Dunkirk, written and directed by Christopher Nolan - Nine out of 10

Dunkirk, written and directed by Christopher Nolan

Nine out of 10

Dunkirk is not just one of the best films of 2017, winner of three Academy awards and nominated for another five, including the one for Best Motion Picture, but one of the greatest in recent history.

It details with panoramic and intimate perspective, bringing modern cinematic techniques to the telling of one of the most dramatic, tragic, overwhelming events of the last century, the evacuation of Dunkirk.

This is a narrative of heroism, evident in almost all the characters, played by an incredible cast, directed by a phenomenal director – one who has definitely entered the history of cinema.

One of the intertwining stories, presented with an outstanding handling of timing, perspective, genius of bringing together tales that constitute chapters of the same sublime symphony, is that of Mr. Dawson, his son and George.

The former is played by the heavyweight Mark Rylance and the latter by the young but already established as an accomplished, skilled excellent actor Barry Keoghan, most recently admired in the Shooting of a Sacred Deer and Black ’47.

Mr. Dawson is the captain of a small pleasure vessel and he tries to sail to Dunkirk, together with what will prove to be a providential, superb Savior Armada, to save men that had been fighting and been stranded there.

Dunkirk is in fact the story of extracting a victory from the jaws of defeat, since the Nazi army had in the first stages of the World War II an uncontested superiority over the Allied Army of France and Britain, which would be cornered and in danger of being decimated.

The fact that hundreds of thousands of soldiers would be saved instead of killed or taken prisoners could well be one of the reasons why the allies would win the war, for without this major part of the British Army we could envisage a scenario in which the Nazis would have quickly overwhelmed a much diminished foe, the only one still standing at that point.

Mr. Dawson and his crew made of his son and another young man called George – who would die at sea – save first one pilot who fell with his plane into the sea and then another, just as he was about to die drowned in the cockpit that would not break open no matter how hard he tried to escape it.

The first pilot has suffered a tremendous shock, is therefore determined to make the captain turn back, away from the death danger, emphasizing that this is just a small pleasure boat, and has no business in confronting the enemy airplanes and the guns at perils at Dunkirk.

Mr. Dawson is a clam hero, understanding and with empathy and compassion, he explains to his son the trauma that had affected the pilot, who is not a coward as the son thinks, but a very severely shocked young man.

The German air force, still very strong at that moment in time, sink quite a number of ships, but fortunately Mr. Dawson and others like him, mobilized to enter this splendid operation as civilians contributing to a massive rescue operation manage to save a good number of the soldiers who have had to abandon ship.

Commander Bolton is another heroic character, the officer in charge on the peer at Dunkirk, who starts the operation with the sinking feeling that he would lose so many men, given the circumstances and very adversarial odds at stake.

The British troops have been withdrawing, exhausted, without aerial cover in many instances, bombarded and machine gunned by Nazi airplanes, facing a seemingly impossible task of reaching the English shore which was so close and yet impossibly hard to reach.

Christopher Nolan is brilliant in rendering not just the tales of extreme bravery and valiance, but also the lows to which such a pressure, an incredible weight that this global conflict can be place on human beings.

On one of the ships that has managed to sail from Dunkirk, the danger is that the boat would sink and this is when a few of the men detect that among them they have alien soldiers and they target them saying they are spies, enemy combatants.

In fact, they are a few French refugees that speak no English, without being Nazis and they contemplate the heinous fate of finding a way on the ship that could save them, only to be pushed by the British men to their death.

The wonderful Tom Hardy has the role of yet another Superman of this elating, uplifting story in spite of its immense death toll, Farrier, who is one of the role models of this magnificent drama, a pilot who fights to the last drop of fuel in his tank.

He chases Nazi airplanes and saves in the process a multitude of comrades in arms, although these have been complaining that they did not have air support, understandably seeing that so many have been sitting targets for the German pilots shooting at them like at practice.

Of course, the British did not have enough equipment, planes, at times fuel in these flying machines to cope with the incredible challenges faced early on – and later- in this awful world war.

Dunkirk is fabulous on all counts: its script is fantastic, the cast could not be any better, the cinematic achievement has been acclaimed at the Oscars and at other film festivals and award ceremonies and finally the critics have rated it with an exuberant 94 out of 100, which means that this film is…

Nearly perfect!