This review is written by Tom Bonnington, a member of the Casemate UK team.
Dunkirk is very much a technical exercise from director Christoper Nolan. Though the 1940 event was essentially the concluding chapter in one of the darkest moments of Europe’s history, its memory for Brits is a proud one; that despite it looking as if we would lose 300,000 soldiers, we rescued them due to the plucky courage of the thousands of sailors who offered to travel to France. But any sense of patriotism is missing from Nolan’s film, and is replaced by the fear, paranoia and hopelessness which must have existed for the soldiers on that beach.
There are a few strange elements to Dunkirk. The dialogue is sparse, so much so that it becomes a bit ridiculous. There seems to be a trend in some filmmakers to have characters not react to a question except with a look, which never really happens in real life so I don’t quite understand why it happens in films. The character who speaks the most is probably Harry Styles’ whose performance was competent enough to make you sometimes forget he’s a pop star.
Nolan, with his quiet characters, seems to want the audience to focus on the sounds. The score is magnificent and deserves an Oscar. It reminds me of Jonny Greenwood’s recent work on Paul Thomas Anderson films – plucky, uncomfortable, jarring yet hypnotic somehow. The sound design too is terrific. Nothing sounds smooth; everything is sudden and uncomfortable. The engines of the planes all splutter and groan and deafen those they fly over, as if it is a monotonous shriek rather like the air raid warnings those on the mainland would soon be getting used to.
In many ways, Dunkirk doesn’t feel like a war film. It seems more sinister. I think this is because the viewer never actually sees the face of a German. They see the planes yo-yoing out of Tom Hardy’s viewfinder, you hear their guns, you see their torpedoes travel through the water but that’s the closest you get really. No German is spoken, in fact the Germans are barely even mentioned. The enemy feels more existential. Even when some soldiers are trapped in a fishing boat with the Germans outside, all we see are the bullet holes zip into the hull, as though they’re playing a game with them. It gives the film that unique feeling to it which you don’t really get from other war films. There is barely a plot here, and no rounded characters, and at times it feels closer to Dante than Dunkirk, but I think this makes it a really unusual and suspenseful war film.
It is also significant that the film has been rated a 12A. Though war is bloody and I imagine the soldiers swore a little more than they do here, it seems there is a concerted effort on the part of Nolan to encourage a younger audience to watch this. Dunkirk is imprinted into the British consciousness in a way that few other events can match, yet many don’t know the first thing about it. This will show them what it was like to compete in a dogfight, to risk drowning after your boat sinks in the channel, and to stand idly on a beach while bombs rain down from above, praying that one won’t hit you. The violence and danger here feels real and raw, as of course it was during that crucial week in 1940.
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