Stars Fionn Whitehead, Damien Bonnard, Harry Styles, Barry Keoghan, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, with Mark Rylance, James D’Arcy, Tom Hardy, and Kenneth Branagh Directed by Christopher Nolan I can’t think of any other director who has such as fascination with the way time works within the structure of film. For some, storytelling is a liner process. We have a start, middle and end; often in that sequence, and time flows flows almost linearly in that fashion as well. The visual aspect of film (and applicable to comics as well) can muddle that time factor within a story’s structure, and Christopher Nolan has constantly played with that in most of his movies, if not all. Most evidently in Inception where time passes differently on different levels of the dream plane. That’s also in addition to the numerous flashback sequences. For Dunkirk, time factors into the soundtrack as well with the tick-tock of a pocket watch embedded into the rhythms of the excellent score by Hans Zimmer. The story here, written by Nolan himself, intertwines three stories that ultimately cross paths with each other at key moments. The conceit being that each story takes place over different spans of time. The first is entitled “The Mole”, taking over the span of a week as we follow a few soldiers (Fionn Whitehead, Damien Bonnard and Harry Styles among them) making several attempts to get off the beach at Dunkirk and make their way home. “The Sea” follows Mark Rylance’s small boat captain making his way to Dunkirk to help rescue the soldiers. This takes place over a day while the third story “The Air” has a couple of of Spitfire pilots (Jack Lowden and Tom Hardy) with about an hour’s worth of fuel battling in the skies over the sea the small boats are crossing. Despite the disparate time factors each story takes, the editing brings similar factors in each story together, keeping the pace so tight that the movie comes in at a very slim 100+ minutes. A rarity for a summer film, much less one from Christopher Nolan whose last film, Interstellar, crossed the hind-numbing 3hr mark. But Nolan is at the top of his game here, utilising the IMAX presentation and frame the way David Lean would have in his own widescreen epics, giving us a scope of grandeur. Most of the young stars are unknowns, but that works immensely to the benefit of the story, while the known stars bring the gravitas to their scenes. While Tom Hardy holds court in the sky and performs behind a mask (again), the land story as Kenneth Branagh and James D’Arcy paring off while Cillian Murphy is paired with Mark Rylance on the small boat. They carry the more serious conversations to reflect the weight of the decisions made where the rescue operations are concerned. Given the scale of the operation and the scope of the event, it is a little disconcerting to see the sparse beaches tho, especially after the bravura single-take chaos featured in Atonement. Despite that, the sparseness adds to the enormity of the scope giving the movie a feel of the old epics. IT also doesn’t diminish the impact of the film, nor detract from the overall importance of the story presented here. Nolan’s film is an impressive piece of work that is very likely destined to be a classic. Rating ****1/2 /5 Find the best online deals here. | Barnes and Noble | Google Play Store | Book Depository Discover more about the books here. Please Support.
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