Dunkirk (2017)

Writer/Director: Christopher Nolan

Oh. My. God. My mouth was left open gasping for air after the tension in this film. Whereas most films start at 0 and get up to 100, this starts at 100 and rises to 1000 very quickly. Every cut to the Spitfires. Every tick of the clock in the score. Every time a character looks up at the sky in fear, you too are in fear. All components of this film serve a purpose: to grab you by the throat and squeeze harder, and boy does it pay off. If you wish to see a run-of-the-mill war film, don't. Watch this instead. Not a drop of blood is spilled. No wasted exposition from the characters about their women back home or the morality of war is spoken. Everything is told through their faces, their reactions, their emotions. Modern cinema is so hell-bent on filling us with dialogue and loud Michael Bayesque explosion porn that this film is a necessity just for being different. I saw this in 70mm, and I've never understood more than now why film is so much better than digital. At the beginning, when Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) is running through the streets of Dunkirk, and bullets are being fired at him left, right and centre, you feel like the bullets are being fired at you too. This is immersive cinema at its finest. Christopher Nolan himself said that this film is like "virtual reality without the goggles". It puts you on the beach, on the boats, into the Spitfires. Rarely does a war film do that for its entire run-time. That alone is worth seeing.

The film starts, as I mentioned previously, with Tommy running through the streets of Dunkirk, escaping German gunfire from all angles. He arrives at the beach, and from there the film's experimental narrative kicks in. We switch between Farrier (Tom Hardy) and Collins (Jack Lowden) in the Spitfires, Tommy and Alex (Harry Styles) on the beach, Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance), George (Barry Keoghan), Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Shivering Soldier (Cillian Murphy) on the civilian boats, and Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh) and Colonel Winnant (James D'Arcy) on the makeshift pier. The narrative ebbs and flows and bends the common time structure seen in films. We see the Spitfires fight the German planes. We see the soldiers fight for their return home on the beaches. We see the civilians sail off into war. We see the commanding officers try to make sense of evacuating roughly 340,000 men while the German army closes in on them.

This is where the music is vital. The ticking clock slowly crescendos and/or gets quicker throughout the whole film. These soldiers are desperate for more time as it seems to run out faster than possible. For the most part, the score is there, ticking away. But when it disappears, pure silence. These moments seem like respite not just for the characters, but for us too. This film is emotionally jarring, and Hans Zimmer's tense score serves this purpose perfectly. Never has he done a better score for a film. For Hoyte Van Hoytema, it could have been too easy to simply shoot the film and then degrade the colours to make it seem bleak for the characters, but instead he lets the camera run after the soldiers, float along with the boatmen and twist and turn with the pilots. In real life, colours aren't degraded, so why would they do it here? The cinematography for the whole part is brilliant, but towards the end, when the sun comes out, it is stunning. The shots of Farrier being captured by Germans are beautiful, even though for the character, death is imminent. All the actors are brilliant, too. It's always harder to act with no dialogue, but everyone does it very well (yes, that includes Harry Styles).

Now for Christopher Nolan. Call him pretentious. Call him a Luddite, but there's a method to his madness. Instead of using CGI, he brought in real vessels, some of which were used in the actual evacuation. He brought in real Spitfires. He brought in cardboard pop-ups of soldiers instead of CGIing them in. Why? It serves two purposes. It gives the actors a sense of what they're doing, and therefore their performances can be truer and more credible. The other aspect is the immersive cinema I mentioned earlier. So goes the phrase "there's nothing like the real thing". That couldn't apply more here. Sure, he could have CGIed the boats and planes, but that looks fake. And in a film that you intend to shoot purely on film and project on film, it must be better to have the real ships and planes. The purpose is to put us on the beaches, and after seeing this film I feel like I lived through Dunkirk. For a film, there's no higher compliment. The only complaint I have is that the film isnt as rewatxhable the second time around. It seems on its historical basis and tension, and tension is harder to recreate on a repeated viewing. That being said, I'm nit-picking. This still is the film of the year. Ten out of ten for me.