Dunkirk Overview

DUNKIRK (2017)

Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Written by: Christopher Nolan
Cinematography: Hoyte van Hoytema
Starring: Fionn Whitehead, Sir Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Kenneth Branagh, Harry Styles.

‘Dunkirk’ opens with silence, the most powerful cinematic tool. Director, Christopher Nolan, forces us to listen to that silence. This silence is a machine gun, loaded with the ammunition of entrapment, uncertainty and terror and pointed at the Allied forces by their nemesis, the Axis powers. The movie is like a musical symphony but it doesn’t hit any low key. Eccentric in its approach, ‘Dunkirk’ flows with crescendo and maintains harmony at the same time. It’s perplexing for average movie goers but for the cinematically literate ones, you may sit back and enjoy while sipping Chardonnay in the form of Hans Zimmer’s maestro backdrop score.

Birth of friendship amidst war torn arenas is eccentric in nature. Audiences around the globe are accustomed with watching a Spielberg-ish tale of unfortunate events and progressive dialogues, brimming up to a larger than life brotherhood among soldiers. By taking a twist from this narrative, ‘Dunkirk’ shows us moments where unusual friendship is born. It shows the alarmed faces of soldiers; the faces reflecting their subliminal thoughts of home and war’s futility. Their disposition taking an uncanny route; where their mind begins to trust each passing by comrade without a sound judgment. Not realizing that sidestepping any detail might result in a bullet in their head; or worse the entire camaraderie might get shot.

Fatherly love and brotherly compassion is prevalent in ‘Dunkirk’, much like Nolan’s other movies. Viewers are brought in terms with a father who will go against all strange odds, fighting through fear, to help his countrymen, his soldiers, escape the war ridden travesty. Where people find patriotism as his driving force, his deeds are in fact a redemptive measure for a very personal, and now lost, cause.

Christopher Nolan is adherent with ‘No Bullshit’ business. He does not find filming major chunks of movies through VFx and other CGIs, cinematically alluring. ‘Dunkirk’ was shot entirely on real location with real ships and airplanes, and sets devised to be as real as possible. As if embodied with devil-may-care DNA, Nolan took the risk of attaching the IMAX cameras on to the airplanes, while filming the scenes. Mind you, there are only a few IMAX cameras in the world and he has broken one down while filming ‘The Dark Knight Rises’. But with such an ambitious filmmaker as Nolan, producers and studio houses can take a high level of risk. ‘Dunkirk’ and others in his filmography are made akin to a scientific approach. One can imagine Chris making a graph of emotional factoring and cinematic sciences, while writing his scripts.

The team of ‘Dunkirk’ has been asking its potential viewers to watch the movie on IMAX screens. Since, the entire movie was shot on IMAX camera; it’s a great effin' deal! The cinematography makes the audience awestruck with its ethereal nature. The magnificence of the sea and the vastness of the sky accompanied with human lust for violence and blood-shed, makes the visual filming truly blue in its approach.

‘Dunkirk’ comprises of a few dialogues and major action sequences, bludgeoning the wishes of the mainstream audience. The essence of the movie needs to be clear. ‘Dunkirk’ is a survival movie and not a battle movie. It gives dominance to the brutality of dooming fear and crippling death against the slow rising brotherhood and faux dominance of compassion over ambition, as shown in other war related movies. Perhaps, this is also a hidden move against the political war pigs, who actually breed such situations from their warm office chairs, drunk on branded whiskeys.   

Not a connoisseur in the French New Wave film scenario, but I felt the editing was heavily influenced by that realm. Especially in the aircraft scenes. When seated in the theatre, you almost feel like you are flying for real. Wind, the pressure, the ambition to hurl down the enemy. The emotion is on your face. The cuts are sudden, making your conscious sticking on with reality and not just losing your senses, floating like a freebird. The air scenes paint the canvas of sky, thereby giving the entire sense of ‘Dunkirk’, i.e., MAGIC.

With an ensemble of a great cast, who enjoy a pretty humungous fandom, it was expected that there’d be a virtual battle of these actors’ caliber of drama enactment. But direction, story and war choreography overshadowed these actors’ acute enactment of war torn soldiers.