Dunkirk (2017)

Wow, Christopher Nolan writes, directs, and co-produces the depiction of a real event for a change. Well, to a point. The individual characters involved are fictitious. But given his usual penchant for sci-fi and mindscrew mystery, it was bound to be unusually realistic for him. Perhaps he wants more of a shot at the next Academy Awards than he had with Inception.

Unlike any other war film I've seen, this one divides itself into three perspectives corresponding roughly to land (designated "The Mole," an architectural term I didn't know), sea, and air. On land, in the course of a week, Allied soldiers at Dunkirk are in the process of retreating, but German forces don't make it easy with all the ship bombing. At sea, in the course of a day, Captain Dawson (Mark Rylance) takes his yacht to join the rescue effort with his young adult son, along with an unexpected rash teenage assistant. They soon pick up a lone survivor of a bombed ship (Nolan mainstay Cillian Murphy), who exhibits PTSD and reeeeally doesn't want to return to Dunkirk. In the air, in the course of an hour, three members of the Royal Air Force (one of them played by Tom Hardy) face off with German fighters in the vicinity.

Naturally, Nolan had no interest in a purely linear telling, so the perspectives alternate frequently. My dad and I got a little lost at times, but it hardly matters amid the chaos of war. The important points came across.

Thanks in part to the alternation, there's never a dull moment. OK, a lot of moments could have passed for pretty dull if not for the intense Hans Zimmer score, which feels like cheating when I think about it. Other moments used improbable silence for tension. Regardless, the 106 minutes flew by and did not afford the slightest comic relief.

You may have noted that the rating is PG-13. Once in a while, you see someone bleeding, but you generally don't see what caused the wound, and it's never what I'd call gory. Some viewers find the off-screen violence more effective than the usual modern gorefest. Me, I'd call it a draw, which means that studios probably would do better to imply more than they show, if only to save on resources (like Hollywood cares about that).

Nice to have a Nolan flick with no dead wives or girlfriends! Of course, the only women we even hear from are a handful of briefly appearing nurses and cooks. On a ship that sinks. So they might be dead wives and girlfriends after all, but at least that doesn't affect the plot.

My dad had one complaint: Some lines were hard to make out. He may have chalked it up to accents, but it's hardly the first time I've had or heard that complaint about Nolan characters. (Incidentally, Michael Caine gets an uncredited role.)

We also suspect that the makers took liberties in how far a Spitfire could fly without turning the propeller. I found nothing about that on the IMDb goofs page, but it captures quite a few other errors that we hadn't recognized. Oh well.

Dunkirk has convincing acting even from the many no-names; for the most part, it's aptly presented to get the audience to feel for the overpowered troops and appreciate the heroes who evacuated more than 300,000 of them. I refrain from deeming it my favorite war movie -- a few have stories that engage my mind better -- but I must recommend it to anyone in the market for the genre.