Visually thrilling with amazing performances achieved through minimal dialogue, replaced instead with superb sound design, the scream of the enemy planes in the sky above the evacuating troops in particular stood out.

Characters and Structure Dunkirk stars Harry Styles, Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Keneth Branagh, Fionn Whitehead and many others, the main cast is nearly entirely British.

The film tells the story firmly from the perspective of those British forces caught up in the disaster, the strafing of beaches and ships for example is filmed purely from the perspective of those under attack looking up at the planes. It never cuts so that we see the German pilots in their planes looking down on their targets nor do we see allied generals and politicians in a war room, spoon feeding the audience information. There are only two characters of seniority that really deliver any exposition about the wider context of what's unfolding and even their dialogue is brief. Nolan's approach during the beach and sea sequences is almost equivalent to a camera gliding along the surface through the events as they happen, this gives it a kind of rawness and realism which a more traditionally structured film couldn't do. The focus here is purely on a handful of characters and their life and death struggles, several times machine gun fires rips out from an unseen enemy, just like our characters we never get a good sense of the other side's perspective. The sequences of boats sinking filmed from inside their interiors for me surpasses Tiatnic (1997) in terms of its nightmarish power. There is an amazing close shot of a ship in the inky black of the night lit up by the red and orange of a fireball bursting out of it's hulk.

Harry Styles is sort of our main protagonist, right from the go he is running for his life. Without much dialogue what we learn about him comes mostly through watching his actions and expressions. He seems to be a perfectly ordinary young man caught up in a horror he couldn't have imagined. For all the ear-piercing noise and hellish fighting some of the most profound moments are the still quiet ones of soldiers stoically waiting their turn, characters sat gazing mournfully at the rough sea, perhaps too exhausted to do anything else, hoping tomorrow they will have better luck. It's a film about people just clinging on, quite literally in several sequences. It's lack of dialogue in favour of visually storytelling is on par with Mad Max Fury Road (2015) another Tom Hardy film.

War films can tend to fall into two different kinds of structures, there is the Sands of Iwo Jima/The Dambusters/American Snipper/Hacksaw Ridge kind which introduce you to your character/s, then in the 2nd act take you through their training before the 3rd act is the climactic battle you know has been coming. The other approach is to pretty much open and close the film in the middle of the war, Saving Private Ryan being such a film. Unlike a Oliver Stone movie this doesn't seem to be an anti war theme nor is it a jingoistic affair. Its simple matter of fact approach just tells the story.

Cinematography and Score The score I loved and think it really suited this material. Hans Zimmer does an excellent job of combining traditional score with more ambient sound to create a grittier sounding music than you'd otherwise get.

The cinematography does a fine job balancing a filmetic look with at times a more documentary style. There wasn't any excessive colour grading that I could see, it all looked nicely balanced and natural. The film's colour pallet is of course made up of lots of sandy yellow, and khaki green, this fits nicely with the greyer colours of the evening with the blue sea and dark interiors of the ships. The tone of the film is sombre, at times desperate and naturally lacking in any humour or levity. The film was shot on location at Dunkirk at uses thousands of extras as well as real aircraft and ships to create it's impressive sequences. In an age which is increasingly going digital Nolan shot this on real film.

Other thoughts

Soldiers of all nationalities in our media and culture can often be portrayed purely in terms of projecting power, impossibly fierce, fearless killing machines. Dunkirk shows us exposed, vulnerable and sometimes frightened traumatised troops stuck in a dire desperate situation. The effect of this choice is characters feel real, not Hollywoodised movie characters who yell out witty dialogue to eachother between reloading or unstoppable baddass types who charge around implausibly dodging bullets while pumping lead into their enemies.

As you'd expect part of the story allows time for the civilian effort to rescue soldiers from Dunkirk. Mark Rylance is given a big part here. In a way the film does make you question whether in 2017 a similar response would follow from people in the UK if lots of other people found themselves needing help. If a sense of shared purpose and unity ever existed or such a thing as a national spirit then it's hard to believe it is just as alive and well today. The film also made me question a bit too whether people today would be hard enough to go through something like this. A delay on the M5 the other day had a woman on the news in hysterics over the fact her dogs in back were very hot. Half the audience at the cinema I'm afraid were overweight, mostly dressed in shorts and t-shirts, munching on their food as they watched the men on the screen struggling in the waves. A man in his 50s at the front of the cinema had even stripped down to his vest by the time the film was over, have we become so unhealthy now that sitting down in spacious cinema for two hours can make a person this hot?

In terms of negatives with the film, I don't have many. There's quite a lot of cutting between short sequences which I haven't noticed quite so much in Nolan's other work, it was a times a bit grading. I found a bit of the dialogue from Mark Rylance hard to follow, incidentally he probably has the most lines in the film. It's stated to this man lost his son into the third week of the war, not impossible but I'd be surprised considering 1939 was known as the Phoney War, a period of near total inactivity on the Western front.