[Movie] Dunkirk

To me, Dunkirk feels really different from a lot of Christopher Nolan’s other movies. The plot and characters are basically incidental to how the film feels, the look and sound of it. The dialogue is almost nonexistent; I think if Nolan could have gotten the feeling he wanted without anyone ever speaking a word, he would have. The soundtrack’s pretty simple; there’s always a background ticking, as if a clock, that progressively speeds up as the movie continues on. The film’s made of three timelines that slowly collapse down to a single point. There are a lot of moments that have a lot of layers to them where the it feels like Nolan’s trusting the audience to pick things up.

Let me explain what I mean, here. The best examples of this are toward the end of the film, where the older men (Mark Rylence as Mr. Dawson and John Nolan as “Blind Man”) interact with the surviving younger soldiers. Mr. Dawson makes the understated point that first, they’ve got a job to do and they’re going to do it, and second, getting people out alive is sometimes the best you can hope for. The blind man at the end, giving blankets to the soldiers, has this interaction: (Might not be quite verbatim)

Blind man: You did good work.

Soldier: All we did is survive.

Blind man: That’s enough.

And then later one soldier comments to another that the old man wouldn’t look them in the eye, obviously projecting his own shame at the retreat onto him. What struck me about that in particular were that Nolan trusted the audience to have gotten that point without needing one of the characters to argue with him—and that both the old men were by grace of their age people who had lived through World War I. It’s another thing the film didn’t feel the need to state, but it’s powerful once you realize it.

There’s a lot of understated, chewy, emotional stuff in there that makes the movie feel more like a poem than a story. It’s different, and interesting, and very powerful at moments.

Which is what makes the last five minutes or so downright bizarre. Here, this bit is a spoiler, so highlight it if you want to read: [SPOILER] Tom Hardy’s pilot character runs out of fuel, and then while gliding, succeeds in shooting down a German fighter before it can kill the Admiral played by Kenneth Branagh, take a victory lap over the beach while soldiers cheer for him, manually put down his landing gear, land perfectly behind enemy lines, and then stand there like a badass while his plane (which he’s set on fire) burn and the German soldiers come to capture him. All intercut with one of the soldiers reading lines from Churchill’s famous “We shall fight on the beaches” speech.[/SPOILER]

After the rest of the movie, that seemed… shockingly bombastic. Tonally discordant. There’s also a bit where you can really tell one of the planes is CGI and it looks remarkably terrible.

There are some other issues I take with the film. I think during the entire time, I saw one non-white soldier, a black man among the French troops. I point this out as an issue, because not all of the British and French troops at Dunkirk were white—here’s a great Twitter thread about it, and a good NYT article. In a movie where the visuals were everything, this is perhaps even more important, because the simple existence of non-white soldiers or crews on the small boats, however briefly seen, would have been striking. This becomes a problem because Chris Nolan (rightly or wrongly) has a reputation for his movies being as accurate as possible (think about the “they made new science to simulate the black hole in Interstellar” thing), with attention to detail. Some people are going to come out of Dunkirk thinking it’s a good representation of that piece of history. (And the history book written to accompany it apparently makes not effort to correct this.) It encourages the continued belief that people of color simply didn’t exist in massive events they took part in.

On a slightly sillier level, it also honestly confused me after a while, because pretty much all of the actors who played soldiers look exactly the same. They were all thin white guys with dark brown hair in the same haircuts. Most are not given names. I’m guessing this is a statement about the interchangeability of the soldiers… but there were times in the film where we did need to be able to tell them apart, at least a little. When they were shouting at each other and one was getting threatened and so on. When Cillian Murphy showed up, it really distracted me from what was going on because I couldn’t figure out if I’d missed the bit of the story that told me how he got where Mr. Dawson found him, or what was even happening.

All in all, I think it’s a movie that’s really worth seeing, because it’s grim and beautiful in how it visually addresses the ideas of cowardice and bravery and hopelessness and their relationship to survival. Just don’t go in expecting gripping characters or snappy dialogue or a challenging plot. That’s not the kind of film it is.