Normally I’m excited for a few weeks prior to a new Christopher Nolan film. However, with his latest film Dunkirk, I was intrigued rather than excited. Nolan has a distinct style to the extent that the phrase ‘Nolanisms’ was coined, and I was not sure how well this style would mesh with a film about an historical event, particularly given the choice of the Dunkirk evacuation. As fascinating and ultimately important as it was, it is also a distinctly uncinematic event. An evacuation doesn’t necessarily have the same sort of emotional impact of a traditional military victory or defeat, especially one on this scale. It can be easy to invest in a story of a small group trying to escape from a bad situation, but how do you do that when you are talking about hundreds of thousands of people? Therefore I was intrigued as to not only whether the film was good and whether the story was faithful to the actual events, but also whether it would feel like a Christopher Nolan film.
One of the things I felt was completely spot on was the tone of the film. With the possible exception of Tom Hardy’s character, this isn’t a film about heroic acts in the traditional sense. The ‘victory’ is in surviving, and we see this in the way many of the soldiers behave. Several of them carry out distinctly unheroic acts, and their behaviour could almost be described as selfish, even though their motives are never malicious. They are simply trying to stay alive, and it was refreshing to see a film not trying to build the event up into something more important than it was, without downplaying the event either. I haven’t ever studied the story of Dunkirk in detail, but it certainly felt authentic as far as I understood the event.
The main ‘Nolanism’ in the film is the way that time passes. There are three storylines running alongside each other which all come together at the end, but start at different points. The soldiers story starts one week before the stories come together, the civilians in the boat story starts at the start of the day the stories come together and the fighter pilots’ story starts one hour before the stories come together. It is slightly disorientating at first, but I felt it worked really well, giving a glimpse into the fates that lay in store for some of the characters without hindering the drama of the reveal of how they reached that point. It did a great job of injecting the film with the necessary amounts of suspense and drama, so on the whole I felt Nolan’s style worked well here.
I did however feel like the scale of the event was slightly too much for the film at times. In a film about the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, it focuses on around a dozen characters. Whilst this does help the film feel focused, it ultimately isn’t important whether these specific characters survive because the stakes are much higher than that. It felt like Kenneth Branagh’s character’s role was to remind the audience of this fact, and as impressive as some of the beach shots were, I don’t think those even fully conveyed the situation the soldiers actually found themselves in.
On balance, I think that Dunkirk is pretty much as good as it is possible to make a film about the Dunkirk evacuation. I would rate Saving Private Ryan higher as a war film, but that had the advantage of being a fictional event (once the D-Day landing section of the film is over and the mission to save Private Ryan beings at least). The balance between drama and historical accuracy felt right here, and so if Christopher Nolan decides to tackle any more historical events in the future, I’ll certainly be excited beforehand.
Scorpo Stories 