Dunkirk is a five star triumph

Rating: 10/10 (23 July 2017)

Christopher Nolan delivers a monumental, stunning war movie, full of suspense and quiet performances. The best war movies in history, including Saving Private Ryan and Hacksaw Ridge, have also placed viewers in the centre of battle. Nolan has not reinvented that immersive approach, but he comes close to perfecting it.
It's a frightening, thrilling opening, but the thing that strikes you is the sound. At certain points, the musical noise engulfs everything, even the dialogue.
The opening scenes visually invite us, the viewers, into the movie. Several soldiers, their backs to the camera, walk down an empty street in the French town of Dunkirk. Nolan leaves a space between them where we, the viewers, can fit, as if we're following them along the street. Seeing the film on a large screen makes it especially easy to glide into its world.
Nolan's film focuses initially on one young man running from a flurry of bullets through the deserted streets at the beginning of the film. Running from sudden gunfire, the young soldier, Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), arrives at the beach, which is crowded with troops waiting to climb onto too-few ships. From there, Nolan quickly establishes three different story lines and timeframes that are gracefully interspersed throughout the movie.
Tommy, innocent and fearful, meets a French soldier, and they desperately carry an injured man on a stretcher toward the shore. Theirs is not a noble act. They are pretending to be medics in the hope of getting on a ship and saving themselves, which instantly sets Dunkirk apart from simpler, hero-driven war movies.
Mark Rylance is the very heart of Christopher Nolan's brilliantly directed war movie, Dunkirk. Rylance plays a civilian who navigates his small boat across the Channel, hoping to ferry stranded British soldiers back home. Rylance's character, Mr Dawson, is part of the day- long sea action, in which hundreds of small boats are called on to help.