What Dunkirk Means to Us
There’s no big time, critically acclaimed director that I have a harder time getting on board with than Christopher Nolan. I find most of his movies to be decently enjoyable but lacking the necessary juice to get me fully bought in. Dunkirk, however, remains my favorite of his filmography. It removes what I believe to be his usual pretense and fully focuses on what he’s great at – exploring how time is experienced. Centering the film on a single event and brilliantly cutting between the different temporal perspectives of said event allows Nolan to shine. And utilizing WWII as the backdrop, gives him the freedom to flex his big spectacle set piece muscles. I remember being blown away seeing this in theaters, and I remain absolutely delighted every time I decide to revisit at home.
–Raf Stitt
My father doesn’t watch a lot of movies, but when he does, he usually sticks to two genres: action and biographical (with Harry Potter being the odd exception to this rule). If there’s any fantasy or sci-fi involved, he’s out. So, that sort of rules out a lot of Nolan’s filmography (sorry, Batman). But in 2017, Nolan decided to give the world Dunkirk, a movie that both my father and I could enjoy. It’s still got everything you’d expect from Nolan (Michael Caine, playing with the concept of time), but it’s grounded in reality and based on true events. After giving (or torturing) us with Tenet, Nolan returned to the “dad genre” with Oppenheimer, another biographical feature that my father enjoyed. So, thank you, Nolan, for making a couple of movies that my father could enjoy, so he could experience how damn fine of a director you truly are.
–Marmaduke Karlston
I’m not a Nolan fanboy. People get very excited when a new Nolan movie is announced. If I’m being honest, the more movies he makes, the less interested I am in seeing them. Inception left me feeling cold and disconnected from what was happening on screen despite the interesting concept. Interstellar seemed to be Nolan’s attempt at making a film with some warmth and humanity, but the result felt more like emotional manipulation and melodrama. I finally saw Tenet for the first time a year ago, and I can’t remember much about it. The plot, like so many other Nolan films, was convoluted, and I never felt any connection to the characters. I never finished Oppenheimer, finding it to be a gigantic bore.
Despite this list of misses and near misses, there is one film of Nolan’s from the last decade or so that found its mark for me: Dunkirk.
The World War II Movie That’s Not a World War II Movie
I went through a WWII phase. I guess Saving Private Ryan kicked it off, and then Band of Brothers solidified my interest (just finished a rewatch of the latter, actually). So when I heard Christopher Nolan was making a WWII movie, my interest was piqued. After seeing the first trailer, I was in.
So my dad (who is also a WWII buff), my son, and I got our tickets, and went to see Dunkirk opening week. Let’s just say, coming out of the theater, our experiences were quite different. My dad sees more movies than me, and in some ways is the more open minded of us when it comes to film. But, being a WWII buff, he was expecting something more mainstream. A more overt war movie. So as we walked out of the theater, his impressions of the film were more of disappointment and confusion. It simply wasn’t what he expected.
Now there’s been a lot of talk about movies subverting audience expectations over the last few years, and I’m generally not a fan of this as it often seems to be used for its own sake rather than toward some end that serves the story or characters. Dunkirk is not a World War II movie. It’s set during WWII, sure. But the broader conflict isn’t the focus. The implications of the Brits’ failure to evacuate Dunkirk is alluded to, but that’s really the only time the film pulls back from its focus to look at events beyond the evacuation of Dunkirk.
When I think back on it, I probably should have walked out of Dunkirk feeling similarly to how my dad felt about the movie. But I felt the opposite. Where he felt disappointment, I felt like I’d just seen something truly different and memorable. As I sat down to write this article, I popped the Bluray into the player and let it play while I wrote just to re-familiarize myself with it. I had to turn it off, because I was so drawn in that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen to write.
From the opening images of the British soldiers walking down the streets of Dunkirk, to the eerie, preternatural score, and the dearth of spoken dialogue–Dunkirk is the kind of movie that sweeps me off my feet and transports me to where the characters are. Their anxiety is my anxiety. Their fears, their hopes, mine. It’s the kind of movie that insists on itself, and it all works so well that in the end, I didn’t care that Germans are never mentioned, basically never shown, and only referred to as the “enemy”. I didn’t care that it wasn’t a traditional war movie.
Finally, Some Humanity
I have trouble connecting to Nolan’s movies. I think his focus on clever plots distracts him from creating characters that I can relate to. I love plot. And I love clever plots. But great plot doesn’t make for great movies on its own. Dunkirk tells its story out of sequence, but the plot is not complicated. Some men need to get off the beach in France and back to Britain or they will be annihilated by the German army. It’s really that simple. Hell, it may be Nolan’s most straightforward story. And it may also be his most human story, which is kind of odd, because it’s not like Dunkirk spends a ton of time with each of the characters, letting you get to know all about them throughout the course of the movie. In fact, the opposite is true. By the end of the film, we know very little at all about most of these characters. Some of them aren’t even named.
And yet, somehow Nolan manages to humanize these characters in ways that he honestly just fails to do in his other films. Despite the little dialogue, the performances given by these actors–the pain and suffering, desperation and hope they feel comes through so clearly. Though we know very little about these characters’ personal histories, we feel like we know what they have gone through, because Nolan’s skillful direction here forces us to go through it with them. Dunkirk is an emotionally draining film for this reason. It tees you up on the edge of your seat from the beginning, and never lets up to give you a chance to relax and get your breath. The best films transport us, make us feel what the characters feel, show us perspectives we might otherwise never have seen. Dunkirk is one such film, and that’s why it makes our Canon.
