Today, let's talk about Dunkirk.
Let me start with the conclusion. I think this movie is a breakthrough experiment by Nolan.
He not only subverted his own style, but also tried to broaden the new expression space of war films.
I was pleasantly surprised to see this kind of experimentation.
Of course, on the other hand, I also agree with what many people say: Nolan's films have become " bad ".
This is the truth.
"Dunkirk" really can't compare with "Inception" or "Interstellar" in terms of direct look and feel.
The reason is also very simple.
In the past, Nolan had two weapons: unrestrained imagination and thrilling suspense.
But these two points are missing in "Dunkirk".
Needless to say, imagination is difficult to display for a "reality-themed" movie.
What about suspense? nor.
Because everyone knew the end of this retreat, the miraculous escape of 330,000 people.
Where is there any suspense?
In this way, it is no wonder that the audience will be disappointed, or bluntly say "it doesn't look good".
Actually, Dunkirk is pretty good.
It's just this "good-looking" that has changed its appearance.
It is not as obvious as "gorgeous pictures", nor is it like a "brain-burning plot", even if you don't understand it, it will be praised as "brilliant!"
The goodness of "Dunkirk" is quiet, it is a secret hidden in "time".
Why do you say that?
Hear me down.
Anyone who is familiar with Nolan knows that he is a director who likes to " play time " and can play new tricks every time.
For example, Memento.
The male protagonist Reiner suffers from "short-term amnesia" and will soon forget what just happened. He has to rely on notes, photos and tattoos to find the real murderer of his wife.
This story is interesting.
What's more interesting is the way Nolan tells it.
He completely disrupted the timeline of the story, using a color picture to tell the story, and a black and white picture on the other hand, and cut the two together, which is equivalent to approaching the core truth from both ends of the story.
Look at the picture:
The film is divided into 45 paragraphs, and the normal timeline is: start from 1 and end at 45.
But in the film, Nolan deliberately said this: 45, 1, 44, 2, 43, 3, 42, 4... Until paragraph 23, the two opposite timelines converge here, and the truth is about to come out.
Nolan uses this structure to make two kinds of suspense exist at the same time: "What is going to happen?" and "Why is it happening?"
That's the trick Nolan plays with timing.
He turned a simple story into a suspenseful story through a complex telling.
Look at "Inception" again, it's different.
If the time in "Memento" is "spiral and progressive", then the time in "Inception" is "nested and recursive".
The basic principle of it is this: every time the dream is deeper, the time is extended by 20 times.
Look at the picture:
Nolan actually used layers of dreams to release the dilemma of real time. With his limited life, he fell to an infinite dream, broadening the limits of his life.
In contrast, "Memento" still makes a fuss about the linear laws of time, while "Inception" breaks this linearity, giving time a kind of " depth ": every level of depth is A brand new life, and the end of each life will carry its influence and return to the life of the previous layer until it returns to reality.
Of course, there's a good chance you'll get lost in a dream at some level and take that as real.
This may be the price of "stealing years".
When it came to "Interstellar", the gameplay changed again.
This time, Nolan took us from an extra-dimensional perspective to re-look at time, and suddenly pulled to the "five-dimensional space".
What is five-dimensional space?
This is puzzling.
For us who can only perceive three-dimensional space and linear time, it is difficult to imagine "five-dimensional space".
But a brief description can be made.
We all know that the fourth dimension is "time" . So what does a person who lives in four-dimensional space see when he sees us?
To put it figuratively, what I saw was a worm.
Because he can see the trajectory of our life at the same time, from birth to death, every moment is in front of us.
OK, so what is the fifth dimension?
is " probability ".
So what do people in the fifth dimension see?
all the possibilities in your life.
Another way of understanding is: the low-dimensional world is the projection of the high-dimensional world. Just as the line is the projection of the surface, and the surface is the projection of the space; similarly, the projection of the four-dimensional to the three-dimensional is the present moment; and the projection of the fifth-dimensional to the four-dimensional is a certain kind of life.
Well, that's all I can say about it.
In "Interstellar", Nolan used the three-dimensional picture we can perceive to present a spectacle of a five-dimensional space.
He not only opened up every past, present and future, but also showed us the infinite possibilities of life.
So what's important?
is our choice.
This is also the theme of "Interstellar": what ultimately saves mankind is the choice born of love.
Okay, we've done a lot of circles, and now we're back to Dunkirk.
To be honest, I am surprised that in such a realistic movie, Nolan has not given up exploring "time", and he has really played a new way.
In "Dunkirk", the 107-minute movie time is made up of three real-life durations of varying lengths. They are: a week on the beach, a day on the sea, an hour in the sky.
When we put these three lines on a real timeline, it should look like this:
If told normally, the story should start with Tommy, a British soldier on the beach, who escapes the hail of bullets and arrives at Dunkirk harbour. He boarded the ship several times, and the ship was sunk several times by the enemy, unable to escape. It took a few days like this. On the last day, he finally waited for Mr. Dawson's rescue boat, and he was rescued, covered in oil. The ship, and the pilot Farrell also arrived in time to eliminate the eyeing enemy aircraft. Eventually, Farrell ran out of fuel and landed in Dunkirk, where he was captured by the Germans. Tommy managed to escape and got on the train home, basking in the morning sun the next morning.
This is the sequential story line.
And Nolan, of course, won't tell you so honestly.
This is what he did: mix and cut these three lines together, so that the stories that happened one after the other became synchronous.
Look at the picture:
In this way, it will be interesting.
First of all, there is a kind of " relativity of time " implicit here .
What's the meaning?
You see, the 107 minutes in the film are divided into three equal parts for an hour, a day, and a week.
In other words: for the same length of time, people in different situations feel completely different.
Especially those who are struggling on the beach, there is no way to survive, and life is like a year. Also for an hour, they will feel like a long week.
This is an obscure interpretation of "torture".
Secondly, the practice of mixing and cutting the timeline also creates the illusion of " inversion of cause and effect ": what happens later is told in advance; what happens first may not be seen until very late.
For example, in the branch line in the air, we saw that three fighter planes had been destroyed by the enemy, and later in the branch line on the sea, Mr. Dawson saw that there were still three intact fighter planes flying in the air; and, In the branch line in the air, Farrell saw the comrade-in-arms who successfully landed waving. Later, looking at the timeline on the sea surface, it was actually the comrade-in-arms' hand that was stuck, and his waving was actually breaking free...
This adds a lot of interest to the narrative. Perhaps the following example is more typical.
In the branch line at sea, Mr Dawson rescued a fallen soldier whose ship had been torpedoed. After getting on the boat, he obstructed the rescue ship from returning to Dunkirk in every possible way, and also accidentally killed a young man due to a dispute.
In the branch line of the beach later, we saw that the soldier's boat had not yet set off. At that time, Tommy, the protagonist of the beach line, was about to get on the boat, but he was rejected. He also said to Tommy, don't worry, we will come back to save you.
If it were narrated in a normal time line, it would not have such a great sense of drama. After the reorganization of the timeline, we first saw him being rescued and obstructed the rescue, and then when he boarded the ship, he refused to let anyone on board and promised to come back. would be much more interesting.
In this great retreat, the only victory is to survive.
Finally, and most importantly.
Putting these three successive timelines in the same time and space will form a relationship of "chasing each other", with a tension of pulling each other inside.
And that happens to be the theme of the film: a race against time.
Nolan turned this sense of tension against time into the ticking of the clock, covering the entire film, and directly internalized it into the form and structure of the film.
The three lines compete against each other in their respective weeks, days, and hours. When viewed together, the three lines are chasing and approaching each other. Not only are people saving people, but time is also chasing time.
Eventually, near the beach, Farrell's plane caught up to cover Mr. Dawson's rescue boat, which rescued Tommy. At this point, the three timelines finally caught up with each other and completed the convergence, and the rescue was completed at this time.
This really is a "form" victory!
That's what excites me the most about Dunkirk.
Nolan once again showed us the possibility of reorganizing time in the context of a war movie.
This is perhaps the most eternal theme of the film.
Because the essence of a movie is a period of time, and the amount of story time you can accommodate in a movie period is very different.
In a 90-minute movie, you can tell about a person's life, or you can only tell about 30 minutes of things (tell the same story three times from different people's perspectives); you can recall the past through "flashbacks", You can turn off the lights and turn to the early morning to express a night of silence, or you can use the subtitle "Three Years Later" to jump across time.
But these are clichés after all.
If a new way can be found to make the film come and go in time more lightly and freely, it will free the film from the limitation of time and gain a more free expression space.
So, every time I see a movie with such an attempt, I get extra excited.
For example, "Roadside Picnic" and "Yangtze River Map" in recent years.
Another example is "The Flower of the Heart", which is not a good movie, but Ning Hao mixed the past and present of the hero and heroine, and made a story about finding and meeting.
Ning Hao didn't publicize it beforehand, and it was only at the end of the film that the difference in the timeline was revealed, so that kind of sadness that the time was no longer and that it seemed like a lifetime, came surging at that moment.
Based on this alone, I will look at "Heart Flower Road Fang" in a different light.
Similarly, the goodness of "Dunkirk" is hidden in the gap of time. It expresses with a strong sense of form: in a rescue of life and death, time is the biggest enemy.
I really appreciate Nolan.
After all, there are not many people who do not succumb to the compulsion of time and are still willing to challenge it.
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