Visceral and Original

Rating: 7/10 (24 December 2017)

The inevitable question rises when a major war movie is released "does this have anything original to say?". Astoundingly, Nolan's new film is a yes. If one were to extract a theme from this script is that people will go through extraordinary lengths for survival. Not to take anything away from acts of survival in "Schindler's List". This movie needs little dialogue to show the unspoken communication between the vulnerable soldiers, perhaps left to die on the beaches of Dunkirk, France.
Nolan found a great moment to flesh out, and more importantly, deliberately exclude a great deal of side stories that easily could bogged down the pacing and the running time. Turning this film into a tight action film running only 1 hour and 47 minutes. Three primary stories are followed, two of which are filled with surprises. The first is the young English soldier who you sense is essentially lost. You never see him with his regiment or carousing with other comrades. Knowing he must do anything he can to survive, he sneaks his way through the crowd and ultimately must sneak around more to continue to stay alive.
The second story follows a father and his two sons as they heed the call to take their private boats across the channel to help the evacuation. Here some hard drama occurs where you might not expect it. Mark Rylance as usual becomes transparent in his role. You can read with his eyes what is going through his head as one truly appreciates the exceptional circumstances that are taking place.
The third story was somewhat featured in the extended trailers that were shown in theatres. Tom Hardy and his cohorts are on a fruitless mission to try and stop the German aerial assault on the retreating soldiers. In the large Imax format, the flying sequences are much more than showing the dogfights that take place. They put the audience in the air, being able to take a bird's point of view as we get the geography of the action scenes.
The editing is something worth noting, as there are jumps forward and back in time as the narrative follows one character's timeline, and then another character's timeline. It all remains coherent by giving the audience key moments from different perspectives, and again keeping the number of characters we follow down to a handful. It also makes for a quick piece of storytelling when the premise is simple enough to get with a few lines of dialogue here and there.