Review: Dunkirk

Simplicity is often the most difficult achievement. There's nowhere to hide - every element must be unimpeachable. Christopher Nolan achieves a stunning simplicity with Dunkirk, which will surely rank as one of the greatest war films ever made.

A war film in which the enemy is never seen and where barely a drop of blood is shed, Dunkirk focuses on the large-scale evacuations of 400,000 Allied troops stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk during the second World War. "Survival is victory" goes the film's tagline and, indeed, surviving the circumstances in which safety is never guaranteed is achieving a mission impossible. Twenty-six miles away from home - so close they can practically see England and yet so far as they are under constant attack by German dive bombers - the soldiers' rescue is a seemingly hopeless situation in which Nolan finds his focal point, trifurcating his non-linear narrative between air, land and sea.

In the air are Farrier (Tom Hardy) and Collins (Jack Lowden), Spitfire pilots determined to protect the rescue vessels from enemy attack. Land is the small town in which young British private Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) is seen surviving enemy gunfire before running out on the beach where thousands of soldiers are painfully and nakedly exposed as they queue to board one of the rescue ships. Much of the ensuing action is positively Sisyphean - soldiers get on one ship only for it to be bombed, they get on another only for it to bring them back to the beach, they find another only to find it being used as target practice by the enemy, and so on and so on. It's both gut-wrenching and heartbreaking to watch scenes such as a rescue ship filled to the brim with the wounded slowly sinking into the water, or soldiers burning in the water as the spilled oil from the ships are set on fire, or Collins trapped in his plane as water slowly seeps in.

Nolan weaves the separate narratives - Mark Rylance's calm determination anchors the third as one of the many civilian sailors who sailed across the Channel to help with the rescue effort - in such a way that all seem to be happening at the same time when, in fact, they are occurring separately. The gambit equalises the experiences of the different figures involved - whether pilot or soldier or civilian, every single person fought the fight in their own way and suffered their own share of horrors. Nolan passes little judgment on his characters - he understands that the boys' desperation even when that desperation means taking on a British soldier's identity or pulling rank when it increases their chance for survival. Indeed, that empathy and the exclusive focus on the British perspective, specifically those who underwent the circumstances firsthand rather than Churchill (whose words are heard via an ordinary soldier), for example, that distinguishes Dunkirk from most war films.

Nolan distills the tale into one of the purest cinematic experiences in recent memory, stripping his narrative of as much context, back story, and dialogue as possible. Intensely visual, precisely executed, incredibly immersive, the film is arguably Nolan's masterwork, one that perfectly marries his often dueling emotional and intellectual halves into a magnificent and deeply moving work.

Dunkirk

Directed by: Christopher Nolan

Written by: Christopher Nolan

Starring: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, Aneurin Barnard, Harry Styles, James D'Arcy, Barry Keoghan, Jack Lowden, Tom Glynn-Carney