I Watch: Films Dunkirk

Christopher Nolan’s film about the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940. It has an asynchronous formal structure, explained by captions at the beginning. The events around the mole take one week, those of the boat on the sea one day and those in the air, one hour. As is inevitable the three timelines come together at the climax of the film.

The film is about heroism, and the limits of it, where war and fighting break people so they can’t go on. It’s about chance and coincidence and also fate. Because we can see how the chances and decisions ripple out to effect the characters when they least expect it, but also because the timelines are occurring at different rates we can almost see how it has already turned out.

It’s about planes too, and not bailing out of them apparently.

Watch This: For a superior war film with something to say that hasn’t quite been said before; as interesting a film as I’ve seen this year.
Don’t Watch This: If shooting and planes and boats and explosions and men trying to be calmly brave and not always succeeding is not for you
It Was Nice Of Christopher Nolan: To let Tom Hardy take his mask off at the end this time.