Christopher Nolan is the filmmaker who made sweet narrative music out of a backwards murder mystery in 'Memento' (2000) and bizarrely and beautifully turned a bookcase into a cosmic conduit between an estranged father and daughter in 'Interstellar' (2014).
'Dunkirk' is, like all of Nolan’s films, great fun and it’s one of the zestiest suspense thrillers of the decade. Yet it succeeds because rather than simply entertain, Nolan immerses you in the terror, sacrifices, and betrayals that his characters endure.
Here you can read 5 reasons why Nolan's first war movie is one of the greatest of all time.
1. It reveals character through action
The characters of 'Dunkirk' don’t talk much, which makes them rarities in Nolan land. But the heroes of the movie don’t have time for delicate verbal tête-à-têtes; that kind of thing is a luxury when you’re stranded on a beach in northern France, vulnerable to bombings while you wait to be picked up.
You might think that without his famously baroque dialogue, Nolan would about as useful as Batman without a grappling hook. Yet in 'Dunkirk', he proves himself so shrewd an observer of human behavior that the idea of a wordier version of the film seems superfluous and pointless.
2. It’s a profound suspense thriller
Nolan made clear in an interview that there was a particular film that he wanted it to be different from 'Saving Private Ryan (1998). While he praised Steven Spielberg’s amazing film, he added that 'it has the language of horror and you take your eyes off the screen…we realized what we want is suspense, we want a film that you can’t take your eyes off and just pull you in, keep you there the whole time.'
Mission accomplished! 'Dunkirk' successfully sucks you into a whirlpool of tension because Nolan uses suspense not only to create an addictively entertaining experience, but to draw us close to the characters. Suspense, after all, is the language of feeling, and by forcing us to feel the desperation of the characters, Nolan offers us a deep appreciation.
3. It uses sounds and images to transport you to another time and place
While the war for the best sound editing Oscar promises to be brutal next year, 'Dunkirk' arguably has the year’s single best sound effect: the sharp but soft noise of a soldier setting his helmet down on the ground so he can take a drink from a hose. It’s just one of many ways that Nolan, who shot the movie on large-format film, uses his discerning eyes and ears to immerse us in another era.
'Dunkirk' also deploys subtler transportive tricks, like when cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema brings the camera so close to an airplane that you feel as if you can make every detail of its outer shell.
4. It shows how war affects its characters emotionally
It is the duty of every war movie director to at least try to avoid glamorizing their subject matter. Happily, Nolan succeeds in that venture, mainly because there isn’t a propagandistic bone in his trench coat-covered body. You get that the moment we see the haunted, quite still faces of soldiers who have left the beach behind.
It’s a chilling performance, and it only gets more unnerving when the soldier panics violently and mortally wounds George in the process. That makes George the only major character in the film to die, and the fact that he’s killed not by the enemy, but inadvertently by a traumatized ally, offers a clear declaration of who the villain of 'Dunkirk' is not the Germans, but the war itself.
5. It values sacrifice as much as victory
The movie still inspires because of Nolan’s apparent conviction that Dunkirk spirit came not only from people who strove for victory, but from people who were willing to help others in the midst of a seemingly impossible situation.
We see the result of that kind of dedication after Farrier lands and we get a glimpse of his face free of his pilot’s mask. And while you might expect to see his visage clouded by terror, he looks calm as he watches the flames dance across his Spitfire. After all, he did what he had to do, and in this era of rampant violence, we’ll probably all have to make sacrifices of our own if we don’t want the bravery of men like him to have been for nothing.