Let me preface this review by making a confession; before this Film was advertised, I had never heard of Dunkirk. I knew literally nothing about it. I am sure my father would be disappointed in me as he is a such a war history buff that I remember my sister and I learning the dates of Pearl Harbor and D-Day while learning the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Now I start the review with this information because today's film was most likely not made for someone who is just learning about this event for the first time. Dunkirk is being described as an "experience" film not unlike movies such as Gravity, where the idea is for the audience to feel like they are experiencing the focal situation itself rather than connect with characters to follow a narrative. For someone who knew nothing about the battle’s particulars (for example, I had to watch a Sibling Rivalry video on Channel Awesome before I knew what The Mole was referring to), I still feel like I learned a great deal from watching this movie. If nothing else, I learned more about what it was like to be a World War II soldier in these brief two hours than I have throughout a majority of the World War II films I have seen; and that is no small feat given the lineup my father built for me and my sister.

I should start with the complaint that a lot of people have been voicing; there is not enough character development. Personally, I found this welcome. Not only because Christopher Nolan films, particularly Interstellar, have a tendency to make the characters ramble about plot developments and existential philosophies to the point of becoming too jumbled to follow. But because I feel this movie needed a certain amount of anonymity to make it easier for the audience to connect with the actual main character, the desperate need to get home. Let me compare it to another film with a similar structure. United 93 is a movie about one of the planes that was hijacked on September 11, and covered not only the tragedy but the heroism of the passengers who stopped the terrorists from murdering thousands more innocent people. I love United 93 and that film is not exactly heavy with dialogue or exposition. I barely knew the names of any of the passengers, I did not know about why they were traveling, nor did I know if they had spouses and kids waiting for them; but I did not feel like I needed to. That film was about what it was like to be mundanely flying somewhere one moment then realizing that you are going to die in the next. The lack in specificity within each passenger made it easier for me to focus on the emotions of the situation, and to connect more with the thought of "Who would I call if I only had a few moments to live?". 

Watching Dunkirk was a similar experience to watching United 93. Because I did not know much about these characters, I was able to better put myself in the action personally. Near the end of the film when it seems like some of these poor souls might finally get rescued, and something yet again hinders them, I almost literally screamed "Oh come on!" right there in the theatre; I can only imagine how the soldiers felt.

A great strength of Dunkirk is its focus on how much waiting around there was during this evacuation which reminded me of how much waiting around there surprisingly tends to be during war. The dejected looks of the soldiers waiting in line for the boats that might not come, the routine duck-and-cover for periodic bombs, the nod of understanding when an ally takes a dead British soldier’s boots. In this film, survival is a lifestyle and a language all its own. Oftentimes, war films focus on the firing of guns, the dropping of bombs, the breakdown of prisoners, forgetting that soldiers are frequently concentrating on surviving just as much as they are on fighting back. The quieter moments in Dunkirk accomplish that with a simple clarity that you cannot achieve with dialogue alone. According to the Trivia section in the film’s IMDB page, Kenneth Branaugh stated that “roughly thirty veteran Dunkirk survivors, who were in their mid nineties, attended the premiere in London. When asked about the film, they felt that it accurately captured the event but that the soundtrack was louder than the actual bombardment”. So it sounds like this emphasis on the waiting around aspect was spot-on.

I saw this film twice in the span of one weekend. I wanted to make sure I missed as little as possible, especially because as good as the film is, I did miss some necessary information the first time. As I said in the beginning of this review, I am not sure this movie was meant for a completely ignorant audience member like me, but for the movie I got, I walked out both times wanting to learn more about the event thanks to a thoroughly perceptual experience. This might be my second favorite World War II movie right behind Unbroken and I will be rooting for it wholeheartedly when it undoubtedly gets nominated for an Oscar or two.