The Best of Christopher Nolan — Vol 4.
Originally penned as another “instant reaction” piece and added to my career opus article on the magnificent films of Christopher Nolan linked at the bottom of this introductory paragraph, as you’ll read, I was rather excited to see his latest cinematic offering. Come on! It’d been a long three years since Interstellar! Added to this and again as you’ll read below, my son and I had seen the brief, incredibly loud if almost wordless trailer(s) over and over again at our local cinema and I simply couldn’t wait to see this.
What I omitted from my original review is that knowing thyself in retrospect I no doubt rumbled and rambled on and on to my early teenage son about the masterful way Nolan plays with time in every one of his films, and that time is a man made construct, memories can be an unreliable narrator and that he regularly challenges his audience to pay attention and, as he’d posit during his second great masterpiece The Prestige, “are you watching closely?”.
My son still tolerates my mad obsessional dives into certain film directors and suffice to say, Christopher Nolan is very definitely one of those. My opus blog article is one of my earliest and best, or my love-in appraisal of Dunkirk is directly below.
Christopher Nolan and his entire cinematic catalogue.
Following, Memento, Insomnia, The Dark Knight Batman trilogy, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenetmedium.com
“Men my age dictate this war”.
Please see above for my eagerness of release for Christopher Nolan’s latest masterpiece and Dunkirk is most certainly that. You won’t be surprised by now to learn that nearly all of Nolan’s central themes pervade this beautiful film, from memory and memories, perceived identity or tribe in this case, dealing with loss and particularly the central theme that runs through nearly all of his films: time. The elasticity of time. The un-realness of time. The manipulation of time. And here, after watching the seemingly same trailer over and over and over again with my teenage son on our Saturday trips to our local picture house, Dunkirk is fully realised on the big screen and what a timeless (pun intended) joy it is.
In essence: the film, and a running time of just 106 minutes, is split across three distinct, yet interweaving time(s) and narrative(s) entitled “1. THE MOLE (One Week)”, “2. THE SEA (One Day)” and “3. THE AIR (One Hour)”.
“The Mole” is by far the largest unravelling of the cast of characters here and as per the picture above it takes place primarily in the town of Dunkirk and the beachhead from which the thousands of British soldiers await their fate as they take cover from the strafing German aeroplanes, building portable ramps into the sea and trying to negate the vicious tides or simply awaiting a high tide to sweep their makeshift vessel out to sea. Vastly more incidents are thrust upon “Alex” (Harry Styles), “Gibson” (Aneurin Barnard) “French Soldier” (Damien Bonnard) “Tommy” (Fionn Whitehead) and all the way up the ranking order to an always perplexed looking Kenneth Branagh as “Commander Bolton” as everyone desperately awaits either their fate or an impossible mission, and their rescue via a huge flotilla of personal boats, ships and cruisers leaving England.
“The Sea” is by far my personal favourite of the interweaving timelines and despite their individual time durations (here it’s one day, it’s one week on the beach and just one hour in the air: see below) all are given room to breath and equal time to tell their share of the tale. As per the picture above, Mark Rylance is incredible as an English citizen simply setting sail for France in a perilous pursuit to aid the soldiers stranded on the beach and is ably supported in so many ways by his son “Peter Dawson” (Tom Glynn-Carney) and especially so a last minute stow-away “George Mills” (Barry Keoghan). Keoghan steals the show for me and with Mark Rylance excelling as per usual it’s brilliantly acted, portrayed and narratively wrapped together with the other two timelines.
“The Air”. Hardy dominates this timeline and he has to as it’s a virtual one man show as he dog fights with German aircraft over the air space of Dunkirk.
A final word on Dunkirk is it was well and truly worth the wait and my son and I were enraptured from first minute to last. I ventured to my local picture house twice more to see it on the big screen and have seen it 3/4 times now since and it remains a stunning achievement from Director Nolan. The film won 3 Oscars (deservedly for the claustrophobic sound editing in the hands of Richard King and Alex Gibson) and won a further 2 Oscars from 7 more nominations but the “big” ones in Directing/Score/Cinematography and of course Best Film didn’t go the way of this astonishing film.
Thanks for reading. Just for larks as always, and always a human reaction rather than spoilers galore. My three most recently published film articles are linked below or there’s well over 200 blog articles (with 400+ individual film reviews) within my archives from which to choose:
“Gone Girl” (2014)
The Best of David Fincher — Vol 4.medium.com
“Collateral” (2004)
The Best of Michael Mann — Vol 4.medium.com
“Amores Perros” (2000)
Love’s a bitch and never more heart breaking.medium.com