Dunkirk: We Shall Fight on the Loading Screens

Title: Dunkirk
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Screenplay by: Christopher Nolan

Finally watched this on my phone’s Netflix app, an experience which would have been improved if the screen didn’t keep going black every 30 seconds. Rewinding for 10 seconds seemed to fix the problem—for the next 30 seconds. Rewind. Repeat. 

So I can say I saw this movie the way Christopher Nolan intended: On a tiny screen, in 30 second installments.

Obviously, this made. Made the whole. Whole experience a. A little bit. Bit choppy to. To watch.

But you know, it was good, I liked it, and this is why I don’t write much about things I like: It’s easier for me to criticize than to praise, for what makes entertainment enjoyable to me seems to be essentially the same in every case, while there are half a million ways things can go wrong. Or else maybe it’s human nature never to be satisfied with the same thing twice, that we grow quickly bored of the good but clutch the memory of the bad to our breast like a talisman.

It may be that the concept of ‘Quality’ is inherently undefinable, that we first experience something subconsciously or instinctively as good or bad and only later rationalize why we felt so, in the way that people who know nothing about iambic pentameter can recognize something powerful in Shakespeare, or who know nothing of storytelling conventions or cinematography (Hello!) can feel the power of a Nolan movie.

Well, you’re not going to fool me this time, grey matter.

Might be this all lives in some pre-linguistic corner of our lizard brains. But let’s try to break it down, even if this amounts to nothing more than rationalization after the fact.

First thing that hits you, even squinting against my glowing five-incher (eyebrow waggle), is how ludicrously good-looking the movie is. Every line and detail is as crisp as Kenneth Branagh’s accent, perhaps thanks to the decision to shoot the movie in larger-than-usual 65mm film. The balletic aerial dogfights in particular amaze as steel angels dart among the cirrus skyscape. Bowler-hat shaped helmets off to cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema. 

Meanwhile, composer Hans Zimmer chips in by keeping both hands firmly down on the keys in the suspense synth soundtrack.

Plucky desperation has never looked or sounded so good.

That sense of being there is reinforced by the attention to detail. The whole thing just exudes authenticity from every square centimeter of celluloid. The movie was filmed on the beach of Dunkirk at around the same time as the real evacuation, using the actual boats that actually took part in the actual evacuation, actually. It’s that groundedness, I think, that urges you to trust that the movie knows what it’s doing, and opens you up to its message on the real qualities of heroism.

(No doubt some details were missed—the one thing I noticed was the Spitfires in the movie never seem to run out of bullets: Tom Hardy’s pilot shoots down about four or five planes, despite the Spitfire only having ammunition for 10-20 seconds of firing).

All of this in service of a war story that is not about a victory but an evacuation, the point being I think that for the average Tommy, GI, grunt or doughboy, ‘victory’ is not something you, personally, can aim to achieve. Rather, your goal is, first and foremost, not dying. Taking the hill or capturing the bunker or whatever comes second: can’t do any of that if you’re dead. 

So we get that truth distilled to its essence, with a group of soldiers whose only aim is to escape and survive, who fight against the specter of death rather than the enemy. Symbolically, we never see a German soldier at all until the last few seconds of the movie, and even they are blurry and out of focus.

It’s a Nolan movie so of course the plot isn’t as simple as the premise sounds, as we cut back and forth across three stories operating across three different timeframes: three soldiers (Fionn Whitehead, Aneurin Barnard and One Direction’s Harry Styles) wait for rescue and have a series of boats blow up from under them (this gets almost comical by the third time it happens), a father and his son (Mark Rylance and Tom Glynn-Carney) take their pleasure yacht across the channel to help rescue the soldiers, and three RAF pilots (Tom Hardy, Jack Lowden and the voice of Michael Caine) take part in a sortie to provide air cover for the evacuation. Kenneth Branagh and James D’Arcy as the British commanders provide a kind of play-by-play commentary through the whole thing.

I love this take on the traditional war movie, as a kind of embodiment of one of my favorite Word War 2 quotes, by American correspondent George Biddle: "I wish the people at home, instead of thinking of their boys in terms of football stars, would think of them in terms of miners trapped underground or suffocating to death in a tenth-story fire." It’s the answer to the mad, Rambo-fantasy of glorious war, our childish wish to be the hero.

There are heroes in Dunkirk, such as Mark Rylance’s yacht owner coming to the rescue, or Tom Hardy’s ace fighter pilot, but they’re grim men, doing a dirty job, and their only reward is the knowledge that they gave it their best.

I mentioned storytelling conventions earlier, and one interesting thing for me, unlearned amateur that I am, that I felt this movie doesn’t really follow the traditional three-act structure. There’s very little setup and zero backstory for any of our characters, acts one and two sort of slosh into one another without any clear twist as the trapped soldiers repeat the cycle of find ship-board ship-lose ship, and while the score treats the appearance of the civilian rescue boats off the beach as the climax, it’s a kind of diffuse one, spread across the three stories and happening at three different times.

But—again, for me at least—that kind of single, sustained note of suspense without letup works in the movie’s favor and supports the theme that the only thing that matters for these characters is returning to England.

Like I say, maybe our sense of Quality is something submerged beneath our intellect, just kind of bobbing to the surface from time to time. That sounds like a capitulation on the part of a writer and reviewer, doesn’t it, an admission that subjective experience is never going to be entirely explainable or applicable. Well, I write mainly for my own solipsistic, onanistic amusement, and if someone out there on the Internet enjoys it too, then so much the better.

Watch Dunkirk. It’s good, says my lizard brain. Sometimes, just making it, making it to the, the end is, is victory enough.