大象传媒

In the summer of 1940, 400,000 allied soldiers were trapped on Dunkirk beach, penned in by the German army. With larger ships unable to come safely to shore, a fleet of civilian boats were conscripted by the British government to travel across the English channel to save as many men as possible. Tom Hardy plays a spitfire pilot, Harry Styles – yes, that one – a soldier on the shore, a soldier lost at sea, Kenneth Branagh the highest ranking officer at Dunkirk. Directing them all is Christopher Nolan, who previously gave us Memento, The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar and many more.

Pros:

1. Dunkirk is not a film, it’s a very tense, very traumatic, devastatingly effective two-hour experience, stunningly realised by Christopher Nolan. There isn’t a traditional plot, per se, and there are no star turns. It’s the story of some of the most harrowing moments in the Second World War, shown from the air, from the sea, from the land. For me, it’s the closest I could possibly imagine to actually being there. If I can make one thing clear, it’s this: see Dunkirk on the biggest screen possible, and in a CINEMA. Do no wait until Blu-ray or streaming for this one.
2. Hans Zimmer’s score is a masterclass in making everything tense. Fist-clenchingly, teeth-gnashingly, chair-grabbingly tense. His rachetty tick-tick-tick-heartbeat-heartbeat-heartbeat accompaniment makes every scene anxiety-inducing (in the best possible way), from something as simple as putting lifejackets on a boat to the horror of diving away as a bomb crunches into the sand. You’ll leave exhausted, and exhilarated.
3. The camerawork, and the editing, is sensational. In crafting this unique epic – that somehow manages to be colossally grand and uncomfortably close at the same time – Nolan has pulled off some incredible technical feats, including using IMAX cameras in a way they’ve never been used before. Put it this way: they had to put an IMAX camera both inside and on the outside of an actual Spitfire.

Cons:

1. Nolan’s films are known for being quite chilly and distant, and Dunkirk is no exception. You don’t have time to properly love the characters you’re spending snippets of time with, so if you’re looking for some old-fashioned Hollywood emotional manipulation, Dunkirk doesn’t deliver that. You care about who’s on screen because they’re human, and you’re human, and this actually happened – not because you feel a proper connection with them. Dunkirk is technical, it’s cynical, it’s… real. More real than most war films you’ve ever seen before.
2. Delivered in a non-linear narrative, Nolan again chops up timelines to tell his story, and for once, it doesn’t add much to have the audience scratching their heads as to what is going on and when. It’s a minor niggle, but in a film that leans heavily on the precision of its craft rather than its emotional wallop, making a frosty film needlessly more complicated is a shame.
3. Harry Styles is actually pretty good in this movie. That should be one for the plus column, and of course it is, but in casting a former – and still current maybe? – One Direction member as an army private, Nolan has given his audience a way of distancing themselves from what’s going on. He’s a… distraction. He gives a decent performance, and doesn’t actively make the film worse by any means, it’s just that you will probably end up thinking… “Hey, that’s Harry Styles!” instead of really immersing yourself in the film. Harsh, but I went there.

Three word review: Incredibly tense excellence.