Katie-Ellen
Full Member
I went to see it earlier this week. @AgentPete asked for feedback (and Litopia is keen to have more reviews posted here...books, films, magazine articles)
The shadow of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan looms massive in the modern war film genre. Nolan takes a very different approach. Dunkirk is a ready made epic; the story, to many only broadly familiar , of the colossal defeat for Britain and the Allies in May 1940, when our troops, 400,000 were trapped by the enemy on the beaches at Dunkirk and an emergency evacuation, done on a shoe string, was only possible with the help of small, private vessels launched from Dover to Dartmouth.
This movie, directed by Christopher Nolan and with a short running time, is taut, visually & cerebrally immersive, emotionally non-immersive. The soundtrack by Hans Zimmer is frightening all by itself; percussive and numinous.
There are three story-lines; the evacuation and its defence by sea, air and land, and minimal sub-plotting or melodrama...good, say I, who needs it with a story off this magnitude...but what you are offered here is a cross-section of events, the context implied, happening off-stage, and with a cast of lightly sketched characters. You're rooting for them of course, and the cast is stellar, no duds, but this is not a character driven story.
It is historically faithful, and just occasionally, approximate; for example, the real life Admiral tasked with advance planning against this dire eventuality was Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, but we meet only the courageous pier master Commander Bolton portrayed by Kenneth Branagh, a character based on the true story of the real life Commander Clouston And in reality, while Spitfires were deployed in support of the evacuation, 15 of them and their intervention was crucial, their fights were played out largely out of sight of the stranded men who afterwards demanded to know where the bloody hell they had been? Further along the coast was where.
The handling was honest; the fact of catastrophe, the knowledge of abandoning the French to their fate, albeit on their own home turf while we retreated to ours ready for a last ditch defence against what seemed imminent invasion. We saw the shattered, shamefaced, rapid dispersal of the troops on disembarking, loaded on to trains for the quickest turnaround. Churchill needed his army back, to fight another day...the Allies were staring defeat in the face, a fact not to be forgotten when we now, with the benefit of hindsight know that day would culminate in D-Day. Perhaps Nolan's next project?
The Stukas (Junkers, Ju 87's) harrying the rescuing destroyers and smaller vessels, strafing the beach and picking off men like ants, were like very agents of the devil. The faces of those enemy pilots. you never got to see, and in fact, you see no enemy at all until a final scene where they advance upon and seize the downed Spitfire pilot who has run out of juice, landed safely and set his plane on fire, denying it to the enemy. Off to the prisoner-of -war camps with him.
Good, not great. There was a hollowness where for me the movie fell between stools, neither 360 degree documentary epic nor personal engaging as with Saving Private Ryan.
Yes, the Churchill speech...and even now, stirring speech gets an outing, more than once, 'we shall fight them on the beaches, and in the fields and streets (paraphrased)...we shall never surrender'...but there is no cameo appearance here by a 'Churchillian' actor, nor deeply invested in any one character so that you are rooting for them as an individual, but I do say, if you are remotely interested in the history, go and see it.
Why? For Nolan's experimental portraiture, visceral without gore, compassionate without sentiment, (by and large) and the dreadful, epic true story, stunning cinematography, especially the scenes of aerial combat, and sound track, and for its lean, pared back but incisive script, and its honesty on the themes of community, duty, courage and fellowship, and the frailty of these in the face of shock, terror of imminent violent death, and total exhaustion.
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