What I really appreciate about Dunkirk is that Nolan depicts war in the ever-so-romantic way ubiquitous in the movie industry while not romanticizing the cruelty and ludicrousness of war.
He tells stories: stories about soldiers desperately trying to survive and go home, stories about fighters using up the fuel and even their life to protect their compatriots, stories about patriotic civilians sailing through the bombed sea bringing men back, stories about the most devoted war engagers keeping to their posts and the most innocent standers-by getting dragged into the vortex. This is the romantic facet of the film: Nolan brings out the full dramatic potential of each story, no matter how trivial it seems or how small a figure the character is, and emotionally saturates the plot to make it the only focus of a viewer at any given moment. He knows how to tell stories well, and he does exactly that.
But he doesn’t judge. Because the war gets to everyone, changes everyone. It turns the same species against one another, it glorifies manslaughter but demands mercy at the same time, it magnifies the fear and stupidity and coldness and bravery and kindness and grit in human nature but it debases human values and beliefs to the extreme.
I like the way he integrates the scenes into the big frame of the Dunkirk evacuation but maintains the individual theme of each subplot. Every character is fighting and struggling so hard, but they fight for different things in different ways, yet they all struggle because of the war, more specifically, because of the whim of a few men and the worthlessness of individuals compared to the “big picture”. I particularly like the contrast between two scenes, the one where a nameless/faceless soldier on the Dunkirk beach walks into the sea to commit suicide, and the one where the pilot (played by Tom Hardy) smoothly parks his plane and serenely accepts his capture (and possible demise). From an orthodox point of view, there cannot be a bigger gap between these two characters, where the former is the coward who vanishes without a trace and is forgotten instantly, while the latter is the hero who saves the day and gets mobbed by legions of admirers. However, in the movie, their ends seem to be equally dramatic and poignant. The war redefines them and distinguishes them drastically, but at the end of the day, when faced with death, their separate fates are reduced to the same tragedy, in which millions of lives are thrown away without any purpose.
I think Dunkirk touches the audience by telling the stark truth about ordinary people, rather than beautifying war veterans and glorifying battles. Most soldiers are in fact just like us: they don’t enjoy being shot at or shooting people; they try everything to stay alive and perhaps go home one day. Ordinary people can cheat and turn at each other when it comes to life and death. It is simple and ugly and not at all romantic or epic. Interestingly the movie casts several good looking young stars to play those pedestrian soldiers. Perhaps in that way it’s slightly easier for the audience to forgive or sympathize with their not-quite-noble doings in the heat of the war. At least they forgive themselves. Or they forget about it all: they end up going home, cheered as heroes, so everything is back to normal when the war is no longer twisting humanity. Nothing reveals the horrifying impact of war more tactfully than such sarcasm.
One thing I don’t enjoy when watching Dunkirk is the music. We all know Hans Zimmer writes beautiful, compelling pieces and I acknowledge that this film is filled with emotions, but music, especially a movie soundtrack, is supposed to facilitate or highlight the emotions, not force them on the spectators through strong beats and high volumes. For some scenes in Dunkirk the soundtrack is simply too obvious, too blatant and too distracting (for example, the one in which the two young soldiers carry an injured man to the departing ship while the music adds a rhythm that does not actually agree with the running steps; also, in one of the fighter jets engagements the music gets really loud) that it counters the dramatic effects. This happened in Interstellar a few years ago as well (but unfortunately even if the music problem got fixed Interstellar still would not be a great film as far as I’m concerned). Perhaps one day I will watch it on Netflix with the volume down. At least the film itself is worth rewatching.