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Rating: 8/10 (21 August 2017)

IT CONTAINS SPOILERS
Dunkirk : between fear, stress and will to survive
The battle of Dunkirk took place during World war II in 1940, when Great Britain tried to evacuate the British troops of the French beaches on Churchill's order. The movie is not really about the war itself but about the soldiers trying to survive the bombings and trying to come back to their country, it is also about the civilians and their patriotism. The tension is very well showed and felt through terrible yet beautiful images and powerful soundtrack amplifying the emotion and letting us worrying for the different characters. Christopher Nolan chose to use different time sets, different stories angles but managed to join them in the end. However, even though it is based on a real story, the storytelling is based on an English point of view, forgetting the Allies (mostly French but also Belgian) that stayed in Dunkirk to support the British troops evacuation. It is not a biopic, nor a historic documentary; it is just about war on the background of the Dynamo Operation. Still, the movie is very surprising because it's very different from any war movie. The movie starts with a very calm and heavy sound where you can feel the emptiness of the streets of Dunkirk broken by the sound of bullet noises and witness the first reflex of the soldiers: flee. That is what it is all about, running away. We understand that we'll follow these soldiers through their escape; it's a survival movie on a background of war. Flee and survive describe best this movie. The movie is very intense and well conducted as we are waiting for a miracle to save the soldiers, we can feel the different feelings they go through, team spirit, fear, egoism, hope, will to survive, but also will to protect the country and defend it. We can see that there are a lot of soldiers on the beach yet; we follow the escape of only three of them. We become attached to them, waiting for the miracle that is going to get them out of this perilous situation. Very few dialogues, lots of silences, and heavy sounds that explain some of the traumas caused by the war (surety, paranoia). Something that is also very different from any war movie is the absences of gore images, what is hard to watch is the time that is going very slowly. It feels like the nightmare is never ending, and shows exactly the horror of the war. To conclude, this movie shows the different states that a soldier/human goes through when his life is in danger: team spirit, fear, egoism, patriotism, hope, despair everything in a very well managed story that is actually three different one ending up in a big one.