The “providential fog” that allowed General George Washington to save his army with a miraculous nighttime crossing over the East River while surrounded by the British; Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s astounding failure to destroy Union General George McClellan’s Federal Army during the Seven Days Battles. These are not only two instances where history is stranger than fiction, these are instances where God Himself appears to have intervened as a means to put his Master Plan back on track. Neither event, however, compares to Dunkirk.
After racking up a series of audaciously brilliant and historic European conquests, German warlord Adolf Hitler would eventually doom himself, and the country that allowed him to rise to power, through a series of strategic and tactical blunders that do not surprise anyone familiar with his paranoid, power-mad, megalomaniacal tendencies, which were only made worse by an increasing reliance on amphetamines. Each one of these disastrous errors (and thank heaven for all of them) fits well within his depraved persona … except for Hitler’s inexplicable decision not to forever finish off the British Army at Dunkirk.
In May of 1940, eighteen full months before America would enter the war, Hitler had swept through Europe and chased more than 350,000 Allied soldiers, including all of Churchill’s Army, to the water’s edge of mainland Europe. Hitler’s extraordinary campaign to take France, Belgium and the Netherlands had crushed the armies of Britain and France in just six weeks. And now here they were, trapped like herded animals on a harbor more than 20 miles from home. Worse still, the movement of the tide combined with the shallow water made mass evacuations impossible.
At this point, Hitler literally had the whole world in his hands. All he had to do was order his tank columns, which were standing by, to finish the job. Within a week or two, the Allied armies would have been exterminated. Then, without a European front splitting his resources, Hitler’s conquest of the Soviet Union would have been assured (he came thisclose as is). Then, without a Russian front, both he and the Imperial Japanese could focus entirely on the United States. My God.
But the blood-thirsty, power-mad Hitler inexplicably ordered the halt of his tanks.
Oh, there are reasons for it… None of which sounds anything like Hitler. We’re told that the vainglorious conqueror who despised the English, almost as much as the Jews, sought a peace with Britain, envisioned a hegemony with the Empire. We’re told that the sadist who drove tens of thousands of his own starving and freezing soldiers into suicide missions, wanted to rest his tank troops.
Sorry, I don’t buy it. This was Providence. This was a miracle. But the miracle was not complete. The other half of The Miracle That Literally Saved Western Civilization was yet to be created, and this is where director Christopher Nolan’s latest masterpiece begins.
Mustering all of his second-to-none storytelling skills, Nolan breaks his narrative into three parts: the battle in the air (over Dunkirk to protect the trapped soldiers from Hitler’s deadly Luftwaffe), the sea (the armada of some 800 private boats sent to rescue the army) and land (the sitting duck soldiers on the beach).
On a deeper level, Nolan uses each of these three fronts to explore, in the most emotionally moving way imaginable, the themes of survival, spirit, and sacrifice.
The struggle for survival, of course, is taking place on land, primarily through the eyes of Tommy (newcomer Fionn Whitehead), a British Army private who learns of his desperate situation after eavesdropping on Kenneth Branagh’s Commander Bolton, the man with the thankless job of pier-master over the seven-day evacuation.
What is now known as the Spirit of Dunkirk, or the unconquerable spirit of the British civilians who held out for four interminable years until, in the middle of 1944, outside help finally landed at Normandy, is portrayed through Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance), who, on the surface, looks every bit the milquetoast Englishman. Over the course of the movie’s tighter than tight 106 minutes, we see his mettle and that of the two teenagers who join him on what looks like a suicide mission.
The sacrifice comes from Farrier (Tom Hardy) a Royal Air Force pilot faced time and again with impossible choices. As it was in Mad Max: Fury Road, Hardy’s face is covered throughout most of the movie (by an oxygen mask) but when he finally rips it off, the look on his face becomes one of the great reveals in film history, especially when combined with what immediately follows.
Dunkirk is a perfect blend of art-house and summer blockbuster, an unforgettable bigscreen experience (you will want to experience again and again) that delivers an even bigger emotional wallop.
Nolan, who also wrote the script, isn’t interested in usual-usual exposition, those war movie moments where the action slows just long enough so a character can monologue his backstory. In fact there is hardly any dialogue at all (Nolan’s good luck charm Michael Caine can be heard over an airplane radio). This is a story told with sight and sound, these are characters built through action and the look in their eyes.
Nothing, however, is more indispensable to this achievement than Hans Zimmer’s score.
The integrity within this epic of intense grandeur is indisputable. We are not manipulated. We are not asked to relate to anyone. Zimmer’s impressionistic score never reaches for the heartstrings. Nothing is asked of our sentiment. What makes your heart hammer and break, your soul stir, your muscles tense, your mind unable to forget, are the images of humanity, of all that everyday heroism glimpsed between all that dark and deadly sea water and all those terrifying metal war machines.
Is Dunkirk the greatest war movie ever made? One of the greatest? Only time will tell, but there is no question it is in the running.
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