Dunkirk (12A)

WITH Saving Private Ryan in 1998, Steven Spielberg presented a visceral and terrifying idea of what it may have been like for the D-Day forces attempting to land on the Normandy beaches. Twenty years on, director Christopher Nolan gives an equally impressive idea of the opposite experience – trying to leave France, at Dunkirk.

After what Churchill called the “miracle” of the evacuation, involving more than 338,000 Allied troops, the then prime minister said that there was “a victory inside this deliverance”. Nolan’s war epic suggests the bravery and sheer doggedness – not to mention the skill of the RAF’s Spitfire pilots – that would indeed take Britain forward.

But, like Spielberg, he also recreates the horror they had to go through. The result is a magnificent film that genuinely stirs the blood.

Nolan is best known for his Batman trilogy and other films of a fanciful nature, from his breakthrough Memento, through Inception to Interstellar. Dunkirk is his first based on real events, but interestingly his approach remain the same – with a marriage of narrative ingenuity, technical prowess, spectacular set-pieces and nail-biting drama.

At the end of May 1940, the Allied forces, including most of the British Army, were cornered by the Germans on the French coast. Their only option was to try to get back to England. For a week the Luftwaffe rained down on the thousands of men trapped on the beach and the vessels attempting to rescue them.

While most directors would approach this chronologically and with an extensive cast – from the family back home to the high command, and all the heroes and villains in between – Nolan’s own script diverges on both points. First, he has only a dozen main characters, and restricts their stories almost entirely to what is taking place in the moment. And second, his narrative organisation is dazzlingly different.

He tells the story from three perspectives: on land, where a naval commander (Kenneth Branagh) desperately oversees the evacuation and young soldiers (including newcomer Fionn Whitehead and One Direction’s Harry Styles) attempt to get themselves onto ships; at sea, where a civilian sailor (Mark Rylance) and his son join the famous flotilla of private boats heading for Dunkirk to help; and in the air, where two Spitfire pilots (Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden) are taking on the Luftwaffe.

As so often, Nolan is also playing with time: we follow the story on land over a week, at sea for a day, in the air for an hour. The masterstroke, a sort of temporal alchemy, is to make these timelines converge.

The exposure on the beach, with nowhere to run for endless days, is felt as a dangerous limbo. One soldier asks another how he knows the tide is turning. The answer: “The bodies come back.” In the air, Hardy the ace pilot constantly calculates the seconds his fading fuel will allow him, as enemy planes bear down on his countrymen.

Other than aerial dogfights, it’s a war film without combat; we see no Germans. But the effects of airplane machine guns, artillery bombardments and torpedoes are felt every second, whether a lone soldier dodging bullets in the Dunkirk streets, a body thrown into the air as a bomb lands on him, or the horror of drowning on a sinking ship.

Nolan has shot on large-format cameras, making his spectacular images crisply immersive. If possible, see this at an IMAX; if not, the cinematography and human drama will prevail, driven by Hans Zimmer’s insistent, disturbing soundtrack. The tension never lets up until the unmissably moving image of those tiny boats in sight of Dunkirk.

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