavily on emphasizing the stark contrast between the protagonist’s peaceful determination to save lives and the extreme, shocking violence he finds himself in during the film’s titular battle.
Dunkirk undertakes the much more difficult but artistically satisfying challenge of showing the events of the famous evacuation with nary a drop of blood. The only blood I remember seeing was on a battle dressing of a wounded soldier being evacuated. I respect and appreciate the great lengths Nolan went to in crafting an incredibly intense PG-13 war movie that more than holds its own when measured with every great war movie of the last 20 years; I would say it exceeds most in its sharp, focused storytelling versus many other films with much longer runtimes.

Dunkirk also borders on being a silent film in terms of dialogue. In addition, I would say that about a quarter to a third of the dialogue is almost indecipherable, being drowned out by the events surrounding the actors. I think this was a conscious decision, as the experience of battle likely includes a lot of confusion directly related to the lack of communication that noise and chaos brings to war. There are long stretches of the film with almost no dialogue, and all dialogue that is easy to understand is purposefully clear because it is crucial to placing the immediate events in context to the largely implied, unseen world events. Kenneth Branagh and James D’Arcy do the brunt of the narrative heavy-lifting as two British officers overseeing the evacuation from The Mole, a semi-protected beach at Dunkirk where the 400,000 soldiers await their fate.

Dunkirk was also filmed almost entirely on 70mm IMAX film, and the entire experience of the film reflects the storytelling capacity of this large-frame format. I purposefully watched the film twice: once in standard IMAX, and once in 70mm film. The visual experience of both formats is overwhelming and critical to immersing the audience in the unrelenting experience of the film. Dunkirk will never be as incredible an experience as IMAX provides, and seeing the film in the theater is essential viewing; waiting for a TV screen at home is undermining Nolan’s successfully-executed cinematic intentions.

Similarly, if there was ever a film clearly worthy of Oscar recognition for sound mixing and sound editing, Dunkirk IS THAT FILM. Combined with Hans Zimmer’s intense score, the aural aspect of Dunkirk is the foundation the rest of the film’s tone and cinematic experience is built on, and I will be shocked if it is unrecognized for at least these categories; hopefully many more.

The film also makes some interesting and possibly controversial choices about its portrayal of the events of Dunkirk. There is almost no notable mention of the French’s involvement, other than Branagh’s one-line commitment to staying beyond the events of the film to help evacuate the French, and the eventual reveal that one of the soldiers trying to escape the beach is a probably-AWOL French soldier. Other than that: no notable involvement by the French.
Also, the Germans are never seen (aside from a few vague silhouettes in the closing minutes of the film). This stands in contrast to many (most?) war movies that either portray heavy-handed, one-dimensional antagonists (Nazis are ALWAYS great villains, right?), or fastidiously try to show the enemy’s equally valid (if misguided) point of view.
Dunkirk also uses a lot of unknown actors who look a LOT alike, particularly when they are almost all dressed the same and in similar states of dishevelment. It reminded me of the first time I watched Black Hawk Down, although with subsequent viewings it became very easy to note the different actors. Dunkirk‘s cast of characters are almost universally unknown or unrecognizable, with the exception of Branagh and D’Arcy, and eventually Tom Hardy and maybe Cillian Murphy (the latter pair appeared in Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy as villains Bane and Scarecrow). Can I add that Tom Hardy is the world’s greatest eye-actor, with several notably excellent roles executed with most of his face covered.
Lastly, the film also avoids the perspective of almost any character not directly involved in one of the three stories of the film. This kinda helps limit the number of character’s you have to follow, which is important with so many similar-looking and unknown actors.
All of these decisions make for some initial difficulty in watching Dunkirk and taking it all in, but they all perfectly support the central goal of immersing the audience in the experience of this real-life event: the chaos, confusion, desperation, and British stoicism are all conveyed by various characters in varying degrees. And in the end, the culmination of these choices results in an entertaining and respectful tribute to the thousands of British citizens, military and civilian, that contributed to the evacuation at Dunkirk. The word ‘home’ is used frequently in the film, and the marketing of the film uses the idea of bringing home to the British Army when they could not find a way to get home themselves. This core theme is powerfully conveyed and downright inspiring.

As a side note, this is one of the only WW2 movies that showed soldiers of the appropriate age of the actual soldiers who bore the brunt of WW2 combat: the soldiers trying to escape the beach look like they are about 18 years old, and it’s freaky to see what are essentially children in such dire circumstances. And yet, that is the reality of many wars, particularly WW2.

There is one interesting bit of feedback that made me want to watch the film again to pay special attention: my great friend Scott Walton, a Marine combat veteran, noted that there was little evidence of NCOs and mid-to-lower level military leadership throughout the film; characters who would have kept the hundreds of thousands of troops organized, calm, and focused on survival. Upon a second viewing, I have to agree. The main story where this should have been in evidence would be the events on the beach itself, which starts a week before the evacuation proper. The only characters the audience is familiarized with are Branagh and D’Arcy’s high-level officers, and the two nameless, virtually rank-less soldiers whose multiple attempts to escape the beach proceed basically unhindered by mid-grade officers who I think would have been more aware of their exploits. There is some evidence that these leaders must have been present, such as after the first German bombing run, when the neat, orderly lines of soldiers on the beach scatter during the strafing run, but immediately reform with ease. This could only have been possible with strong, unit-level leadership holding the men together, but the film never really shows any of this, and it clearly stuck out to Scott, who IS one of these leaders and has performed this function in combat. I suppose the dramatic need to contrast Branagh’s high-level perspective with actor Fionn Whitehead’s nameless soldier’s perspective were more compelling than dwelling on the bureaucracy of the organizing 400,000 men, but still…it’s a notable omission and probably a conscious choice to limit runtime and the number of characters for the audience to follow.

I’m mildly embarrassed to admit, but I had no idea what Dunkirk was before I first heard about Nolan making this film. As an American, WW2 is often referenced as “starting” after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. I was woefully ignorant of British wartime efforts prior to the entry of the United States in WW2, and equally embarrassed at the end of the film to find that Winston Churchill’s most famous speech (fighting on the beaches and never surrendering) was given because of the events of Dunkirk. It is also appropriate that the closing minutes of the movie include several lines of this speech that point out that a miraculous evacuation is not a path to victory; a retreat is a retreat and hardly a military victory. But for the British people, Dunkirk was a magnificent moment in which the entire country came together to rescue hundreds of thousands of soldiers in danger of imminent death and provided the context in which D-Day was an even more triumphant victory for the Allies. As with many events of WW2 for the British, the character and strength of the people of Great Britain was forged in events like Dunkirk, and Nolan’s film is an entertaining, respectful tribute.

Analysis by Jim Washburn