Dunkirk: 5 things

After weeks of seemingly everyone on the planet singing its praises, I finally saw Dunkirk in all its IMAX-y goodness yesterday. It’s a masterpiece, and once the hype has died down I might even go so far as to say it’s Nolan’s best. For now, here are the five things that I took away from the film:

1. An epic scale doesn’t have to mean an epic runtime

I can’t have been alone in expecting Dunkirk to have a lengthy runtime. Instead, Dunkirk runs at a breathless 106 minutes. Nolan gets held up as a champion of cinema for his insistence on shooting with celluloid, but it’s deeper than that; he understands that cinema is about show, not tell. Dunkirk is a film about the human story of Dunkirk, not its logistical achievements, and that first shot of Ffion Whitehead’s eyes as he looked out over the spume-covered frontier of Northern France was all the backstory I needed.

2. Nolan is a master architect

The decision to shift time frames (a week for those on the beach, a day on water and an hour in the sky) was an ingenious way to maintain excitement throughout the film. Where Saving Private Ryan had a middle act that suffered in between its dramatic close and game-changing opening, Dunkirk’s temporal shifts kept the pace of the film up without needing to short-change each strand of the plot. There’s probably an earlier draft of the film that saw the beach plot build up to an epic, three-strand final act, but Nolan’s use of non-linear narrative (and faith that the audience would be able to keep up) shows him again to be a master structurer.

3. The devil’s in the details

The lack of dialogue means that there are comparisons to be made between Dunkirk and the silent cinema of the early 20^th Century, but the sound design is just as accomplished as those crystal-clear IMAX shots. One of the tensest scenes in the film sees a group of soldiers holed up in a stranded boat, waiting for the tide to rise sufficiently in order to float away. Suddenly, a hole appears; enemy soldiers are using the boat for target practice, and the soldiers are forced to choose between giving away their position or ending up with a boat too riddled with bullets to float. It’s a mini-movie within the grander film, the ‘enemy’ constantly shifting as the group’s priorities change. It’s also a sequence where the films sound design comes to the fore. Each bullet hole is followed by a clang of metal as the bullet ricochets inside. The music (or sound effects, Zimmer’s score being used to harmoniously with the latter that it’s hard to differentiate) rises alongside the rush of water. The Dutch ‘captain’ walking along the deck of the ship, his footsteps imitating the heartbeats of the hidden soldiers (and the audience) listening. It reminded me of Fleming’s James Bond novels, where he would write in almost perverse detail about the guns and hardware of Bond’s trade, lending an authenticity to their otherwise outlandish plots.

4. Shepard tones are the stuff of nightmares

Nolan has used Shepard tones, where different pitches of sounds are cycled to give the impression of a never-ending escalation of noise, before, but never to such potent effect. Expect to start hearing them in every thriller for the next few years.

5. Even Nolan has to use CGI sometimes

CGI can feel like a dirty term these days, used as a get-out-of-jail card for filmmakers that want spectacle without the challenges of creating something in-camera. Mad Max: Fury Road and now Dunkirk (funnily enough both starring Tom Hardy) are great examples of the excitement that special effects and stuntwork can create, but without losing sight of the extra oomph that VFX can provide. I’m sure some of those soaring IMAX shots of the English Channel will have had merchant ships removed, and the modern-day coastline of Dunkirk does not look like the 1940s time capsule that it appears as in the film. Yet within the context of the film this FX work is invisible, and only helped to heighten the considerable achievements of the Spitfire pilots who really were skimming the waves with their propeller blades.