'Dunkirk' thrillingly captures the reality of war

See this movie. 

The first words in Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk are spoken by a young British soldier (Fionn Whitehead) who has just barely escaped the enemy gunfire that had picked off a group of his fellow soldiers one by one. Yet as the young Brit, desperate to escape the bit of French territory just across the channel from England into which invading German forces have corralled the Allies, stumbles into an Allied encampment, he is fired on once again and nearly killed. He speaks the words that save his life: "I'm English."

This concise, thrilling, and brutal opening scene is basically Dunkirk in miniature. It has the tension, the action, the true-to-life depiction of war, the desperate quest for survival, and, most important, the understated yet surely present undercurrent of English patriotism. All of these qualities appear, in one form or another, in varying combinations, for the rest of the film. Together, they make it a highlight of Nolan's impressive oeuvre (he of Inception, and The Dark Knight fame), and one of the best World War II films ever made. There are many ways to make a World War II movie, and Hollywood has basically done them all. There's the "elite squad on a mission" template (Dirty Dozen, Inglorious Basterds, A Bridge Too Far). There's the "disparate platoon on a journey" model (Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, Fury). There's the "Great Man" type (Patton, Emperor), that views the war through the eyes of a single important figure.There are other kinds, but these are the mainstays. And again, we've seen plenty of all of them.

What we haven't seen is a movie like Dunkirk. Several qualities distinguish Dunkirk immediately. There are, for example, no Americans (we weren't in the war yet, although we are alluded to when one character reads Winston Churchill's famous post-Dunkirk speech). Nor are there ever any scenes of commanding officers pointing at maps or discussing strategy in a room; the closest we get is Kenneth Branagh as an officer who, trapped like everyone else on the beach, is in just as much danger as they (and one could argue his role is even slightly extraneous to the film). Even more striking, however, is that there are no Germans. Yes, the soldiers trapped on Dunkirk's beach and sailing in its waters are bombed by, torpedoed by, and shot at by Germans, but never do we see on screen a single German face.

Pictured: definitely not a German face

And unlike virtually every movie listed above, there are very few stars in Dunkirk. World War II movies often can't resist stuffing their cast to the gills with famous actors, almost/often to the point of distraction (see, for example, the cast of A Bridge Too Far). This isn't to say Dunkirk is completely devoid of stars--we have Kenneth Branagh, recent Academy Award winner Mark Rylance, Nolan regulars Tom Hardy (yet again obscuring his face for most of the film as a pilot) and Cillian Murphy, Harry Styles (of One Direction), and Michael Caine (er, his voice). Nor is it devoid of acting talent: In his film debut, Fionn Whitehead, the closest Dunkirk has to a main character, is a highly relatable and engaging locus of sympathy; Mark Rylance embodies the stiff upper lip as the civilian Brit sailing across the channel (often steering with a Union Jack visible behind him), and the rest of the actors involved do some of their best work.

"When Hitler is ashes...then you have my permission to die."

But Dunkirk has a more collective focus; names are given only sparingly and indirectly. It cuts between three temporally and spatially distinct yet occasionally intersecting narratives: on land (the soldiers stuck on the beach), sea (an English civilian piloting his private ship across the channel to Dunkirk), and air (English pilots trying to keep their countryman safe from German planes). Some critics have questioned the necessity of this nonlinear timeline, but the scope it provides is immense, and the payoff it delivers upon climax is justly rewarding (even more so with the backing of an 80s Vangelis-style backing by Hans Zimmer). Nolan manages to convey the drama of the entire incident, in all its facets, while also giving us people whose lives and fates concern us. He has delivered on his promise to make Dunkirk an "intimate epic."

Nolan makes us care about these characters by showing how difficult mere survival is in such a situation. The British in Dunkirk have to survive sinking ships, German bombs and torpedoes, aerial dogfights, ocean water caught on fire from spilled oil, and much, much more (which Nolan illustrates with practical effects, bucking Hollywood's CGI laziness). So many moments of danger in the film rely on split-second decisions, happenstance, and fortune that we never truly know what is going to happen to any one of the characters on screen. They fight not only the enemy, but, in many cases, sheer helplessness. What can a soldier with a single rifle do against an attacking plane? What can you do if your boat is full but you see comrades treading water? It is the focus on sheer survival, and the moments of high tension (again aided by Nolan regular Hans Zimmer's score and its Shephard tones), that make Dunkirk one of the best on-screen portrayals of the pure lived reality of war that I have seen (and this 97-year-old British Dunkirk veteran agrees with me!).

Yet some have criticized Dunkirk, primarily for being boring or somehow hollow. The action depicted on screen never adds up to anything substantial, they claim, and it's difficult to connect to a cast intentionally made into more of a collective. Yet such critics totally miss the point of Dunkirk. By honing in on the more common experiences of war, Dunkirk steers away from Saving Private Ryan-style sentimentality and captures the lived reality of the conflict for the overwhelming majority of its participants, the desperate (and overwhelmingly young*) soldiers content only to survive to the next battle. Other World War II movies may have elite squads, conveniently-assembled platoons, or singular Great Men, but Dunkirk alone of World War II movies I've seen successfully conveys how an entire nation felt at war.

We see this in one of the last exchanges of the film, as--spoiler alert for a historical event that happened more than 70 years ago--two characters return to England and pass by an old man. He congratulates them for what they have done.

"We just survived," one of them scoffs. "That's good enough," the old man says in reply. As, indeed, it was. As for Dunkirk itself, it's more than good enough. See it for yourself, on the biggest screen possible, and find out why. *It seemed in appropriate for me to mention in the body of my review, but this movie, above all, made me think about how I would have fared in a situation like this. The actors playing most of the soldiers are all right around my age, as would the soldiers on the beach all those years ago. Would I have been a coward? A hero? Would I have survived? How fortunate was I to have been born in one of the only times and places in the vast stream of human history in which I am exempt from what otherwise would have been my duty as an able-bodied young adult male in virtually any other time and place? Why am I asking you these questions?