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:
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 on10th
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:
