"You're weekend sailors, not the bloody Navy. You should be at home."
"There's no hiding from this, son. We have a job to do."
While Christopher Nolan's newest film Dunkirk is light on the dialogue, this one particular conversation stood out above all the rest, and rang true as the theme of Nolan's film.
The film follows a handful of soldiers and non-military as they attempt to simply survive the monstrosities of 1940's war. Throughout the story, we meet men such as Tommy (played by Fionn Whitehead), Gibson (played by Aneurin Barnard), and Alex (played by Harry Styles), three far too young soldiers who are struggling to just survive; Mr. Dawson (played by Mark Rylance), an incredibly brave father who puts his life at risk to smuggle soldiers across the channel; George (played by Barry Keoghan), who inadvertently becomes entwined with the Dawsons and proves to be braver than any soldier; Farrier (played by Tom Hardy), a pilot who, along with his sidekick (played by Jack Lowden), keeps the air enemy-free to give the soldiers on the sand a fighting chance at surviving; Bolton (played by Kenneth Branagh), a commander who will do anything to bring his men home; and one soldier (known only as the Shivering Soldier on IMDB, played by Cillian Murphy) whose shell-shocked spirit heartbreakingly proves just how horrible the aftermath of war can be.
Nolan's story-telling brilliance shines bright as he chooses to not write your typical "fictional characters" for his narrative; he instead throws the viewer into the middle of the story with no warning. As a viewer, I was at first taken aback to be thrust into a tale without even knowing the characters' names or histories (I honestly had to look up character names on IMDB before writing this, as names are rarely uttered in the film) but it took only a few minutes to be enraptured by the film. I didn't need to know these characters' names or their lives before that moment because it felt as if I was witnessing real war with real humans, and Nolan presented me with enough realness to feel raw emotion and be completely unhinged for 106 minutes.
Nolan also does not in any way hold the viewer's hand or guide them gently through a story. Instead, he shows us what I imagine human interaction is like during war - you don't have time for pleasantries or the slow buildup of friendship or even the chance to learn each other's names. You know those next to you are your brothers, and that has to just be enough.
The film does not shy away or shield the viewer from the horrors of war, especially the true events that took place at Dunkirk. However, Nolan and his team are masters at their craft, and while the viewer does experience the brutality of war, we are not forced to linger longer than we should. The film depicts war as history, not as entertainment.
Even with the mercy of this film only being PG-13, Dunkirk is not an easy film to watch. As a viewer, you are uncomfortable and emotional less than five minutes in, but the truth in the film is worth any discomfort I as a viewer felt. This is my history as a human, and I need to feel this way and see these things every once and awhile. Not all the time, but sometimes. We need to be shown our depravity so we can learn never to be that way again. And we need to be shown true heroism so we can strive for that.
Dunkirk proved to me just how powerful a Christopher Nolan film can be. I have been a fan of Nolan's since The Dark Knight trilogy, and I only allow myself to watch Interstellar a few times a year because of how profoundly it affects me every time. While Dunkirk is vastly different than any previous Nolan film I have seen, Nolan does in his work for this film what he always does for me - he makes me want to be more. Nolan constantly inspires me to use my own talents to the fullest, to explore and dig for everything that I can. Seeing him put out the very best film he possibly can time after time after time makes me want to pursue my passion as he does.
My one complaint about Dunkirk is that it left me wanting more. But this is typical Nolan for me. I want to watch a 50 hour director's cut of Dunkirk that digs into the individual characters and shows me how they got to where they were, what happened to them after the war, everything. While I don't need this to ache for these men in Dunkirk, Nolan writes about such captivating people that I long to know more.
