Dunkirk is a glorious victory for old-fashioned movie making

Given his fondness for bloated extravagance in his storytelling- his last four films have come in at 2 and a half hours minimum - it is surprising that Christopher Nolan confines himself to 106 minutes in Dunkirk. It’s even more surprising, considering his similar tendency for massive exposition dumps, that the dialogue in the film is completely minimal.

The narrative is set up in three lines in a title card and then we are into it. Characters speak only when they have something vital to say because one imagines this is not the sort of scenario that lends itself to banter. The result is a magnificent, visually driven film with scarcely a wasted frame.

The economy of the storytelling is admirable. We don’t need to know about the British Expeditionary Force or The Phoney War, or anything of the sort. This is World War Two seen as a ticking clock narrative; there are 400,000 men on the beaches of Dunkirk in northern France, can they be evacuated before they are slaughtered or captured? That’s it – tick, tick, tick.

We open with a group of young British soldiers which is very quickly reduced to one, archetypally called Tommy (Fionn Whitehead). Within a couple of minutes, we are on the beach, under attack, and for the next 100 minutes on the edge of our seats.

In narrative terms Dunkirk is an exercise in pure cinema. The gift of the film maker is the ability to play with time and Nolan does that by crafting three separate storylines. There is one on The Mole, an artificial jetty from which the soldiers are being evacuated, one from a little ship coming to aid the evacuation, and one from a couple of Spitfire pilots (Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden) doing their best to provide air cover. This is an elemental story of land, sea, and air.

Nolan’s conceit is that the story on the Mole lasts for a week, the one on the boat lasts for a day, and the airborne story lasts for an hour. We however see them all enmesh and finally come together in the space of 106 minutes. This involves Nolan’s favourite editor, Lee Smith, using parallel editing techniques which call to mind Edwin S. Porter’s Life of an American Fireman (1903).

The result is a sensory disorientation which echoes the fragmentary and shattering experience of combat. The sound design also plays its part with a low-level soundtrack suggesting constant menace which means the threat is as surprising as it is ever-present. On the other hand, the sound mix does make it hard to hear some of the dialogue; not that anyone ever says anything crucial.

The approach to character is similarly random. We follow the characters we follow simply because they are there, their stories intersect as their lives intersect and we pick up the threads. The randomness of the approach means that not only do characters not have back stories, some don’t even have names – Cillian Murphy, for example, is credited as ‘Shivering Soldier’.

This lack of detail actually makes you more involved with the characters, it is easier to empathise with them when all you consider is the purity and the enormity of the threat they are facing. There is none of the stereotypical chirpy Cockney banter of Fifties British war films, none of the noble Dunkirk spirit; these are terrified young men who are prepared to do whatever it takes to survive and get home.

Although it is ostensibly the story of young soldiers there are some grown-ups in the cast too. Kenneth Branagh as the commander on The Mole and Mark Rylance as a weekend sailor doing his duty make fine buttresses to support the rest of the story. In the air Tom Hardy’s Spitfire pilot is a largely mute witness to the drama unfolding below, in many way he is the eyes and ears of the audience.

Famously Nolan shoots on film rather than digital and the effects are instantly apparent. Working on his favoured wide screen format he and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema construct sequence after sequence of lush, rich images. The benefits of Smith’s editing technique come into play here too because Nolan can hold shots longer than normal giving the eye the chance to roam around van Hoytema’s meticulously composed frame. The consequence is moments that make the heart stop and others that make the heart swell. The sequence towards the end which marries a ‘dead’ Spitfire with shades of Elgar’s Nimrod is a genuine thing of beauty.

It goes without saying that you should see Dunkirk. I should also add that you should see it in the biggest format and on the biggest screen you can find. Nolan is offering a genuine epic to affect all of the senses and this exercise in pure cinema deserves to be seen at its very best.