It seemed, for a while at least, like Christopher Nolan was going to be the savior of big budget cinema. This was, after all, a filmmaker who had earned his stripes making morally and formally complex thrillers on a modest scale, before joining the ranks of the Hollywood elite when he redefined what a superhero movie could (and should) be. In between entries in his Dark Knight saga, he made equally heady, but now larger scale one-offs that were equally challenging and entertaining. But then, something started to give way. The final installment in his Batman trilogy felt bloated, uneven and oppressively weighty, and his attempt at a sci-fi spectacle, “Interstellar,” was a messy bore. His imagination seemed to have reached a definitive ceiling and all the IMAX cameras in the world couldn’t save him. But maybe without these recent disappointments, Nolan’s new World War II thriller “Dunkirk” wouldn’t feel like such a breathless accomplishment. This is the kind of bold, brilliant filmmaking that defined his early career married to the large scope and scale of his most recent Hollywood output. It’s truly amazing.
“Dunkirk” dramatizes the events surrounding Operation Dynamo, wherein French, Belgian and English soldiers were pushed back towards the sea by an advancing German army, with Winston Churchill putting a call out to private boats to help bring the trapped soldiers home. Nolan tells the story from three perspectives – the land, the sea, and the air. On land we follow Tommy (newcomer Fionn Whitehead), a young British soldier desperate to get home; in the air it’s a pair of Royal Air Force pilots, Collins and Farrier (Jack Lowden and Tom Hardy); and on the sea it’s a middle-aged yachtsman named Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance) puttering towards battle in an effort to do his part for the war and picking up a lone survivor (Cillian Murphy) along the way.
And really that’s it. There aren’t any cutaways to restless men in war rooms plotting and strategizing, there isn’t any extraneous information about the tide of the war and Dunkirk’s placement within it, and there isn’t a sense of these men before the battle (a sincere apology to those expecting to see handsome youngsters kiss their sweethearts goodbye).
Nolan shot the film almost entirely with IMAX cameras (the remaining bits were either 70mm or 35mm), which are notoriously loud and necessitate all of the dialogue to be re-recorded in post-production. Nolan’s workaround was ingenious: the movie just wouldn’t have very much dialogue. (Kenneth Branagh, always the professional, is on hand as a commanding officer, to occasionally interject a rousing speech.) It’s a beautiful marriage of form and function with the large format cameras lending the experience an even bigger scope when it needs it (like during the dizzying aerial dogfights) while also upping the emotional intensity when the cameras are simply trained on the young actors’ faces as they react to the horror unfolding around them. It’s a thrilling movie, for sure, but it never forgets to make you feel too.
As the movie goes along, too, it reveals itself to be more structurally clever than originally thought. Early on in “Dunkirk” there are cards identifying each geographic landscape, but there are also timestamps associated with each location that are very easy to miss – on land it’s one week (which explains why there are periods of intense boredom interspersed with all of the scrambling), in the air its one hour (because that’s how long they could be airborne before fuel ran out), and in the water it’s a day (about how long it took to get from England to the French coast). As the tenor of the movie steadily intensifies, so, too, does the intermingling of these timelines, to where characters will start popping up in different sections at different moments, in surprising and revealing ways. It adds an additional level of complexity and depth to an otherwise straightforward narrative. Much of the movie plays like the multi-tiered climax to “The Dark Knight Rises” or “Inception,” but the completing chronology provides unexpected emotional oomph.
Adding to “Dunkirk” and its sense of overwhelming intensity is, of course, Hans Zimmer‘s score, which is even more dissonant and nightmarish. In keeping with the movie’s obsession with the expansion and compression of time, as it relates to a battlefield scenario, Zimmer has chosen to build motifs around the sound of a ticking clock. Not only is this is shrewd and thematically aligned, but it’s also, when paired with the enormous visuals and equally precise sound design, absolutely nerve-shredding.
With a zippy 106-minute runtime (that’s over an hour shorter than “Interstellar”), the storytelling is economic and assured. There isn’t a single wasted moment or unnecessary detail. Everything is enthralling and narratively necessary. If there are any complaints to level at “Dunkirk,” it’s that what little dialogue there is, is so low in the mix that you can barely understand it (Hardy might be even more mumble-mouthed than he was as Bane, and you can see just as little of his face). However, dialogue is such an afterthought for the film as a whole that it really doesn’t matter. Also, it’s worth wondering if the film could have benefited from an R-rating, particularly during moments of extreme carnage on the beach. The movie is weirdly bloodless, although fountains of gore could have potentially tipped the movie from merely being intense into something outright unbearable.
Nolan is a master filmmaker. That was never a question. But what seemed, for a while at least, to be up in the air, was if he was able to rein in his technical obsessions and studio obligations to tell a story that connects with the human experience in a singular and profound way. Thankfully, “Dunkirk” answers that question with a resounding yes. This is a film that still allows him to indulge in his love for technological innovation but does so with a story that is deeply felt and wonderfully told. It’s become a cliché to suggest experiencing a movie like this on the big screen, but, really, see it on the biggest screen you can, in true IMAX if possible. There have been countless films this summer that have engaged in endless spectacle, but “Dunkirk” is the rare blockbuster that will leave a bruise. [A]