Review: DUNKIRK

DUNKIRK 
(WAR/THRILLER) 
★★★★
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Screenplay by Christopher Nolan
Starring: Fionn Whitehead, Jack Lowden, Tom Hardy, Harry Styles, Mark Rylance, Tom Glynn-Carney, Kenneth Branagh, Barry Keoghan, James D'Arcy, Aneurin Barnard, Cillian Murphy
Rated PG-13 for intense war experience and some language.
106 minutes
Verdict: Christopher Nolan's best movie since INCEPTION strips away the political nuances of the war genre for an experience that is intensely bracing, visceral and remarkable. 
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN DUNKIRK IF YOU LIKED:
THE DARK KNIGHT  (2008)
INCEPTION  (2010)
THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS  (1966)
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN  (1998)
DOWNFALL  (2004)
With the advantage of living a mostly rural 21st century American experience far from the realities of the wars here in the past and the wars very much in the present in other parts of the world like Syria, the very real concept of war is personally perplexing.  A couple weeks ago, I was in a museum looking at a few skulls and other bones dating back to medieval Scandinavia with evidence of devastating sword wounds, and it seemed so strange to think that these were the very authentic remains of human beings who were as real and living as I ever was, who breathed, thought, and felt things, and part of that experience included another very real human being cleaving their head or driving a sword through their leg.  Why?  That was so far back, and that kind of thing has happened and still happens on a far larger scale to this day.  Were these people considered significant beyond the average personal sphere of influence?  Did anyone care strongly about their pain and peril beyond themselves and maybe a few family members?  Maybe when death is so present and so random, the fear of death is numbed.  Maybe when it's so common, it doesn't matter as much emotionally.  But what compels so many people agree or just feel obligated on both sides that a war, small or large, is mounted with such surety?  In my day to day business, the choices that I face and the responsibilities that present themselves make a lot more sense than killing an "enemy", but they're also so inconsequential, and yet they matter to me personally.  What would matter to me personally about ending the life of a complete stranger, a stranger who is essentially the same as me except for a difference in home and creed?  The only reason that could possible matter is that the stranger wants to kill me, and even then, I couldn't be sure that was enough reason to compel me to act in self-defense that would kill him or her.  I'd hope to have enough of a sense of self-preservation, but whether as a matter of nerves, courage, self-preservation or personal hatred, the permanence of ending that other person's life would be a tremendous weight.  The reason he or she would want to kill me must come from a similar sense of obligation or self-preservation, and why should either side want to fight anyway if it was truly known that the fighting was unnecessary?  What does any of it matter?  War seems so pointless when you really dig down into the roots of it, where someone's pursuit of power from one or both sides is reckless enough to drag so many others into a conflict over big, broad ideas of freedom, pride and a way of life, and even in the case of World War II, probably our least morally ambiguous major war (and even there, we have horrible examples of atrocities committed in desperation by the "moral side" like the bombings of Dresden and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both of which destroyed the lives of so many civilians who had minimal personal motivation or investment about the wars waged by their nation's leaders and armies), the millions of lives lost, civilian or not, were lost for only a tiny fraction of the overall participants who were truly responsible for the fighting.  War is baffling, stupid and horrible, but when the negotiations have been negated and the soldiers have been forced to either face the bullets of the enemy or the bullets of their own nation's firing squad for desertion or cowardice, and the possible salvation from death or unrighteous subjugation, there may be no choice left to either flee or fight, and even if you flee, eventually you still have to fight.

Christopher Nolan's latest film, which he's written, directed and produced, tells the story of the Dunkirk evacuation in June 1940, a year and half before the entry of the United States in World War II, when Allied troops were defeated by Nazi Germany in the Battle of France, and hundreds of thousands of British and French soldiers were cut off and surrounded only 39 to 87 miles from their native England with death on all sides.  A triptych, the movie is intercut between three separate threads that drop things right into the middle of the event; the first is "The Mole", where Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), Alex (Harry Styles, of One Direction fame) and Gibson (Aneurnin Barnard) are low-priority army privates struggling to get off the beach and onto one of the evacuation crafts, but the boats are constantly subjected to attack by planes overhead or submarines underneath.  The scenes of boat decks packed tight with soldiers who have nowhere to go but crouch down in terror as bombs are dropped on them are particularly terrifying, and the sound in the IMAX theater rattles through the seats like an earthquake that really puts you in the action, but not an escapism sort of action; it's a bracing experience.  The second thread is "The Sea", where Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance, best known as the titular character of Steven Spielberg's THE BFG and for his Oscar-winning turn as Rudolf Abel in Spielberg's BRIDGE OF SPIES) pilots his own personal boat, the Moonstone, into the war zone to assist in the evacuation in his own small way (as many smaller personal and commercial vessels did in the historical evacuation) along with son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Peter's friend George (Barry Keoghan), and along the way they pick up a shell-shocked officer (Cillian Murphy) who's the only survivor of a U-Boat attack.  Thirdly is "The Air", where Spitfire pilots of the Royal Air Force Farrier (Tom Hardy) and Collins (Jack Lowden) pursue and engage with the German Luftwaffe planes that are dropping their bombs on every craft attempting to evacuate soldiers from the beach.

The characters of DUNKIRK are secondary to the in-the-moment experience, and their dialogue is kept to a minimum, while a great deal of it is indiscernible anyway (particularly Hardy's, whose lower face is usually covered by a flight mask), but most of the particulars in what they're saying doesn't matter as much as what you're seeing.  I wasn't a big fan of Nolan's last two movies, INTERSTELLAR and THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, movies which strove for big emotions and big ideas, but emotions, at least the emotions Nolan was dealing with in those movies, are not his strong suit.  He thrives in spectacle, scale and tension, which is all cranked up to an 11 in DUNKIRK, and the effect of working so well in those areas that are so pertinent to this particular story is unexpected visceral emotion.  The desperation, admiration and relief are all very potent throughout, and the movie opens so strongly and so intensely, it's practically exhausting near the halfway point, but he deftly eases the tension without ever relieving the threat, so he can ratchet up yet again for another quick burst ahead of the largely uplifting but emotionally mixed conclusion.  It also certainly helps that after a run of bloated two-and-a-half to three-hour long epics, Nolan brings DUNKIRK in at less than two hours.  It sucked me in from beginning to end and wore me out, but it felt like really going through something powerful.  My only particular reservation is that in order to do practically any kind of movie with this kind of budget, even the ultra-marketable Nolan has to bring a story of World War II in with a marketable PG-13 rating, and while the results of violence in most of Nolan's movies often seem weirdly sterile regardless of the rating, it seems weirder in the case of this kind of movie that the violence is so visibly bloodless.  It isn't the kind of movie that would make sense to have SAVING PRIVATE RYAN levels of gore, but having more of the horrors of war on the periphery of things would obviously make sense.  Either way, the tension is so potent and the threat of death is present that the depiction of war is still largely effective.

Obviously, most of us don't have a personal way to understand how real or not the depiction of war in any movie is, thank goodness, and even those of us who think we have a pretty good understanding of war and sacrifice don't really unless we've actually lived it.  I imagine no movie can really impress upon us the sense of terror and loss that real, actual war is to those who have been in one, and even then, there's no universal experience of war.  Maybe in some alternate universe or some alternate course of historical events there's a movie of the German perspective on this "glorious" victory, of how many abstract "others" of France and England tried to fight good German values of national pride and strength, and how Germany's brave young men prevailed.  Maybe there's a movie about a great German soldier who had more confirmed kills than any other sniper in German history, then sort of dealt with PTSD before being killed offscreen by a fellow German veteran with PTSD, thus completely ignoring the purported issue the movie is supposedly addressing, but the movie made a crap-load of money anyway and an assclown becomes president.  It doesn't matter.  DUNKIRK is a movie that isn't about the moral complexities of history and war.  It isn't about sides.  It's about survival.  It's an aggressive visceral experience about the in-the-moment immediacy of a turning point in England and the world's history, an Alamo moment of World War II that became a rallying cry.  It's bracing, and it's incredible.

                                                                                                                                                         Images via Warner Brothers