This is as much a panic attack as it is a movie. There’s not likely a horror film out this year that’s more frightening than writer/director Christopher Nolan’s take on the British army’s evacuation of the French coastal town of Dunkirk after they were overpowered by Axis forces in 1940. Nolan’s last two films each came within pissing distance of the three-hour mark, but here he strips everything down to raw bone (and a cool 106 minute run time). It’s a visceral, constantly moving tableau of punishingly loud sudden gun shots, rattling war planes, rushing water and the hopeless faces of a decimated battalion who aren’t sure yet if they feel lucky to still be alive.
Nolan stays in the trenches here. Every character on screen is in danger of getting his head shot off at any moment. There are no scenes of Churchill in conference with top military brass in London. We don’t see any friends or family back home. Also, the pace never slows down enough for anyone to tell us their backstory. There’s scarcely a breath of exposition. No one’s an action hero who’s got all the answers. We don’t even get a single glimpse of the enemy’s face. Sniper shots come from nowhere and we see approaching Luftwaffe war planes exactly as the British soldiers see them. From a cold distance.
The are so many smart things about this film. Among them is the way that, amid all of this chaos, Nolan slips in character turns that are quiet and subtle, communicated through faint gestures and things left unsaid (the scenes of a father and his two sons speeding in a motorboat across the English Channel toward danger, in answer to the government’s call for civilians to aid in the rescue effort are particularly strong with this). Meanwhile, the spotlight characters on the ground (Fionn Whitehead and Harry Styles, both inexperienced actors) are two young pencilnecks who have no idea what they’re doing anymore. We slip into their shoes instantly and we see what they see and smell the death around them. They’re not fascinating characters; they’re US. And that’s just as good.
Nolan achieves this by making sure that nothing that we see on screen ever takes us out of the moment. In other words, no CGI. Nolan is an analog purist in a digital world and it serves him well here. His most ambitious set pieces of sinking ships or the carpet-bombing of the beach are all done through practical effects, seamless even as shot in the clarity of 65mm IMAX. It’s one of the best uses of a Hollywood mega-budget in awhile.