The podcast "Pop Culture Happy Hour" of NPR (National Public Radio) spoke highly of Dunkirk and made sense. The four guests summed up the three convincing advantages of this film:
1. Nolan only emphasizes survival, almost no personal heroism, and basically abandoned the corresponding background, character description and theatrical structure. There are two routines for war movies in the Hollywood framework: First, a small group of people in the big war, some are weak, some are hateful, some have heroic potential but may fail, the big narrative and the skirmish are in a complex and simple appearance. It unfolds in a closed, closed network of relationships; secondly, between the wars, these soldiers gather together to talk, and the brotherhood and the image of the characters are enriched by this. The film completely abandoned these two routines, abandoned the in-depth development of the character's personality, and replaced it with three parallel narrative lines, aiming to restore the local situation of Dunkirk at that time and the instinctive reaction of the characters in order to survive.
2. Derived from the first point is the collective nature of the war itself. Someone found that all the characters in the film had incomplete names, so they questioned the sincerity of the director. But the war was so tragic that 400,000 people were defeated like a mountain. How much attention can one's name and even life be given? Nolan’s lens language is clear: at the beginning of the film, we seem to know who the protagonist is, but when he walks into the crowd on the beach, when thousands of people wearing helmets lower their bodies while avoiding the strafe, you find that he is too Tiny. This point, on the one hand, reveals the characteristics of the battlefield: the collective is a unit of success or failure, and the individual's face is often extremely vague; Depend on each other, but have no time to understand each other.
3. Nolan chose a more difficult perspective to shoot Dunkirk. Many military fans will point out that the success of the Dunkirk retreat should be attributed to the German strategic errors and the French army's tenacious resistance to the Germans, and therefore accuse Nolan's angle of being too old. In fact, if Nolan spreads out the pattern of warfare and shoots big war movies, he can spend a lot less effort and borrow a lot of mature war movie tools to advance the plot. But his focus is not here. What he is concerned about is the survival instinct at the Dunkirk scene. The meeting point of the three timelines comes from three awesome persistences: the people on the beach insist on living against despair, the pilots in the air insist on escorting until the fuel runs out, and the ordinary shipowners on the sea insist on sailing towards Dunkirk. In the end, more than 300,000 troops were finally rescued, no one stood out, but those who survived tried their best. If you want to shoot this kind of persistence, you have to take the risk of being "too flat."
4. A few fragmentary opinions. The host mentioned that the film successfully combines two battlefield horrors: claustrophobia and vastness; Mark Rylance's character (the shipowner's father) shows credible calmness and moderate control ability, in the psychological of drama It is a kind of balance to the panic on the battlefield; in the historical retreat, the pilots of the civilian ships were mostly the British navy, and only a few of the ships were driven by the owners themselves; in the film, there are chestnut hair, high cheekbones, and strong accents. There are several soldiers, and even American audiences who are clothed in the UK may be stupid and unclear; if you find yourself obsessed with Tom Hardy’s lips, this film is for you.
PS Although I am very impressed with the opinions of these professional commentators, I still can't give up the five-minute long shot of Dunkirk in the movie "Atonement": the "one beauty" whose physical strength is close to overdraft, and a grievance has been charged. The young people in, stumbled into a beach outside the city of Dunkirk; the old resort was entrenched by British soldiers who had lost their helmets and armor. People were crying and laughing and chasing, and the Ferris wheel was spinning feebly in the setting sun. After checking, the locations selected for "Atonement" and "Dunkirk" are different. The former is one of the assembly areas, and the latter is the final retreat location of the British army. The atmosphere of Dunkirk in the two films is quite different. But they all reflect the true side of the Great Retreat. That's good, I don't have to reluctantly give up my love after all, and favor one and the other.
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