Dunkirk is an unrelenting Cinema triumph! (unmissable!)

Rating: 8/10 (26 July 2017)

Watching Dunkirk at an IMAX Cinema is reluctant to be an unforgettable experience (for me it was, surely). Filled with unrelenting tension. From start to finish there isn't a minute's respite. With each gun battle, torpedo attack, aerial bombing and explosion, there's end-to-end action which is in equal parts gripping, thrilling and stunning. Expect your heart to hammer for the entire 107 minutes. I didn't hear a cough, sniff, barely an intake of breath from my fellow captivated cinema-goers. Nolan's Dunkirk will suck you in and spit you back out - in the best way.
As a Briton, this was seriously important, valuing the details. The magnificent history of Britain has tales to fill almost every book in the world and this powerful document of an era, the World War II and one of Britain's greatest military expenditure (which was actually a retreat by all means), told in stark terms by the Dark Knight director, a Brit-phenomenon himself, Christopher Nolan was more than overwhelming and satisfying. How the evacuation of Dunkirk in May 1940 turned out: how nearly 400,000 mainly British (which means mostly English but don't forget our Scottish brothers) troops escaped from the beach and harbour of a northern French port while being bombarded by the Nazis
Surely, my main expectation with war movies is the terrifying gore (thanks Spielberg). Blood, organs spilling everywhere, limbs blown off; all an accurate depiction of war but just so awful to watch. There's hardly a drop of visible blood spilled in Dunkirk but it is still one of the most brutal and powerful war films I've ever seen.
Steven Spielberg might have owned the Normandy beach landings while Clint Eastwood owns Iwo Jima, and now, Nolan has authored the definitive cinematic version of Dunkirk. Unlike those other battles, however, this last was not a conventional victory, but more of a salvaged retreat, as the German offensive forced a massive evacuation of English troops early in World War II.
And unlike those other two directors, Nolan is only nominally interested in the human side of the story as he puts his stamp on the heroic rescue operation, offering a bravura virtual-eyewitness account from multiple perspectives — one that fragments and then craftily interweaves events as seen from land, sea and air. Coming from Nolan, the film retains the same legendary scale but it's blended with a more intimate and structurally fascinating project like his earlier works Memento and Following.
Anyone who ever saw Memento knows Nolan is a fan of playing with time and structure, incorporating a pulsating suspense factor even without spelling anything out for the audience. Again, like a true master of cinema, he lets it all come together in sometimes surprising but enormously effective and even emotional ways. With sparse dialogue and an emphasis on three separate angles on the Dunkirk operation, Nolan creates three smaller elements that lead to a much bigger picture.
No action movie is complete without an epic score and Christopher Nolan has once again teamed up with the infamous Hans Zimmer following the success of their collaboration for The Dark Knight Rises. Given the lack of dialogue, the score is the "leading character in the film." The soundtrack is the star of the film.
With that, the film divulges into three interlocking chapters but is told from three different perspectives. There's 'The Mole, One Week', taking place on the harbour wall from which thousands were rescued and where we see a commander (Kenneth Branagh) trying to make sense of the disaster. There's 'The Sea, One Day', where we see civilian sailor Mark Rylance set off from the English south coast. And there's 'The Air, One Hour', in which RAF pilot Farrier (Tom Hardy) engages in dogfights with the Luftwaffe. There are other characters – young troops on the beach played Fionn Whitehead and Harry Styles; a disturbed soldier (Cillian Murphy) rescued from the hull of a sinking warship. Yet as much as these familiar faces give us something to grab onto, this is a war film without heroes or a straightforward story. The event is the story. If that means some of the film feels chilly, a little distant, it's at the expense of easy sympathy and simplistic drama.
Sir. Churchill called Dunkirk a 'miracle'. The newspapers tagged it a 'triumph'. Nolan resists any punch-the-air celebration. Hans Zimmer's score scrapes away at you throughout, piling unease on unease before flirting with Elgar's war remembrance anthem 'Nimrod' and backing off, as if embarrassed.
Questions are posed about the British government: a survivor asks a RAF pilot back home, 'Where the hell were you?'. The older generation owes a debt to the young: 'That old bloke wouldn't even look us in the eye,' observes one soldier. We hear Sir. Churchill's 'We shall fight on the beaches' speech, but the words come from the mouth of a dazed soldier, not the PM. There's no glory here, just survival. It's a sombre tribute that makes a distant war feel uncomfortably present.
What was so brilliant about this war movie, as opposed to other blockbuster war movies, was the lack of any cheesy back story. There was no handsome soldier trying to get home to his childhood sweetheart, no lieutenant attempting to rescue a long-lost brother, no young boys crying for their mums, no romance - just a lot of actual war. The film was all the more real and heartbreaking for it.
Never mind that Britain if stood alone at that precise point during the war, this film is like the Brexit version of British identity in a nutshell: proudly isolated, independent, not European, and strongest everywhere in the world.
Go watch this in an IMAX Cinema if you can. This is a 2017 must- watch. A must see if you're English. A must see if you're Scottish. A must see if you're British.