"Dunkirk" review

A whole new kind of hell for war to cover.

For better or worse, modern war films have taken on something of a formula, no doubt as a means of efficiently crafting a narrative that is palatable to the masses surrounding the very ugly and surreal experience of warfare.

Now formula is not necessarily a bad thing; plenty of movies to come from the mold set up with modern technology assisted storytelling in movies such as “Saving Private Ryan” have allowed us to explore the human psyche, display the will of the human spirit, and better understand how much is at stake when we can’t learn to tolerate our differences in ways that by and large weren’t very wide spread.

The need to center a certain level of drama surrounding specific characters within a limited timeframe does however have the unfortunate effect of limiting the types of stories that you can tell regarding conflicts that are often too massive in scope and messy to capture on film.

This is precisely what makes Christopher Nolan’s cinematic World War II epic “Dunkirk” so remarkable.

“Dunkirk” regales the story of the messy European conflict to the audience in which the Allied retreat from French shores, disrupted by assaulting Nazi military from land and air, was only successfully pulled off thanks to the intervention of civilian ships working in tandem with the military to get over 338,000 soldiers evacuated from the battlefield.

To this end, the movie follows the perspective of a civilian ship launching to participate in the evacuation over the course of a day, a group of Royal Air Force pilots providing cover fire for the evacuation for an hour, and some young Army Privates struggling to survive and escape the battlefield that they have fought on for a week.

Christopher Nolan’s capabilities of using character driven narrative as a means to profoundly explore the depth of the human condition through the focus of a single highlighted issue can be almost unparalleled but the strength of his actual drama can be a bit on the inconsistent side in terms of impact.

While this noticeable weakness has played a hand in regularly producing faults in most of his movies both good and bad, the man is an undeniable master of story structure, technical craftsmanship, and theme, which serve him astonishingly well in depicting a messy large scale conflict that goes beyond the scope of a single man’s story in a tale that doesn’t really have a clear cut ending given that the soldiers successfully evacuated would have to eventually return to a war that lasted 4 more years.

“Dunkirk” is a very different type of war movie. Rather than be a human drama that focuses on studying the various pressures of war hammering down upon the psyche of 1 group of individuals, the sweeping perspectives and differing time scales blend together into a nonlinear narrative more about capturing the stress and intensity of war than the destination of any particular person involved with it.

The Battle and Evacuation of Dunkirk in and of itself, along with the ongoing war, are almost treated as its own character; a force of nature fed by the pain and suffering of a humanity thrashing against its own conditions in an attempt to escape. The waters go from calm to explosive and perilous the closer the civilians get to the beaches and action that the soldiers at the pier struggle to endure and what is debatably the calmest perspective of the film comes from the Air Force pilots, observing the action from up high until the danger of enemy planes unexpectedly creeps up on them.

Nolan assembles the cinematic equivalent of armed conflict chaos by playing maestro with the film’s technical makeup.

“Dunkirk’s” script is very minimalistic and light on dialogue, conveying the psychological stresses of actively fighting for your life and preying on sympathy for the basics of human survival instinct as the actors are tasked with packing as much reaction to their surroundings in as little time as possible to successful avail.

Mark Rylance plays civilian yacht captain Dawson, who leaves to Dunkirk with his son and son’s friend, picking up an adrift and shell shocked soldier, played by Cillian Murphy, along the way.

The groups reaction to Murphy’s panic at realizing he’s reentering the battlefield give the film a heart that naturally and effectively demonstrates the horrors of the scenario without manipulating heartstrings in ways that lesser movies would have dedicated an entire subplot to.

Other performances demonstrating a variety of responses to wartime action ultimately help to paint a more three dimensional picture of a war campaign observed from all ends in such a capacity that transcends the dramatic weight of any individual narrative and manages to feed off of all three working on screen simultaneously within their respective time frames.

Accomplishing this is made possible through pitch perfect editing that weaves between narratives seamlessly, some of the most heart stopping sound design that I have been subject to in a theater in years, and a series of cinematography choices ranging from contrast between the surreal sense of claustrophobia induced by characters fleeing and fighting for their lives in open spaces and the lack of displaying actual enemy soldiers on screen as a means of enhancing the notion of the human combatants as victims of circumstances far greater than themselves.

For all intents and purposes, “Dunkirk” is a nigh flawless film with regard to what its narrative experiment attempts to accomplish and contribute to the genre of war movies. Its only true downfall however lies in that its experience will be far from universal.

While I would personally dare anybody with even an iota of knowledge with regard to the technical craft of filmmaking and the manner in which creative minds utilize said craft to tell their stories to argue the legitimacy of what this film accomplishes, it will undeniably not be everybody’s cup of tea even if you can appreciate what it wants to achieve.

Clocking in at under 2 hours, the film is lean, deftly executed and without any fat to trim but is still an orchestra of carnage in which what little traditional character narrative comes about is broken up for the sake of basking in the chaos of combat that has no defined narrative flow towards its grand finale, or major dramatic pay off towards the fate of its characters.

This is not a story about humans experiencing war; it’s a story about experiencing war live in which its depicted human characters are but a tool to instill within the viewer a sense of tension, longing, exhaustion, anguish, and ultimately, hope.

Time will tell whether or not its unorthodox methods will be appreciated by the masses in favor of a more tradition narrative style but for me, “Dunkirk” is one of the best of the year and possibly one of the best WWII films possibly made.

8 Open Firing Spitfires out of 10