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'Dunkirk': Christopher Nolan's Latest Tour de Force

An Extensive and Overdue Review

By Marina Caitlin WattsPublished 7 years ago 9 min read
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Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

July 21 saw the premiere of Christopher Nolan's latest film.Dunkirk is the blockbuster hit we've been waiting for all summer, as it tells the story of the bravery and resilience of a little-known battle in France. The battle between the Allies and Nazi Germany took place in May and June of 1940.

Dunkirk has impressed critics throughout the film community, as the movie is already considered a potential top Oscar candidate. It is the first film the director has made that is based on actual events in history.

It is also the shortest Christopher Nolan film in decades. It has little dialogue, which the action and grandeur of visuals make up for, and weaves together three stories for the ultimate World War II film.

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

The film stars Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, Harry Styles, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Aneurin Barnard, Fionn Whitehead, Barry Keoghan, and Damien Bonnard.

Many people were shocked to find Harry Styles trying a hand at acting. The former frontman of One Direction, Nolan compares the casting of Harry Styles to that of Heath Ledger when he was planning The Dark Knight. He did so because people underestimated both Styles and Ledger in these particular roles. "I auditioned literally thousands of young men with different combinations of young men," said Nolan. "And he had it."

When casting the film, Nolan wanted to focus on how young and inexperienced the young men sent out to war were, hence him casting unknown, young actors for the beach sequences.

Tom Hardy (who might I add was top-billed of Dunkirk's cast) carries on the trend of covering 80 percent of his face in movies as well. Nolan said, "Of course Tom, being Tom, what he does with single eye acting is far beyond what anyone else can do with their whole body, that is just the unique talent of the man, he's extraordinary."

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

The film was written from three perspectives—the land covering one week, at sea covering one day, and one in the air covering one hour—to tell the three stories as they intertwine with each other. There is very little dialogue; Tom Hardy barely has 10 lines of dialogue.

This vignetted narrative structure confused on different temporalities, according to Nolan: "On land, some stayed one week stuck on the beach. On the water, the events lasted a maximum day; and if you were flying to Dunkirk, the British spitfires would carry an hour of fuel. To mingle these different versions of history, one had to mix the temporal strata. Hence the complicated structure; even if the story is very simple. Do not repeat it to the studio: it will be my most experimental film."

Viewers get three different perspectives on the frenzy that was the battle of Dunkirk, and experience the stresses with the characters onscreen, as the clock (literally) ticks by.

The title of the film "Dunkirk" itself is divided into three segmented colors: sky blue, dark blue, and orange, referring to the triptych plot of air, sea, and land.

It's all about those details in this 76-page long script! Nolan originally wanted there to be no script for the film and have the entire thing improvised. Due to the grand scale of materials needed, there was no way that this was plausible in the time and resources he had.

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Until 1942's Fall of Singapore, the battle at Dunkirk was viewed as the worst defeat in England's military history.

Winston Churchill became the Prime Minister of England only two weeks before the battle. In a matter of nine days, 338,226 men escaped, including 139,997 French, Polish, and Belgian troops, together with a small number of Dutch soldiers, aboard 861 vessels (of which 243 were sunk during the operation). The story we see unfold on the silver screen is incredible, as Nolan brings to life a war epic of, well, epic proportions.

Nate Jones of Vulture sums up the battle pretty well: "England and France were officially at war with Germany after the invasion of Poland in 1939, but there was a period of about eight months where nothing really happened. The Allies assumed the Germans would attack through Belgium like they did in WWI, but when they actually invaded in May 1940, most of their forces came through the rugged territory in the south — which meant that, when the Germans broke through, the British and French armies up around Belgium were suddenly surrounded. It seemed like they were going to be wiped out entirely, but crucially, the Germans slowed down at the last minute, giving the Allies enough time to evacuate thousands of men through the port town of Dunkirk."

In regards to the battle of Dunkirk's importance, director Christopher Nolan stated, "This is an essential moment in the history of the Second World War. If this evacuation had not been a success, Great Britain would have been obliged to capitulate. And the whole world would have been lost, or would have known a different fate: the Germans would undoubtedly have conquered Europe, the U.S. would not have returned to war. It is a true point of rupture in war and in history of the world. A decisive moment. And the success of the evacuation allowed Churchill to impose the idea of a moral victory, which allowed him to galvanize his troops like civilians and to impose a spirit of resistance while the logic of this sequence should have been that of surrender. Militarily, it is a defeat; on the human plane, it is a colossal victory."

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

As far as details and historical accuracy goes, Nolan was very meticulous. Anachronisms were minimized, as Nolan's goal was to make the film an experience for viewers where they felt as anonymous as some of the characters in the film did.

Nolan was very thorough in making sure he created the appropriate feel for the film. He, along with his wife Emma Thomas and a friend made the crossing from England to Dunkirk on a boat, exactly how the civilians would have done during the Dunkirk Evacuation. Nolan said it took 19 hours because of the conditions of the sea, and used his experience to capture that in film.

“It’s one of the great human stories, and it’s one of the most suspenseful situations that I had ever heard of in my life,” Nolan told Fandango in the very first extensive interview he’s given about the film. “You have 400,000 men — the entire British army — trapped on the beach at Dunkirk. Their backs to the sea, home is only 26 miles away and it’s impossible to get to. The enemy is closing in, and there’s a choice between annihilation and surrender. I just think it’s the more extraordinarily suspenseful situation. That, I think, speaks to a lot of things that I am interested in with film.”

Hans Zimmer teamed up with Nolan once more in working on the score for this film. The ticking heard in the background is that of Nolan's pocket watch. He put the sound effect though synthesizers and edited it for the film to give it that truly creepy vibe.

A very interesting detail about the soundtrack's clock is that it doesn't stop ticking during the whole movie, until Alex and Tommy are safe on the train.

Kenneth Branagh had the honor of talking to World War II veterans who had seen the film, and they were amazed with the adaptation. When he asked what they thought of the film, they responded "The film was louder than the battle!" (They heard it was good, but not THAT good).

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

It was released in 70 mm in 125 theatres, making it the widest release in that format in 25 years. You can check it out in this format in IMAX, and here the whirring of the film, which only intensifies the film more with Nolan's pocketwatch faintly heard as well. He wanted to focus on the very real aspects of the battle of Dunkirk and capture the emotions that those involved were feeling. Nolan placed cameras in the cockpit and floating in the water with the actors.

The movie used over fifty boats in the sea during production, which is the most that has ever been used, making it the largest marine production in film history.

In order to create the immense crowd scenes shot, Nolan checked out the silent movies Greed, Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages, and Sunrise as inspiration. "I spent a lot of time reviewing the silent films for crowd scenes — the way extras move, evolve, how the space is staged and how the cameras capture it, the views used," Nolan said. He also studied A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, Saving Private Ryan, and The Wages of Fear to dissect the process of creating suspense through details. The crowd scenes were also emphasized due to the minimal dialogue to take away from these sequences in the film.

Nolan also used huge number of cardboard cut outs of soldiers along with 1000 extras in order to create the illusion of a huge number of men during the evacuation. This recreated the immensity of the situation.

The French city of Dunkirk wanted parts of the movie to be filmed in the original Dunkirk. As a consequence, the City Hall created a cinema department to promote and organize filming in the city. They achieved getting 207 days of filming in the first 18 months from different projects.

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

The entire film was made to encompass the snowball effect that had only been used in the third acts of Nolan's previous films. According to him, through application of the snowball effect, he stripped the film of conventional theatrics to make the entire film to be more than the sum of its parts.

Overall, Dunkirk is a visual masterpiece, capturing the immense undertaking of rescuing hundreds of men. Not even out for a month, the film as grossed over $300 million, and is already being compared to other World War II epics. Some are even saying that it's his best film to date.

"The Dunkirk Spirit" has remained a touchstone in British culture since World War II, and Christopher Nolan handles this retelling with great attention to detail, reflecting on the great strength that was Dunkirk.

"Never say die, never surrender."

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About the Creator

Marina Caitlin Watts

Marina loves Frank Sinatra and hates decaf coffee. The native New Yorker and Cornell grad knows every word to "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and thinks Shakespeare is cool. If you need her, she's waiting for Godot. Twitter: @marina_caitlin

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