★★☆☆☆
There’s a gnawing cinematic paradox that runs through Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, and ultimately brings it to its knees. Namely, the more truth you attempt to deliver, the more fake your movie appears. “Look!” says Dunkirk, at every turn, as it re-imagines the near-miraculous wartime evacuation (340,000 lives saved, against all odds) via 106 dizzying minutes of sound and fury signifying not very much at all. “Over there! That’s a real navy destroyer, not special effects! And up there — they’re real Spitfires whizzing overhead! And those 1,500 extras over there — they’re really in the water!” And on it goes, this bizarre catalogue of show’n’tell that is so caught up in the self-satisfaction of its own spectacle that it neglects the fundamental, crucial element — drama.
And by “drama” I don’t mean momentum, or tick-tocky countdowns. There are tons of these in Dunkirk. The film is countdown crazy. It cross-cuts continually between three nominal protagonists, each of whom is very much on the clock. Newcomer Fionn Whitehead is the every-soldier Tommy (yep, Tommy, we get it) who is, essentially, in a big race from the moment he appears on screen — will he get across the beach and on to the ship before it leaves? Will he get out of the water before the ship, now sinking, squashes him against the pier? Will he get out of the next ship before it sinks too? And will he get out of the water before the surface oil spill catches fire? Then there’s the emotionless RAF automaton, Farrier, played by Tom Hardy’s eyeballs (Hardy’s face is mostly hidden by a pilot’s mask, although he does get to deliver hackneyed corkers such as, “I’m on this one. You take that one!”). Farrier’s fuel gauge takes a hit early on and so everything he does, and every strangely repetitious dogfight (they may be real planes but that doesn’t alchemically turn their scenes into movie gold), is done with the knowledge that Farrier’s fuel, and his time, is running out.
Finally, there’s the old man Mr Dawson, the closest thing the film has to an actual, genuine character. As played by Mark Rylance, with that classic lilting cadence, Dawson is a kindly pleasure-boater who has picked up a shell-shocked soldier (Cillian Murphy) on the way to join the flotilla of civilian rescue boats (aka the Little Ships of Dunkirk). The Dawson scenes are driven by the urgency of the evacuation itself and by the question of whether Murphy’s soldier will go berserk, Dead Calm style, before they get across the channel (like Billy Zane in that movie, Murphy’s soldier is locked below when he becomes obstreperous and aggressive). Writer-director Nolan, however, clearly felt that the Dawson section wasn’t hysterical enough and so has included a ridiculous side story about the cabin boy George (Barry Keoghan), who falls over, bangs his head and might just bleed to death if everyone else doesn’t just, you know, hurry up.
And so the film cuts manically back and forth between these three strands with all the empathetic prowess of Call of Duty: Dunkirk Edition, while clattering you about the ears with a cacophonous, amphetamine-rush soundtrack by Hans Zimmer that can best be described as an express train full of cutlery crashing into an explosives factory. Thankfully, there are brief moments of silence in the score. They allow you to appreciate the sweet pinging of tinnitus.
The defence for the film is that it’s “immersive”, and that it is shot on big spectacular Imax and 65mm cameras (they have big frames for big images), and that it’s a new kind of visual storytelling. The problem, however, with prioritising visuals over drama, character arcs and empathy, is that those same visuals can easily find themselves exposed and lacking. Nolan’s oft-declared penchant for filming real things, as well as being oddly misguided (film is fiction, let’s not kid ourselves — fake is fine), often leaves the frames of Dunkirk looking strangely undernourished. Once the 1,500 extras from the opening beach scenes have gone home, it’s quite the task to fill those big frames with so-called real stuff. The film’s Little Ships sequence, especially, was crying out for some lovely CGI boats to make up the numbers. There couldn’t have been more than 20 on screen (but they’re real!), compared to the roughly 700 that participated in 1940. Indeed, even Mrs Miniver, from 1942, one of the last significant movies to deal with Dunkirk, had at least 100 boats in its flotilla scenes.
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And in the end that’s probably the greatest disappointment of all. The evacuation of Dunkirk, as an event of global historical importance, has been shamefully underrepresented on film. This was a chance to make a The Longest Day of our era. Or a homegrown Saving Private Ryan. Instead, in all its superficial pulse-quickening antics, Dunkirk is no more than Baby Driver Goes to War.
12A, 106min
