Dunkirk

We started the New Year with Dunkirk: not really a seasonal film, but it is new to DVD and we attracted a reasonable audience.

I'd seen the film at the cinema and had been impressed and was looking forward to seeing it again. The structure is complex but it looks very simple: as ever the art is in concealing the art.

One of my main recollections from the first film was Mark Rylance's superb performance, and I was equally impressed on this second viewing. I assume that his character would have been old enough to have taken part in WW1: he does not mention this but you can sense it from his heroic weariness as he decides to take his boat to Dunkirk rather than merely handing it over to the Navy.

Here are my notes:

Dunkirk

UK 2017          106 minutes

Director:          Christopher Nolan

Starring:            Fionn Whitehead, Barry Keoghan, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy and Kenneth Branagh

Awards and Nominations to date

• Number 13 in The Guardian’s list of the Best Films of 2017
• Nominated for Golden Globe for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Score
• Nominated by the London Critics Circle Film Awards for Best Film, Best British/Irish Film, Best Director and three other categories
• A further 18 wins and 86 nominations

“This is a powerful, superbly crafted film with a story to tell, avoiding war porn in favour of something desolate and apocalyptic, a beachscape of shame, littered with soldiers zombified by defeat, a grimly male world with hardly any women on screen. It is Nolan’s best film so far. It also has Hans Zimmer’s best musical score: an eerie, keening, groaning accompaniment to a nightmare, switching finally to quasi-Elgar variations for the deliverance itself.”

Peter Bradshaw

 During the fall of France in the Spring of 1940 Allied soldiers have retreated to the coast at Dunkirk. As the troops wait for evacuation the Royal Navy requisitions small civilian vessels that can sail in the shallow waters close to the beaches, while in the air Spitfires try to save British ships from attack by Nazi planes.

Nolan directed the film from his own script which tells the story of the evacuation from the perspectives of land, sea and air. Each story develops over different timescales so that although they are edited together it is only towards the climax of the film that the different narratives coincide. He had initially conceived the idea for the film in the mid-1990s but had postponed the project until he had enough experience of directing large scale action films. His aim was to tell the story solely from the perspective of the soldiers on the beaches: thus the invading Nazi forces do not appear. Additionally Nolan avoided any scenes with Churchill who had become Prime Minister only on10^th May 1940 in order to prevent the complexity of the domestic political situation undermining the story of the evacuation. The circumstances of Churchill’s assumption of power and subsequent wartime premiership are a major story themselves and are the subject of Joe Wright’s forthcoming film Darkest Hour (2017) with Gary Oldman starring as Churchill.

The major events in the film are based on the historical record and Nolan worked closely with a historical consultant to ensure the accuracy of the film; similarly although the characters are all fictional some of them are based in part on Dunkirk veterans whose stories Nolan encountered during his research. The evacuation at Dunkirk itself was a major turning point in the Second World War and appeared on screen as early as 1942 as part of the plot of Mrs Miniver. In 1958 Leslie Norman, father of Barry, directed Dunkirk which starred John Mills, Richard Attenborough and Bernard Lee; the film became the second most popular production of the year in the UK. The evacuation also featured in a key sequence in Joe Wright’s Atonement (2007) and more recently Their Finest (2016) depicted the making of a wartime propaganda film about Dunkirk to raise morale in a war-ravaged Britain. 

On its release in 2017 Dunkirk received praise for its screenplay, direction, soundtrack and photography, with some critics acclaiming it as one of the greatest war films ever made. Somewhat inevitably Nigel Farage attempted to use the film to promote his own blinkered perspective of history by circulating a photograph of himself in front of a poster for the film with the patronising exhortation: “I urge every youngster to go out and watch #Dunkirk”. Clearly he had forgotten that Britain did not stand alone against Nazi Germany and that Churchill himself, a lifelong patriot, amateur historian and arguably the greatest British Prime Minister of the twentieth century, had actually favoured an “indissoluble” union with a France. In an era of fake news it is vital to remember the following words of wisdom: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts”.

Here is a link to the trailer:

Sully: Miracle on the Hudson

Somehow this film had passed me by, and when we decided to screen it I was interested to see it but did not expect anything special: I was wrong...

When I started researching the film for my notes I realised who the director was, and then I read the full details of the landing (not a crash) and, more importantly, the subsequent events.

I enjoyed the film very much, and even though you know right from the beginning that the plane will land safely, the script is structured in such a way as to keep you on the edge of your seat all the way through. Needless to say the performances are excellent, with Tom Hanks in particular deserving all the credit for what could have been seen as a two dimensional character.

Here are my notes:

USA 2016        96 minutes

Director:          Clint Eastwood

Starring:            Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart and Laura Linney

Awards and Nominations

• Oscar Nomination for Sound Editing
• A further 12 wins and 32 nominations

“Sully is a beautifully balanced, classily nuanced and hugely engaging film that avoids all the clichéd pitfalls it could have slipped into. Tom Hanks gives one of the best performances of his career and Clint Eastwood's direction is beautiful and rich. It's not just a great movie, Sully is one of the best pieces of cinema that a major Hollywood studio has released this year.”

Simon Thompson

When his Airbus A320 strikes a flock of birds Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) loses power in both engines. He judges that it will be impossible to reach nearby airports safely and so ditches the aircraft in the Hudson River. The passengers and crew are evacuated without casualty and a subsequent enquiry by the National Transportation Safety Board finally confirms that Sully’s decision to ditch in the river was the best option open to him.

The film is based on Sully’s autobiography Highest Duty which the producers of the film purchased and then developed a screenplay with Todd Komarnicki. Sullenberger’s stated desire was the film should incorporate “that sense of our common humanity” and noted that the event had occurred shortly after the 2008 Recession. He explained:

“People were wondering if everything was about self-interest and greed. They were doubting human nature. Then all these people acted together, selflessly, to get something really important done. In a way, I think it gave everyone a chance to have hope, at a time when we all needed it.”

For Kormanicki the main challenge faced in writing his screenplay was not the known outcome of the actual landing, but rather the investigation that followed:

“It wasn't really a challenge of what to do with the event since that is the thing everyone knows about, it was more about how you parse out the information about the man slowly falling apart and becoming a hero in the eyes of the world when internally and with the investigators it was actually seemingly going the other way.”

The film received its premier at the 2016 Telluride Film Festival and then went on general release on 9^th September. Warner Bros. had initially been hesitant about releasing the film on the fifteenth Anniversary of the September 11 attacks, but nonetheless went ahead with this release date and explained its reasoning on the grounds that “Sully is a story of hope and a real hero who did his job.”

The film was well reviewed on its release, with both Hanks and Eastwood being singled out for their work. Peter Debruge gave the film a positive review as well as specifically praising Hanks:

 "This is Hanks' show, and he delivers a typically strong performance, quickly allowing us to forget that we're watching an actor. With his snowy white hair and moustache to match, Hanks conveys a man confident in his abilities, yet humble in his actions, which could also be said of Eastwood as a director."

The American Film Institute selected Sully as one of its ten Movies of the Year.

Several major airlines decided not to include the film within their on-board entertainment systems, although Virgin has shown the film.

Here is the trailer: