Dunkirk (2017)

Director: Christopher Nolan

Story: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy

Music: Hans Zimmer

Time: 106 minutes

Bottom-line: A gruelling war-documentary; another great Nolan experience

One of the most anticipated films of 2017, Christopher Nolan’s WWII war film is based on the true incidents of the Dunkirk evacuation. The film features an ensemble cast consisting of Fionn Whitehead, Harry Styles (yes, from One Direction), Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy, Kenneth Branagh and Tom Hardy. Nolan uses a hyperlink narrative structure to construct the story from three viewpoints: the land, the sea and the air.

 

Styles (left), and Fionn (rightmost)

“All we did was survive.”

“That’s enough.”

 The Mole: Tommy (Whitehead), a young British soldier, escapes German gunfire to make his way to the Dunkirk beach, where 4,00,000 other soldiers await their fate. There is a huge shortage of ships and ration, and the British perimeter is reducing by the minute. The audience get to know that the Prime Minister has requested smaller civilian boats to bring back soldiers from Dunkirk, by sailing directly up to the beach.

The Sea: Mr. Dawson (Rylance) and his son, Peter (Tom-Glynn Carney) along with George (Barry Keoghan), sail towards Dunkirk in their private sailing boat, hoping to rescue as many soldiers as they can. On the way, they meet a shell-shocked soldier (Murphy), whom they haul aboard. When he realises they are going to Dunkirk, where he has just come from, he panics.

The Air: Three Spitfire pilots are on their way to provide air support the to the troops at Dunkirk. As the story progresses, their leader is shot down, one of them is badly hit, and the last one (Hardy) is extremely low on fuel.

Rylance as Mr. Dawson

Just like the way I consider Gravity to be a space documentary rather than a feature film, Dunkirk is also more along the lines of a documentary. It is like Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, or Alistair Maclean’s HMS Ulysses: having just the outline of a story, but filmed with an eye for detail. The experience of watching it in the theatre enhances it so much more: the sound of each bullet echoes in your ear, the close-ups and PoV shots make you feel part of the action… in fact, Nolan went the extra mile (or several miles, rather) to make everything seem more real, with his use of practical special effects.

Almost entirely avoiding CGI, Nolan employed thousands of extras to play the soldiers at the beach, he used actual models of ships and planes and even shot at the actual locations of the evacuation. This precision, combined with van Hoytema’s spectacular cinematography and Zimmer’s masterful background score, gives us a gut-wrenching look at the war. The hyperlink narrative is so that we can keep track of the parallel events of collaboration between land, sea and air, and the huge contrast between the calm sea around Dawson’s boat, and the utter chaos in the torpedoed ship certainly send chills down one’s back.

 

Hardy as Farrier, a fighter-pilot

Fionn Whitehead and Mark Rylance excel in acting: the former playing a young soldier looking for a quick way out of a mess, and the latter, experienced and dedicated, deliberately going towards the danger zone. Tom Hardy’s role is similar to how he played Bane: his face fully covered almost throughout the film, and seated inside his cockpit from start to finish. It was surprising not to see Michael Caine in a Nolan film, but he does have a voice role as a radio communicator to the RAF. 

Dunkirk is certainly worth the three-year wait (Nolan’s last film was in 2014), and this war film promises to entertain without any bloodshed or shootout sequence. With immaculate technical detail, minimal dialogues and backstory, good acting and Nolan’s directorial touch, a theatre experience of this film is highly recommended!

My Rating: 4/5

Rotten Tomatoes rating: 93%