★★★★★
HAVING told the stories of memory-fading vengeance, brooding superheroism, magician one-upmanship and the interstellar meaning of love – to name but a few – writer-director Christopher Nolan turns his sights to the war epic. The result is an expertly crafted and unforgettable piece of bravura cinema.
In what feels like an opening statement of forceful intention, it begins with a bold and uncompromising bullet-torn escape through small French streets as soldier Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) makes his way desperately to rejoin the rest of the 400,000 men waiting on the beaches of Dunkirk for rescue after being forced back by the German army.
It’s May 1940 and the Allies are in trouble. Their hope lies in the promise of a fleet of Navy-led fishing boats making their way across the English Channel and Spitfire planes up above to take out enemy planes which see them as a giant target to be picked off.
Nolan’s impressively focused film takes a three-pronged approach to telling the tale of that most daunting Second World War event: on land over the course of a week, on the sea over the course of a day and in the air over the course of an hour, each of them interweaving with one another to tell the full story of what was not so much a victorious battle as a triumphant retreat.
It’s a sly approach which brings a fascinating, unpredictable dynamic to the drama and a great sense of emotional weight as the strands converge in the film’s climactic sequence.
Nolan chucks us head first into the horrifying, monumental fray and once again exhibits his talent for cinematic showmanship to create a truly enveloping, transportive experience that’s equal parts thrilling, terrifying and awe-inspiring to behold.
The horror of war unfolds in a combination of bracing intimacy and operatic grandness that in the moment makes you forget the truth of ultimate victory for the Allies in favour of sheer impending doom that all these men may be lost to conflict without triumph to swoop to the rescue.
One sequence involving the enemy dropping bombs on the beach as we watch in horror as bodies are strewn up in the air is particularly, viscerally effective at driving home the sheer reality of what happened there almost eight decades ago.
Its surprisingly short 106-minute runtime is strung together with expert precision, an almost unbearably tense sense of dreaded atmosphere and an auteur’s craft of cinema as an artform to convey a sense of daunting scale and the enormity of the situation.
In the end it’s a story about people, individuals and a collective, banding together to claw, swim and fly for survival – triumphant in spirit, determination and the inherent need to help their fellow man.
There’s Mark Rylance’s Mr Dawson, conveying a lot by saying very little as he captains his meagre fishing vessel towards the shores of Dunkirk in spite of the almost certain peril promised by a rescued, nameless shivering soldier (Cillian Murphy).
Then there’s Tom Hardy’s heroic pilot Farrier, perpetually masked as he soars and dives up ahead in exhilarating aerial dogfights. And Harry Styles makes an impression in his acting debut as Alex, one of the many soldiers bewildered by what’s happening to them.
On a technical level it’s an extraordinary piece of work, with Hoyte Van Hoytema’s captivating IMAX-focused cinematography, the exquisitely crafted sound design with the power to raise the hairs on the back of your neck – from the whistle of a dropping bomb to knife-edge silence – or Hans Zimmer’s foreboding, ticking clock of a score.
Nolan successfully conducts this symphony of elements to make for an unforgettably immersive cinematic experience.
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