Tag: Christopher Nolan

Oppenheimer

Posted on by victorfraga

Christopher Nolan’s 12th film arrives in cinemas in the most unexpected way. His first work after an ugly breakup with long-time studio Warner Bros, Oppenheimer comes with the peculiar hype of being one half of “Barbenheimer” – the double bill proposed by those who noticed its shared release with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie. The clash has been beneficial for everyone as fans opt to watch two films instead of choosing a side, but will this three-hour epic hold up its end of the bargain?

Cillian Murphy, who had small roles in all three of Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy films as well as Inception (2010) and Dunkirk (2017), takes the lead as J. Robert Oppenheimer. Known to history as The Father of The Atomic Bomb, the film dramatises his recruitment by the US government during World War 2 to put together a bomb that will end the war. Conscious of the ramifications, but also fearing what would happen if the Nazis get there first, Oppenheimer leads The Manhattan Project, and the historic development of the bomb that would destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As well as the project, the film also looks at Oppenheimer as a man, and his opposition to the use of his invention in the years after the war.

The film breaks a lot of rules around summer movies. It’s a three-hour, artistically-led drama that prioritises conversations over spectacle, and yet it is as thrilling as anything you will see all year. The tension as The Manhattan Project builds, with many learned minds disagreeing over the methods and morality of their work, creates the tone of a horror/thriller. Behind the camera, it’s a symphony of sound and vision. Ludwig Göransson’s imposing soundtrack dances with the visuals, telling an emotional truth beneath the facts of the case. It’s breathtaking to watch, particularly in the Imax format Nolan endorses.

Many Nolan movies can be accused of getting lost in the science, and with Oppenheimer those calculations are already historical fact. Instead, the director revels in the murkiest, dirtiest moralities faced at the time. We look at the man behind the legend, and how only the most complex mind can make the kind of breakthrough he achieved. The growing spectre of Communist panic puts a question mark over his patriotism, but he is shown to be a free thinker rather than a card-carrying revolutionary (“why limit yourself to one dogma?” he asks when questioned about his beliefs).

The film’s other question is harder to answer: is he truly the “destroyer of worlds” he became known as? Is a scientist responsible for how his breakthroughs are exploited? Arguments for and against are made, but from unexpected quarters. Representatives of the American establishment bristle at his guilt, as it questions their own Post-War consensus of “doing what we had to do”. Oppenheimer’s greatest judge is himself, with the third hour of the film unfolding as a fascinating quest for some kind of punishment.

Hollywood’s biggest and brightest line-up to be nourished by the actor-friendly project, and everyone gets fed. Matt Damon is the perfect foil to Murphy as the brusque Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves, who doesn’t trust these men of science but is smart enough to know he needs them. Emily Blunt shines, particularly in the third hour, as Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, a role that starts out as slight and build brilliantly into a storm of impotent rage. Notable names like Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Gary Oldman, and Casey Affleck all appear in roles that are slight for stars of their stature, but allow them a moment that justifies their involvement.

There are two performances that stand above the crowd, however, in Robert Downey Jr and Cillian Murphy. The former Iron Man found Marvel stardom thanks to interesting, charismatic supporting roles during his comeback in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While he is older, this performance is reminiscent of that period. There’s no hint of Tony Stark here, no quips or self-assured smirks. Instead, he uses the authority of his stardom to make Atomic Energy Committee chair Lewis Strauss an unknown quantity for most of the film, both helping and hindering Oppenheimer in equal measure, before a late-stage twist that allows him to grandstand. It’s a remarkable performance that reveals an actor going back to basics and finding cinematic gold.

He is, however, a close second to Murphy. The sheer weight of history felt in his eyes would be enough to carry such a weighty film, but every scene makes your eyes drift towards his every movement. It doesn’t have the same menace as his famous Peaky Blinders character, Thomas Shelby, but it does have some similarity to that performance, in that they are both men burdened with superior knowledge and dreadful acts. This is Murphy’s first significant movie lead, and hopefully won’t be his last.

Nolan’s work is so notable that his recent films have suffered the fate of being scrutinised to death. Oppenheimer is a film that should simply be enjoyed. The director may have not saved cinema with 2020’s Tenet, but he continues to stretch the limits of what we believe large scale movies are capable of.

Oppenheimer is in cinemas worldwide on Friday, July 21st.

Is Denis Villeneuve the new Christopher Nolan?

Posted on by victorfraga

Among other things, arthouse cinema celebrates experimentation, a quality demonstrated by Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), a thriller that tells its mystery in reverse chronological order. Conversely, blockbusters mainly aim to appeal to mass audiences through sheer entertainment. These two avenues seem contradictory, but the strength of the British director’s early work lies in its ability to combine them and thereby cater equally to hardcore cinephiles and the average movie-goer. With Inception (2010) being his best example to date, Nolan’s films focus on story, character and big-budget thrills in equal measure. Nolan trusts the intelligence of his audience.

Denis Villeneuve’s (pictured above; image by Gage Skidmore) Arrival (2016) mirrors Nolan’s Inception and Interstellar (2014) in its use of time, and Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve, 2017) is both intellectual and visually stunning. The Canadian helmer’s early work is similarly comparable to Nolan’s – like Memento before it, Enemy (2013) is an internal thriller centred on a psychologically unbalanced protagonist. Having started from similarly independent backgrounds, both directors have maintained the abstractions of their earlier filmography in their bigger-budget work.

Nolan and Villeneuve both excite viscerally. They have championed the experience of going to the cinema over streaming, openly criticising their studios in the process (Nolan has parted ways with long-term collaborators Warner Bros). Both favour practical effects over CGI. Especially Nolan. His films have included a functioning Batmobile, high-street truck flips and plane crashes. Though not as comprehensively, Villeneuve has followed this model – whereas most blockbusters (think Marvel) revolve around green screen he shot large parts of Blade Runner 2049 and Dune (2021) in huge, intricately detailed sets (see video below) – even filming the latter in the Jordanian desert.

The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008) introduced unforeseen nuance into the superhero genre, changing it from being generally perceived as silly fun to being taken seriously by critics and large audiences. Its omission from the 2008 Best Picture nominations influenced the Academy’s decision to include more nominees in the future. Equally, Inception boasts a complex narrative that still adheres to the demand for explosive blockbuster spectacle.

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A recipe gone awry?

Lately though, this fusion hasn’t worked as well in Nolan’s work. Visuals and music in Tenet (2020) are superb (Ludwig Göransson deserves an apology from the Academy), but the story is far too confusing to engage with emotionally. It also seems that as Nolan’s technical ambition has escalated, striking a balance between abstraction and mass appeal has become increasingly difficult. Dunkirk (Nolan, 2017; pictured below) boasts impressive set-pieces and the “inversion” in Tenet looks stunning, but both lack a strong emotional core.

Meanwhile, Villeneuve’s latest films have succeeded where Nolan’s have failed. Blade Runner 2049 is aesthetically striking and provides a touching story, the same of which can be said for Arrival. Both boast the intelligence and awe we associate with Nolan whilst also being easier to follow.

Blade Runner 2049 and Arrival did well critically, and the early praise for Dune suggests a continuation of this trend. Meanwhile, Tenet underperformed at the US box office and received mixed reviews by Nolan’s standards. Even though The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar performed well commercially and critically, they are both divisive. Polarisation isn’t necessarily bad, but the lack of controversy surrounding Villeneuve suggests he is developing a more winning version of Nolan’s formula.

Additionally, Nolan’s upcoming film about atom-bomb creator J. Oppenheimer seems smaller-scale than the bombastic Tenet, as suggested by its $100 million budget (relatively small for Nolan). Given the biographical subject matter, it could also find Nolan scaling back baffling storytelling in favour of something more accessible. Because of this potential shift the spotlight could now be on Villeneuve to provide art-house blockbusters for the masses.

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Money talks

The notion of Villeneuve “replacing” Nolan is complicated by the fact that Nolan’s films still do (very) well financially. Dunkirk grossed over $527 million worldwide, whereas Blade Runner 2049 disappointed (relatively) with a $92 million US and Canada gross and $259 million international intake. Even Tenet’s relatively weak performance (a measly $58 million in the US and Canada) is difficult to judge given it was released mid-pandemic. If Villeneuve is emulating Nolan, he is doing so artistically more so than financially.

At the moment, all eyes are on Dune. At a speculated budget of $165 million, it is Villeneuve’s biggest film yet, and it shows. Each frame is enormous, and the bombastic Hans Zimmer (Nolan’s frequent collaborator, unsurprisingly) score adds extra scope. Dune is intellectual and viscerally entertaining, centring on dreams and complex politics as well as a conventional battle against evil. It seems poised to appeal to viewers seeking thinking man’s sci-fi as well as larger audiences. It has garnered positive reviews so far and debuted strongly overseas (it harvested $36.8 million from just 24 markets in early release) – with the added star power of Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya it is likely to triumph.

With Nolan scaling things down and Dune poised to succeed commercially and critically, Villeneuve seems likely to take his mantle as Hollywood’s chief mediator of art-house and blockbuster cinema.

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Dune is in cinemas on Thursday, October 21st.

You can reach Amhara Chamberlayne on Twitter @AmharaFilm.

Tenet

Posted on by victorfraga

He’s done it again. Yes, he’s playing with time and audience expectations. Yes, the action is kinetic and absorbing. Yes, Michael Caine is in it and women barely are. Despite conforming to his well-trodden formula in parts, a bonkers science fiction conceit and engaging performances lead to a convincing result.

Foremost, the action set pieces are something to behold. These are your big ticket items to get the punters through the door and they are visually stunning from the get-go, tending increasingly ostentatious as the runtime wears on. Indeed, some of the more sprawling sequences can be a little hard to follow but there is nothing to criticise about the individual components in these magnetic dioramas. The sci-fi element is key to the fun and without giving any of the mechanics away, Nolan really shows off how the laws of physics themselves are an undeniable element of his director’s toolkit. Here we see the culmination of cinema magic first seeded in the wonky worlds of his earlier movies Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014). The feats committed to screen are at turns beguiling, jaw-dropping and sometimes a little frustrating to wrap your head around.

The same is true of the overarching plot. The whole film is strung along by a capably deafening soundtrack but unfortunately the bombastic sound design means that essential explanatory dialogue is occasionally lost and the film doesn’t take a single breath for viewers to catch up. Even with the addition of subtitles, I lost some nuances of just why particular events were happening. Despite the lack of clarity, it’s a lot more interesting than the pseudocomplexity of Interception. Just don’t think about it too hard, as the characters themselves take pains to point out. Sure, some overwrought nerds will doubtless emerge with an axe to grind but treat it as knowingly dumb and walk away all the more satisfied.

Lead roles are a little light on substance, but who really needs things like ‘motivation’ and ‘character development’ when there is such a bounty of rich action to be had. John David Washington is clearly having a lot of fun but never strays too far from badass mode. Helped along by the globe-spanning storyline, Bond is the obvious comparison and a property that has been flirtatiously associated with Nolan for years. Fortunately, Tenet plays more to Craig than Connery but whilst the weight of the lead is admirably shouldered by Washington, it is Robert Pattinson who steals scenes effortlessly. All suave competence with a touch of enigma, Pattinson has recently excelled at genre performances with Good Time (Safdie Brothers, 2017), High Life (Claire Denis, 2019) and The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019), positioning himself as an actor who can do anything. Tenet provides the most directly big-budget action role for him yet, a dry run ahead of his upcoming turn as Bruce Wayne. Nolan here ensures a successful passing of the Batman custodianship. No-one talks about Affleck.

Elsewise, the actor behind the central antagonist is near unrecognisable, name withheld so that readers can also experience moments of “Is that…? Surely not. But it must be…”. Whilst this turn is pleasantly surprising, the brief appearance of Sir Michael Caine comes across as needlessly gratuitous this time around. Whilst some Nolan darlings are bearing ever-fresher fruit, it’s past time to kill others and women are again underserved here. Elizabeth Debicki merits her share of the screen time but is given very little to work with aside from keywords like “doting mother”, “unhappy marriage” and “tenacious”. She is introduced with a background in art appraisal and certification but this quickly falls by the wayside in service to the bigger picture. Other female characters are functional, delivering exposition in their brief windows on-screen before it’s back to the boys. Maybe next time, eh. A slew of minor mercenary figures also rise and fall as the characters traverse country to country, their availability explained away by the intelligence service background of the main characters. Again, don’t think about it too much.

All that to say Tenet is well worth your time and money in a summer light on new releases. However, the film is firmly located at the opposite end of the spectrum to offerings from Statham, Cruise and The Rock, demanding a little savvy from the audience. A few threads are even left open to chew over at home and, from another studio, one could expect further installments. In this era of constant franchising, it is gratifying to instead be allowed the space to reflect.

Tenet is in cinemas everywhere on Wednesday, August 26th. On VoD on Friday, January 4th

2001: A Space Odyssey (50th anniversary, 70mm)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is back in a brand new 70mm print struck from new printing elements made from the original camera negative. Like known champion of physical celluloid over digital print Christopher Nolan who was involved in the process, I saw the film in a cinema as a boy with my father, although in my case I saw one of its many reruns in the seventies. Nevertheless, I relish the chance to go back and see this brand new ‘unrestored’ 70mm print because it recreates what audiences saw on release, no remastering, re-edits or redone effects.

The film absolutely holds up against present day efforts (one of the few remotely like it is Nolan’s Interstellar/2014). In its day, 2001’s visual effects were far superior to anything previously seen in science fiction and although cinema effects technology has moved on considerably, this aspect of the film remains convincing.

However, the visual effects are far from being the strongest aspect of the film which was conceived by director Kubrick with SF author Arthur C.Clarke. The plot is deceptively simple. (Skip the rest of this paragraph to avoid spoilers if you’ve never seen the film.) A monolith (sides ratio: 1:4:9) appears on Earth and inspires primitive apes to make weapons, it reappears thousands of years later in the Tycho crater on the Moon and after being excavated unexpectedly sends a one-off transmission to Jupiter. So mankind sends a space mission to Jupiter, but the ship’s on board computer malfunctions and attempts to kill the crew. The one surviving astronaut undergoes a journey which culminates in his going through the door of the monolith and emerging as a gigantic star child.

Considering the magnitude of the themes involved here, it’s surprising how dull or banal much of the movie is. If this sounds like negative criticism, I don’t mean it in that sense. The film’s execution is never dull or banal, rather much of its subject matter is dullness or banality. Hitchcock once described drama as “life with the dull bits cut out”; Kubrick’s genius in 2001 is that he forces us to watch these dull bits. And they make for compelling viewing.

Thus there are scenes of apes gathering at a watering hole or huddling underneath rock ledges at night against the cold. There are scenes of a flight to the moon via an intermediary space station when a jump cut could have taken us straight there in terms of plot. There’s a briefing in a conference room at Tycho where Dr Haywood Floyd (William Sylvester) addresses fellow scientists about cover stories and the need for secrecy from which the film cuts away just before telling us (a scene we never see) what he knows about the object excavated in the crater. There are hours of the two man crew Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) – there are actually five crew, but three are in hibernation – and the HAL 9000 computer (voice: Douglas Rain) going about their daily routines aboard the Discovery One spaceship to Jupiter. There is the weird interstellar journey which plays out like an incomprehensible drug trip and, finally, the surviving astronaut’s emergence into a world of rooms in which eighteenth century furniture sits upon a grid of white squares lit up from below. It’s hard to find anything like any of this elsewhere in cinema, science fiction or otherwise.

Set against these scenes are moments of great import: an ape trying out as a club a bone found on the ground, a group of spacesuited astronauts on the moon overcome by sudden, unbearable noise from the monolith, a spacewalking Jupiter Mission astronaut struggling frantically after his breathing line has been cut and the heartbreaking disconnection of HAL one memory terminal at a time.

The wider panorama here contains unforgettable moments predicting the minutiae of space travel which may not have come true in the year 2001 but still feel like they could be just around the corner in 2018, the date of the film’s title notwithstanding. Take the celebrated sequence travelling to the space station. A sleeping Pan Am passenger’s pen floats in zero gravity, an air-hostess (or space-hostess) enters shot right way up and walks in a circle until her feet are above and her head below to walk out of shot upside-down, a rotating space ship slowly docks with a space station with which its rotation is in sync – all to the strains of Strauss’ Blue Danube waltz. And as testament to the incredible detail in the notoriously obsessive Kubrick’s intensive research, widescreen TVs on the backs of the seats inside the passenger cabin. Unremarkable today, but possibly little more than an idea on a drawing board somewhere in the TV manufacturing industry when the director built them into his film as something of a major coup.

If 2001 remains unchallenged as the greatest SF film of all time, there is however one aspect in which it has aged badly overall. Aside from the group of four Russian scientists with whom Dr. Floyd has a conversation, three of whom are women, it’s notable that women aren’t given any real position of prominence in 2001 – hostesses and receptionists plus a handful of minor/secondary scientists characters – and that’s it. If Kubrick and Clarke were alive and writing the film today, I’d like to think that’s something they might change. Otherwise, though, 2001 could have been made yesterday and seeing it in this brand new 70mm print is a real treat.

2001: A Space Odyssey (70mm) is back out in the UK on Friday, May 18th. Watch the film trailer below:

Memoir Of A Murderer (Sal-In-Ja-Eu Ki-Eok-Beob)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

At the start of Memoir of a Murderer, Kim Byung-su (Sul Kyoung-gu) walks dazedly out of a dark tunnel into a white, wintry landscape. Like so much in this convoluted South Korean thriller, that might be highly significant or symbolic, a metaphor, a journey, a state of mind. Or it might not. It’s undeniably a visually striking and arresting starting point. In the manner of frame stories or flashbacks in so many films, we return to this sequence towards the end. But it’s not clear at the start that this is a flashback, and it’s no clearer at the end when this scene recurs.

That’s indicative of some of the games screenwriter Hwang Jo-yoon (co-screenwriter of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, 2003) and director Won Shin-yun want to play with their audience. They’re plugging into a long cinematic tradition of films dealing with impossible memory and that peculiar subset thereof most notably represented by Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) in which a main character suffers from amnesia or memory loss. Just as the protagonist of Memento suffers from short term memory loss and must therefore physically record events so as to have a record of them to which he can refer before taking appropriate action, so too Alzheimer’s sufferer Kim needs a means of recording events so that he can recall them by some method other than his increasingly unreliable memory. Doting daughter Eun-hee (Kim Seol-hyun) gives him a mobile phone on which he can record messages with his voice as a means of recording important events in his recent past.

Like Memento, Memoir of a Murderer takes place in the subjective experience of a memory-unreliable protagonist. Unlike Memento, Memoir of a Murderer‘s dramatic structure is not rigorously ordered and indeed can be quite disorientating and confusing at times. For example, a flashback early on has the ageing Kim recall his many murders. As he tells it, he only ever killed for a good reason, only people who deserved to die. His first victim was his father who horribly abused his own wife and family, his second a woman who came to his veterinary practice wanting him to cut open the pet dog she’d killed to extract the jewellery it had swallowed. As Kim sees it, he’s preventing pain and possibly murder being inflicted on other people by killing his chosen victims. But there’s at least one point in the narrative where you wonder momentarily if these memories are actually true and whether he really is a serial killer at all. And there are flashbacks to things in his past which have got jumbled up inside his head and may in fact misrepresent his true personal history. This is not a man upon whose memory, short or long term, we can rely.

So Kim spends time pondering his life at Bamboo Grave, the rural site well away from the city in which he resides and where he claims to have buried his victims. And he recalls his violent car accident 17 years earlier which is where all his memory problems started. Then, driving his black jeep, he runs into the back of a white car and, whilst going to check that the other driver is ok, finds blood leaking from the white car’s boot and takes a sample of it using some tissue paper. He then finds himself face to face with the unhurt Min Tae-joo (Kim Nam-gil) and immediately knows that this man is like himself: another serial killer. Min’s behaviour is certainly suspect: he claims the leaking body is that of a deer he hit and he won’t give Kim his driver details for insurance purposes, even though Kim insists it was his Kim’s fault and will happily pay for any repairs.

The narrative plays some neat tricks on the audience. When Kim forgets who his daughter is, he tries to strangle her. Later, having forgotten this episode, he sees red marks on her neck and assumes rival killer and her boyfriend Min to be responsible. And because his memory is less than reliable, we’re not quite sure who or what to believe.

The ante is upped via a series of initially believable but increasingly less plausible plot developments. Kim learns through his mate the local cop (Oh Dal-su) who runs a check on the car number plate for him as a favour that owner Min is a cop. Later on, Min, running into Eun-hee outside Kim’s veterinary practice, starts dating the girl. By the time we reach the revelation of a particular death, credibility has stretched well beyond breaking point. Which is a shame, because before the proceedings topple into silliness, the way they keep you guessing is highly effective while the overall narrative delivers more than its share of suspense, shocks and surprises. And the whole thing is based on such a memorable premise.

Memoir Of A Murderer showed at the BFI London Film Festival in 2017, when this piece was originally written. It shows on Monday, May 21st (2018), in London and Cambridge as part of the London Korean Film Festival.

Why did Nigel Farage like Dunkirk so much?

Posted on by victorfraga

Nigel Farage isn’t my favourite person. He epitomises the side of Britain with which I do not identify: racist, nationalistic, nostalgic of British Imperialism and displaying a smug and yet tacit sense of superiority. I believe in a diverse, tolerant, inclusive and internationalist Britain. A few days ago, I came a across a tweet from Nigel Farage recommending Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (accompanied by the image above), a film which Jeremy Clarke had reviewed a couple of weeks earlier for DMovies. Farage said: “I urge every youngster to go out and watch Dunkirk“. On the other hand, our dirty reviewer described it as “a remarkable insight into the dirty side of being part of a war”. So I questioned myself: how is it that someone as reactionary as Nigel Farage liked such a subversive piece? I went to the cinema to see it for myself.

I found Dunkirk excruciatingly boring and cold. The video game language and characters without background and emotional depth made it impossible for me to relate to the film. But it’s not personal taste for cinema that I want to discuss here. It isn’t the historicity of the film either (which has also been questioned). I want to understand why is it that the film resonates with nationalists.

The simple answer of course is: this is a movie about withdrawing from Europe, a heaven-sent analogy for frothing Brexiters. But that’s not all. There’s another reason why Dunkirk has pleased Nigel Narage and most likely other Ukip and Conservative voters. It plays out like a adrenaline-inducing video game or canticle, which can be easily misinterpreted.

I’m not suggesting that everyone who enjoyed the film is a nationalist or a latent warmonger. I wouldn’t even challenge that the film is indeed dirty and subversive in some ways, like Jeremy argued. And I don’t even think that Christopher Nolan willfully endeavoured to make a film that appealed to nationalists, but that’s a risk he was willing to take by making a film that’s not clearly anti-war.

So what’s an anti-war movie?

Dunkirk is not an anti-war film, not at all. Once a film portrays war in a positive and engaging light (even if this engagement is in the shape of adrenaline-induced thrills instead of patriotic chants or more didactic political messages), there’s always a risk that reactionary pundits will seize and claim it in favour of their dubious nationalistic agenda.

War is repugnant and grotesque, and so should anti-war films be. Violence should never be airbrushed, blood should never be removed, and the conflict should never be glorified, romanticised or celebrated in any way whatsoever. Otherwise it can easily slip into a military apologia. A genuinely anti-war movie should never be a feel-good movie. It should be harrowing and disturbing because at war there are no victors. Or a mockery: that’s also a possibility for an anti-war movie.

Dunkirk, on the hand, works like a hypnotising video game. Not coincidentally, the cinema screening I attended was preceded by an advert of the game “Call of Duty WW2”. The Hans Zimmer electrifying soundtrack plays out at 140 bpm, in a tandem with your heart. I would hazard a guess that a Dunkirk theme park ride will follow soon. Highly suggestible young people will undoubtedly leave the cinema subconsciously thinking: “wow, this is so cool. War is like a video game, what a wild ride, I want to be part of it”. Often we don’t remember the content of a movie, yet we remember the sensation and feelings it triggered. This is why war movies can be so dangerous.

Plus there is no blood in the film, which was a conscious decision by Nolan so that he could get a PG13 certificate in the US and a 12A in the UK. These youngsters will think, again subconsciously: “war is not a bad thing at all. Worse that could happen is I will get covered in slime. I won’t get covered in blood”. That’s why a war movie should never be sanitised and made palatable to young people. They are the same people Nigel Farage wants to recruit for his patriotic and xenophobic cause.

The fact that Dunkirk is a film about evacuation, ie victims fleeing an attacker, does not make it anti-war, either. Instead it just makes it Manichaeistic, feeding the hero and the “good vs evil” narrative, therefore spurring animosity and historical rivalries. The Union Jack is to be seen several times, and the duty to “fight” is highlighted throughout Dunkirk.

My conclusion is very clear-cut: war is the maximum expression of nationalism. If you don’t want nationalists to embrace your film, then you must make it blatantly anti-war.

The anti-war battalion

Below is a small list of genuinely anti-war films that we recommend you watch, including one that’s out in cinemas right how (click on the film titles in order to accede to our review):

Dunkirk

Posted on by mjbstaging

British filmmaker Christopher Nolan – now one of the highest-grossing film directors in history, with the Dark Knight Trilogy under his belt – has created a complex and multilayered film that cleverly interweaves three separate narrative strands: 1) on land over a week a young soldier (Fionn Whitehead) after he arrives alone at Dunkirk beach and falls in with others (including the music superstar and heartthrob Harry Styles); 2) on sea over a day a small, requisitioned, civilian boat (crew: three) go to bring home trapped combatants; and 3) in the air over an hour three Spitfires fly a sortie. Nolan is fascinated by time and runs these in parallel so that an incident partly revealed in one strand is later retold in another revealing more. There’s a constant sense of the clock ticking differently in the three time frames: mind-bending and exhilarating stuff.

The impressive analogue 70mm IMAX version puts you in there as if you’re escaping death on the way to the beach or in a Spitfire cockpit shooting at/being shot at by the enemy. It has everything you expect from a big screen war movie that small scale drama Churchill lacks. It’s a remarkable insight into the dirty side of being part of a war. The issue is survival: if not everyone can be rescued, who will be? The top brass organising the operation led by Kenneth Branagh must confront this issue to transport the maximum number of men home.

For those who are not familiar the events, the film depicts the Dunkirk evacuation of Allied soldiers from the eponymous beaches and harbour of France, between May 26th and June 4th 1940. It is believed that the extremely risky and unexpectedly successful operation saved the 330,000 British, French, Belgian, and Canadian troops from almost certain death under the surrounding German Army. Hence the “Miracle at Dunkirk” accolade.

As in the best horror films, anyone can die at any time. Not that this is a horror film. English soldiers are gunned down by French friendly fire. Spitfire pilot Tom Hardy’s broken fuel gauge makes him reliant on the pilot in the next plane relaying how much fuel that plane has left. Civilian boat captain Mark Rylance sails into a war zone with no weaponry or means of defence so he can rescue combatants. Shell shocked soldier Cillian Murphy completely loses it and injures someone trying to help him.

Men trapped in a beached boat are fired on from outside the hull by unseen assailants. People are trapped in spaces large or small which water threatens to fill cutting off their air supply. Swimmers covered wholly or partially in oil from crashed aircraft are forced to choose between staying underwater and not breathing and coming up to breathe when an inferno rages above the surface. Life and death situations.

Nolan manages some worrying tilts at British society circa 1940 which resonate today. A young soldier reaches the beach and joins a queue to be told to go elsewhere as this line is reserved exclusively for the Grenadiers. Another soldier who doesn’t speak much is accused by others of being a German spy. And an airman who nearly drowned in action is asked by an embittered evacuee, “where were you when we needed you?” British conformism, value judgments and prejudice are alive and well in the fight for survival. But so too are heroism and being prepared to give one’s life in the fight for a better world. Britain, now as then, is both good and bad.

Dunkirk, however, is consistently good. In fact, it’s likely the most impressive film you’ll see this year. It’s out in the UK on Friday, July 21st (2017). See the analogue 70mm IMAX version at BFI Waterloo London, The Science Museum London or Vue Printworks Manchester if you can.

On Amazon Prime on Thursday, April 1st (2021). Also available on other platforms.

Watch Dunkirk‘s two IMAX trailers below:

And here:

And click here for our review of another British historical film set around the same time, and still out in some UK cinemas.