“Dunkirk”: Christopher Nolan’s abstraction of the duty to rescue others, as civilians rescue soldiers
Christopher Nolan loves to put moviegoers into alternate worlds and make them real, and indeed he makes the chilly blue-gray war seascape of “Dunkirk” become alien.
The movie is certainly a departure from the usual focus on D-Day, showing the Dunkirk Evacuation as it unfolded in the late spring of 1940, 18 months before the US would enter WWII. The Battle of Britain would soon follow, with the air raids on London civilians.
But the film is also a morality play, about using a flotilla of volunteers and civilians who stepped up to the challenge of rescuing British, French, Belgian, and Canadian soldiers trapped on the beach in the frar north of France. Call this more than radical hospitality, call it radical courage, but necessary.
Nolan keeps the dialogue sparse and utilitarian. There is a particularly disturbing sequence where one soldier (Cillian Murphy) refuses to let the private boat that seems to have rescued him back into harms way to rescue more people, leading to complications leading to death of another soldier. A able civilian seaman (Bobby Lockwood) saves all. The boat’s older skipper (is that Tom Hardy?) says about the soldier, “He may never be himself again.” Later he says the only thing that matters is “Hope”. (In Corinthians it is “Charity”).
The incident is notable for savage Nazi air raids on safe harbors, including a Red Cross ship which sinks.. The movie has many impressive water scenes of men escaping drowning.
The music score by Hans Zimmer makes effective use of some of the material from Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations.
I saw this in an Imax presentation at AMC Tysons, with a presentation aspect ratio of about 2:1, it seemed.
Name: “Dunkirk“
Director, writer: Christopher Nolan
Released: 2017
Format: Imax, variable aspect ratio, seemed to be about 2:1
When and how viewed: Tysons Corner AMC, 2017/7/24, morning, moderate weekday audience
Length: 107
Rating: PG-13
Companies: Warner Brothers, Syncopy
(Posted: Monday, July 24, 2017 at 6:45 PM EDT)
Tags: Christopher Nolan, Syncopy, Warner Brothers