Clearly, Harry Styles, who got his start on The X Factor in the United Kingdom and is lead singer of the band One Direction, falls into the “recognizable” category, but D’Arcy wasn’t aware he was in the film until arriving to the set.
Continue with more depictions of the Dunkirk evacuation and other mostly intense recommendations. But if you were looking for a story, or characters to care about, you might want to look somewhere else. We take everything in, we don’t know what is actually going on.
The film moves along at a brisk pace and no scene feels out of place or unneeded. I’m not exaggerating, those scenes seem like real high definition footage from World War 2, visuals that Nolan somehow obtained from the video archives of the war. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called the film “a tour de force of cinematic craft and technique”, and in Peter Travers’s review for Rolling Stone, he wrote that it “may be the greatest war film ever”.
Nolan plops us down in the middle of the evacuation, never explaining the logistics of the war, simply showing us long lines of exhausted soldiers praying to be rescued. Saving Private Ryan is actually much bloodier and more horrific than Dunkirk but it has an incredibly strong storyline throughout as an organising narrative, which some critics felt turned the film, after the carnage of the landing sequence, into yet another story of cowboys and Indians. He puts the camera right next to them, makes your eyes their eyes, and in the best moments it’s absolutely staggering. Interestingly enough, he wound up with a screenwriting Oscar nomination anyway.
One negative I do have is that there were no “characters“, just people. We would not be able to do this in the same way if the overall circumstances were any more extensively narrated for us. And in a movie like The Wages of Fear, there’s no Hollywood guarantee that our heroes will make it through their tense scenario alive.
Felt enormous responsibility while making Dunkirk, says director Christopher Nolan
“When I first heard about Chris making this film, I was already excited to watch it”, Styles says. “It gives you a sort of emotional, immersive relationship with the events you’re seeing”.
To achieve this effect of dunking you, the viewer, into what you see, Nolan has more or less abandoned the creation of character too, nearly anonymising his protagonists, not appealing to our sympathies for individuals in peril.
Aesthetically and tonally, Battle of Britain does not go with Dunkirk, so don’t expect it to at all.
The fans will no doubt come – and with an open mind.
At the same time, what few planes can be spared are sent out to do what they can. Also among its all-star cast are Laurence Olivier, Christopher Plummer, Robert Shaw, and a young Ian McShane as a novice pilot.