Retreat for Victory

Rating: 9/10 (30 July 2017)

Remember the opening scenes in Spielberg's SAVING PRIVATE RYAN? The Normandy beach landings in June 1944. Explosions on the beach, bullets zipping through the guys in the sea. DUNKIRK offers the same visceral experience of combat, only it lasts for an hour and three quarters. There are a few moments of calm between battles and bombardments, but these are always the preamble to the next grim phase of the conflict.
Christopher Nolan has directed some weird movies (MEMENTO, INCEPTION, the DARK KNIGHT Batman trilogy). His only 'weirdness' here is to take three separate time frames â€“ a week for the men on the beach, one day for the flotilla of small craft setting out to rescue them and one hour for the Spitfire pilots fighting the German bombers â€“ and meld them into a fairly seamless narrative that condenses the drama into a solid 90 minutes of nerve-shredding tension. The scenes onboard a sinking mine-sweeper are among the most harrowing depictions of the total horror of war I've seen.
There are panoramic CGI shots to show the sheer size of the retreating army (400,000) but the script focuses on one soldier fighting to survive the day (Fionn Whitehead), one fishing boat captain (Mark Rylance) and one RAF pilot (Tom Hardy): these three are used to bring home to us that each of the soldiers and their rescuers had a backstory â€“ a home, a family, a life â€“ that they were laying on the line for their country, their king and their fellow men. A spot-the-celebrity element includes cameo appearances from Harry Styles, Michael Biehl and others whom I failed to identify. Kenneth Branagh and James D'Arcy play naval officers who occasionally veer close to the officers parodied in OH WHAT A LOVEY WAR! â€“ I hope this was intended.
DUNKIRK joins the 'pantheon' of all-time great war movies and will surely win awards next winter. I was misty-eyed through much of it â€“ and not just because my dad was one of the soldiers who went to Belgium and didn't come back (I was two years old). There's a temptation to see the 'strategic retreat' from the French coast in 1940 as an awful defeat, when in fact â€“ as this version makes clear â€“ many of the 300,000-plus men who were brought safely home to England returned to Normandy in 1944 to begin the destruction of Hitler's military machine.