On the beach

Rating: 5/10 (22 July 2017)

In which Christopher Nolan attempts to do a Spielberg in widening his palette to take in a major war-themed movie a la "Schindler". Does he succeed, well, I don't think so. Nolan has spoken about the unusual construction of his film, taking three stories on the day, one being two young soldiers' desperate attempt to escape the carnage on the beach over the course of a week, the RAF pilots attempting to protect the air-space over the Channel within one hour and the crew of a small private boat in one day making their own way to try to help relieve the situation and then sort of sort of slow / fast forwards them all on from there, cutting from one to the next in triangular order, from start to finish. These switches, I have to say, I grew almost irritated at by the end, to the point of anticipating them even at key dramatic points in the story.
I guess his big idea was that rather than attempt a massive-scale over-arching narrative of the events at Dunkirk, he attempts to tell the tale with just these three microcosms and infuse them with the different human traits at play in such a desperate situation. Thus we see the young soldiers on the run from the start displaying fear, selfishness, ingenuity but yes, even cowardice as they try anything to get aboard a leaving ship, only to end up threatened with drowning in an abandoned boat they'd hoped to commandeer and use to get to safety. With the pilots, we witness calmness, bravery, loyalty, flying skills and ultimately self-sacrifice as they fight overwhelming odds in the air while in the rescuing private boat, again we see endeavour, courage and compassion as the crew of one middle aged man and two young boys attempts to make a difference by saving as many as they can.
Was this approach the best way to convey the big picture here...I'm not convinced it was. Some of the incidents seemed contrived and at odds with the realism sought for elsewhere, especially the incidents of the young cabin boy on the small cruiser and the French soldier who ends up with a bunch of hardly heroic British soldiers under deck, trying to escape drowning.
Sure, the depiction of the terrible ordeals they each went through is realistically portrayed, on water, land and sea, but ultimately it lacks the realism of say "Saving Private Ryan", (sacrificed obviously for the 12a classification to no doubt ensure younger viewers could get to see it), so there's no blood or bits of bodies as you would otherwise expect. I'm not sure I saw even one German in the whole movie.
There's very little dialogue either so there wasn't much room for acting skills to shine other than by reacting mostly with British pluck to events, which actors like Kenneth Branagh and Mark Rylance can do all day while Tom Hardy is confined almost exclusively to the cockpit of his Spitfire. The best I can say about pop star Harry Styles' acting debut was that I didn't even notice him until my wife pointed him out to me in a scene right at the end.
Commendably, Nolan keeps his film to a 105 minute duration when it would have been easy to bloat it to double that length, but in the end, I didn't feel at any stage that I was actually witnessing real events, always that I was watching a movie, which for me, as I say, makes it ultimately a failure. The miracle of Dunkirk was that 300000 got home safely under insuperable odds, whereas here it seemed as if barely 300 made it. Mr Nolan should turn his telescope around.