Life’s a Beach
There is an extrodinary feeling when you go to watch a Christopher Nolan film, I’ve never gone to see one without think that the film could end up being one of my favourite films. Nolan is extrodianry at storyteller and a lot of that comes from his spectacular visuals, he always puts in 110% and you see it. In his new film Dunkirk you can see that he has put in a lot of love and care into the emotionally charged film but at times he chooses to focus on one event rather than the characters that are there, a mistake found in The Dark Knight Rises where the destruction of Gotham is put to the forefront over Batman’s journey and resolution. In Dunkirk it is the characters that should have the emotion but instead they are just people who play a part in the event and that is either good or bad. I’m not sure.
Dunkirk is a film about the evacuation of Dunkirk where British forces were stuck on the beach in France surrounded by the Nazi army. The British came up with a plan to bring it’s soldiers, and those of France and other countries, back to the UK to regroup so they may fight another day. Overall there were around 400,000 soldiers stuck on the beach waiting to get back home. The film is split up into three parts that happen all at once, the land, the sea and the sky; The land follows a british soldier as he tries to get on a boat home, the sea follows an everyday sailor in his own boat going to pick up soldiers from Dunkirk, the sky follows an RAF pilot who is tasked woth defending the channel and the boats trying to get across.
The split up of the three main story pieces are all set during clear timeframes, the land is one week, the sea is one day and the sky is one hour. This split up allows the film to converge at one point but only after the events all catch up too each other. This creates the tension in the film as you don’t know when each part is taking place or if someone is going to save someone else, all you know is that these three events are all happening in this horrific scenario. It is both a positive and negative for the film as the film itself isn’t very long, one hour and forty seven minutes. The positive side is that it allows the film to surprise you in what is happening when but the negative means that the jumping back and forth between each one doesn’t allow you to get to know the characters that much. You don’t get to learn their backstories or really what they’re thinking except for their sense of urgency in escaping or saving. The time jumps also means there are moments in the film where time has jumped completely for some characters and it isn’t explained later on what happened, how it happened or why.
The confusion between all of this can easily be explain though, I think. The film does a good job at portraying how many different small moments are happening at once in a plan/situation like Dunkirk. The sound of the ticking clock in the score only telling you that all three of the events in the film have to line up together at the precise moment for the British army to be successful with their evacuation. It just would’ve been nice for both a bit of character development and also more of a sense of urgency. The scale of the war itself isn’t huge, this might be because the actual events of Dunkirk happened over a few weeks and not just the one week so we get the end of it all where it’s the last struggle to get home. The film is brutal in its killings and damage done and you fear greatly for the soldiers’ lives but there never is anything big enough for you to think that they need to get out of there right away. Instead all you know is that they are evacuating and they are struggling to get out safely and you are told that the Germans are closing in on them but it isn’t shown. It would’ve been better had the land have more of getting to the beach instead of a week that jumps through a few days just to get to the conclusion of the film, the short runtime is used instead of building the suspense of whether the british soldiers are going to make it to the beach let alone actually making it home.
Despite all of what I just said, and I know it might seem like me complaining and giving Dunkirk it’s first low score, the film does what every Nolan film does and basically it mesmerizes you. The film is expertly made as if it were a silent film, gone are any useless lines of exposition and all that is kept is the raw feeling of what the feeling between the soldiers were at the time. The cinemaography is stunning and you get stunned when you’re watching and realising that the planes are being film for real as the IMAX cameras work their magic in making the shots look spectacular and unlike most films you’ve ever watched. The sound design feels deafeningly accurate as each gun shot chills you to the bone and rattles your eardums as you feel the weight of what the soldiers are running from placed upon you.
Dunkirk has that Nolan essence that all of his other films do, I feel like even if he made a bad film it’ll still be amazing to watch. Nolan captures this moment in time that wouldn’t normally be seen as a film, mainly because it doesn’t involve the US, and shows you the most accurate war film you’ve probably ever seen. Soldiers ducking for cover, jumping off sinking boats, running away from bombers, fighter pilots risking their lives to fly through the skies and protecting those below. Dunkirk has just about every that makes a great realistic war film, one that shows you how hard it was for those back then and why such a feat of achievement has helped shape the world today.
Dunkirk is an early contender for film of the year at the Oscars but it is also a film that I can see jsut missing out over one other film that did just one thing better. If Dunkirk were to have better characters then I would safely say that the film would easily be my pick for film of the year. Despite it’s lack of in depth characters, Dunkirk is still a moving and tense film that you should defintely see. The visuals, the sound and the events that happen during the course of the film are stunning and shocking. Nolan has taken this event and shown the audience the hardship and struggles that happened, he shows that the soldiers involved went through hell and that they were incredibly lucky to survive.
Nolan’s three story arch in the film can be lost at times but they represent the precision and fight that Great Britain had so well that you can forgive the film for it. Nolan has made another spectacular film and it is one that students will study in film school, historians will show to show the intensity of the event and one that would make the soldiers of Dunkirk and all those involved proud.