Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is great. It is well thought out and executed; it has genuine tension and excitement and looks seriously at the questions the evacuation of Dunkirk raises. It has a haunting, eerie, foreboding, tense soundtrack that also effectively uses silence and then the noise of war—bullets hitting, Stukas, explosions, the metal of ships; the soundtrack mimics or plays off all those sounds to great effect.

It isn’t just an ode to the brave civilians and soldiers who saved the United Kingdom to fight again, though it is that a little bit. It’s an ode that treats these heroes as human beings instead of abstractions.

Fans of other war movies might not enjoy this one because the soldiers we root for are so consistently helpless and humanly flawed. It is also not brimming with action, though the action scenes are excellent. In some ways it does not conform to expectations of a war movie—though its transgression may well be where its greatness lies.

The movie has a tricky time structure; three different stories of different lengths are woven into the movie’s ninety-six minutes. An RAF pilot’s (played by Tom Hardy) story is only an hour, while the story of the men on the beach spans a week. This is indicated in chyrons when the stories are introduced. The beach story begins a week earlier, and all three stories intersect at one point.

Once you’re given a better briefing than the preceding on the nature of time in the story, if is not difficult to follow, and the logic behind it is sound. However, I prefer not to have to attend a briefing before a movie begins, and when I first watched the movie, I was at times confused by the anachronies. I don’t want to be that guy, but I have a PhD. with a focus on narrative theory and can throw around terms like “anachrony,” and I was at times confused when I first saw the movie.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the movie the first time I watched it because it is visually stunning and the people on the screen are having experiences that are engaging and thought provoking, and they are almost constantly in real jeopardy. I can’t recall how many “main” characters die, but there is no bulletproof character you know for sure is going to make it. Everyone is in danger from German planes, artillery and even gunfire. And this danger is largely unseen and therefore more terrifying. You hear the shells coming; you hear them land. You hear the bullet hit and see a new hole and have no more information on the unseen enemy.

The movie’s color palette is gorgeous—it looks beautiful and real. When a ship is sinking, it doesn’t look like a model in a tank or a set that is being tilted (though I bet some sets were tilted). Nolan’s famous reliance on practical effects, or his fetish, whatever—he uses practical effects more than most big filmmakers of his era—gives the movie a consistent sense of realism that the 1958 version does not have.

Newer movies also don’t look as real. Pearl Harbor, for example, which has many excellent practical effects and very good digital effects, suffers from many of its digital effects being darker than the rest of the film, leaving the viewer thinking: “Those digital effects look pretty good,” instead of “that boat is sinking.” The 2019 version of Midway also leaves me thinking “That’s good CGI” and not “that’s an aircraft carrier.”

The movie blends the boredom and terror of war masterfully. The soldiers stand silently in line, and they look much like the soldiers in the 1958 Dunkirk. There is nothing to do but wait—until the Stukas come.

One of the ways this is unlike many other war movies is that no one is a hero, but everyone does something heroic. More precisely every character, except for maybe Kenneth Branagh’s, acts selfishly and unselfishly. They all make personal choices that ignore the greater good of their fellow countrymen and the war effort for personal reasons—either for self preservation or to fulfill a psychological need.

One character takes a wounded man onto a ship as a ruse to gain passage; after he is kicked off that ship he sneaks back on—cutting in line in front of thousands of other soldiers. But when that ship begins to sink, he doesn’t just jump clear; he risks his life to open a hatch, saving the lives of a number of men trapped below decks.

At one point Hardy’s character pursues a German fighter that is threatening him, instead of a bomber threatening a ship full of evacuees. All of his other actions during the movie are unselfishly heroic, but for this moment he protects himself and his plane at the high cost.

And this is the question the film and the evacuation of Dunkirk itself most directly address—what is the value of one life? What is the value of twenty? What is the value of a destroyer, which is apparently as helpless against German bombers as the men on the beach? Do we risk planes and ships to save men? What will win the war and therefore save the country? Can I sacrifice my life to help save others? At one point, Commander Bolton (Branagh) tells Army Colonel Winnant (James Darcy) he has to decide how many more wounded men to evacuate because “One stretcher takes the space of seven standing men.”

The movie looks at that question on the larger and on the intensely personal level. And each character answers that question—for himself. I don’t think there is a character who doesn’t risk his own life for someone else at some point, though many speak strongly and at times act in pure self interest.

It also has a Michael Caine cameo! Dunkirk is great, but it is still not my favorite Michael Caine World War II movie, but it is in the running for my favorite Caine/Nolan movie. Nolan claims it is his “most experimental film,” and maybe it is confusing structurally, but maybe we don’t care about its structure—maybe we just experience the stories without having to completely understand.

I wrote another big, long paragraph using narrative theory terms to explain the movie’s structure. It ended, “it is simpler to say that three stories are being shown, largely asynchronously, but it is simpler still to not worry about it because the movie just works.”

Recommendation

Buy this movie; obviously Steelbook is better because . . . it just is.

There’s a fancy limited edition with special features, if you like that sort of thing.

If you want to brush up on narrative theory, this is good place to start.