Thoughts on Dunkirk

This movie is fantastic. It’s so fantastic, I saw it in theaters twice.

It’s one of the best war movies I’ve seen in years, but it’s not like other war movies. There is no one main character, there is no heroic charge or last stand, no clear victory or defeat. At the same time, there are cowards as well as heroes. There are men who care only about survival, and there are others—many others—who put their lives on the line to save people they’ve never met.

There’s lots of chaos and death, but very little blood. There’s also very little gunfire for a war movie, and very few explosions. When they happen, though, they’re all the more earth-shattering for the long lulls between them. That seems a lot more realistic to me—and a lot more terrifying.

I really love the fact that you never see the face of the Germans. For the guys on the ground, they’re more a force of nature than something they can actually fight. Even the guys in the air are more worried about how the dogfighting depletes their fuel than they are about actually getting shot down.

One of the things that really fascinates me about this movie is the context in which it happens. Most World War II movies take place in the second half of the war, during or after the Battle of Britain. When the Nazis failed to invade Britain, it was clear that they were going to lose (or at least that it would end in a stalemate on the western front). But when Dunkirk happened, everyone fully expected the Nazis to invade and conquer the UK just like they’d conquered France. It appeared at that time that the Germans were going to win.

It also strikes me that Dunkirk was where World War I met World War II. In the run up to the first world war, the Germans expected to sweep across France and push the British into the sea. They expected that victory was only a matter of weeks away. In the run up of the second world war, they expected a repeat of the brutal trench warfare that bogged down the western front for years. Instead, they got exactly the scenario that the Germans had expected in the first war but never gotten.

This movie made me think a lot about the major defining conflicts of previous generations and what our major defining conflict is going to be. I don’t think we’re far from another Dunkirk. Will we rise to the level of heroism that the British civilians showed when they rescued their soldiers stranded across the channel? Will we come together in the face of the next existential threat, or will we come completely apart?

Dunkirk is a fantasic movie, and I highly recommend it. It’s definitely one of Christopher Nolan’s bests.