Dunkirk Summary & Review
In times of great war disasters, the military will do anything to help their troops. They want to make sure that everyone fighting for them gets home safely. They would even go so far as to recruit people outside the army to help. In times like this, it’s expected that everyone help in some form or another. One of the greatest examples of this is the Dunkirk evacuation during World War II. This event is the subject of Christopher Nolan’s newest film, Dunkirk.
When the German forces cornered the British and French armies, the soldiers found themselves trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk. All attempts to evacuate them had been thwarted by Germany. With things looking bleak for the soldiers, the officers were doing everything they could to get them home successfully. This movie covers the famous event from three different perspectives: the land, the sea, and the air.
Though I am not always the biggest fan of war movies, Dunkirk is not like all the others. It is something extremely special and masterful. Christopher Nolan has crafted the best war movie that I have ever seen. I can’t think of another film like this that had me feeling as excited as I was. He managed to make a movie that would have gotten lost in genre clichés in the hands of anyone else.
First off, I loved the performances. The cast consisted of Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, and many others. Everyone, big name and not, gave fantastic performances. Everyone acted as if they had come from an actual war. They really captured how a person really would be after fighting in a gruesome, horrifying war.
As with Nolan’s other films, the visual effects were fantastic. I know a lot of movies have great visuals, but there’s something about Nolan’s visuals that feel different. They look like they have a purpose rather than being put in there just for the sake of being flashy. I also loved the fact that Nolan use real fighter planes and boats that were present in the evacuation. It felt like he really wanted to respect the event.
At this point, Christopher Nolan’s movies are films that you have to see in IMAX. He knows how to use IMAX technology to his advantage. The way the sounds and visuals were edited made you feel like you were really there. I came out of this movie thinking I was present for the actual evacuation, and I had experienced what the characters did on screen.
I also loved the film’s use of little dialogue. While there was some dialogue here and there, the film isn’t driven by conversations between the characters. It was all told through the actions of the soldiers on the beach, the civilians on the sea, and the pilots in the air. The film masterfully tells the story without creating clichéd drama between certain characters. It just feels like your watching a documentation of what really happened.
The same goes for the narrative of the film. The movie doesn’t follow any stories between the characters. The only story it follows is what everyone involved in the evacuation was doing at that very moment. This felt very original compared to most war films, which usually tell the stories of one person and the extraordinary thing they did. The only character followed through this movie was the event itself.
Dunkirk proves that Christopher Nolan is worthy of being one of the best filmmakers working today. He knows how to make a studio film and make it feel like an independent art film. Not many filmmakers today know how to do that. They only know to make one or the other. I can’t wait to see what Nolan will do next, because this movie pretty much proved it will be great.
