Dunkirk (2017): Directed By Christopher Nolan / Countries: United Kingdom / United States / France/ Netherlands / Starring: Harry Styles, Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance.

Dunkirk (2017) is the movie with the greatest effort for historical accuracy among blockbusters. This is more interesting if you know that all characters are fictional, but a story is very much real. Dunkirk earned $525 million worldwide and making it the highest-grossing World War II film of all time. Some critics describing it as Christopher Nolan’s best to date, as well as one of the greatest war films ever made.

The movie shows one of the most painful English’s losses in World War II. Nevertheless, they turn this loss in victory because of saving the huge number of soldiers from German captivity. Aproxymetly 330.000 Allied troops were saved from Nazi German forces by all kind of vessels; cruiser, destroyers, minesweepers, yachts, small boats etc.

The movie depicts experience and fate of common soldiers in chaos on land, sea, and air. How much did filmmakers manage to show a real history find out in Dunkirk history review.

DEVELOPMENT

An idea and inspiration for a movie came to Nolan and his wife while, producer Emma Thomas, travelling over the English Channel in the 90s., They travelled for 19 hours because of rough see in a small boat, just like many soldiers did during the Dunkirk evacuation.  The more the Nolans studied evacuation, more did they wanted to show it in a movie. There was one problem; there ware no Americans in Dunkirk evacuation. Nolans waited until they had enough trust from a studio that they would let them make it a British film, but with an American budget.

Nolan threw himself into reading first-hand accounts by people who had been there; a lot had been collected by the Imperial War Museum. Historian Joshua Levine had compiled a book called Forgotten Voices of Dunkirk, and he came on as a historical advisor. Joshua Levine later wrote book adaptation, Dunkirk: The History Behind the Major Motion Picture. Nolan spends some time with veterans of Dunkirk and because of their different interpretations, he decides to show different points of view; land, sea, and air.

MAKING

Great effort was made to display accuracy in all possible ways. Clothes ware specially made; the heavy wool fabric was made from scratch, tailored for the main cast and over a thousand extras. The costume department then spent three weeks ageing them. Costume designer Jeffrey Kurland studied look of clothes at the British Museum, RAF Museum, and Imperial War Museum, in magazines from the era, photo archives, and books. The mole, were soldiers ware board on boats, rebuilt over four months in accordance with the original blueprints and sand was brought back from Dunkirk.

Filming took place on dates as real evacuation and on the same location on the beach. Street scenes were shot in nearby Malo-les-Bains because most of the buildings in Dunkirk were destroyed in the war. That is why the city looks too good in the movie.

A most important part of making was a decision to minimize the need for CGI. They used cardboard cut-out props of soldiers and military vehicles created the illusion of a large army. Real or scale model fighter aircraft and real warships and boats provided a realism that could not be achieved from CGI.  Briefly, they put tremendous effort to effort recreate real evacuation and to bring it closer to the audience.

SOME THINGS STILL MISSING

Despite the effort, mistakes ware made and some of them ware intentional. German plane noses were painted in yellow for better distinction from British Spitfires. This was not actually done until a month after Dunkirk. In the time of shooting there was no more usable British cruiser so the cruiser on screen was French. Hardly noticeable, but with some experienced eyes it did not go away.

Contrary to Hollywood usual habits Dunkirk is missing bombs, chaos and filth. Scenes are to clean; soldiers waiting in the line on the clean beach, a nice little town on the beginning is in contrast with devastated real Dunkirk and bombs are not so destructive as in real life. We hoped to see something similar to the devastating and chaotic 5-minute scene from Atonement. That five minutes gave is more sense of reality and soldiers despair then whole Dunkirk movie.

Atonement (2007) depiction of Dunkirk chaos. 

Lack of CGI and using real vehicles lead to a smaller number of main vehicles than in real events. In the whole movie, we saw three British Spitfires guarding Allied soldiers contrary to usual much larger formations. The Brits ware saving planes for Battle of Britain, but three planes for Operation Dynamo is just craziness. It should be pointed out that Spitfires only had 14 seconds of ammo and couldn’t land on beaches.

Similar to planes, there is only a handful of destroyers and most of them ware shown as sink so the soldiers are saved by small ships. The audience is misled because it is estimated that small ships saved about 5% of all soldiers, and 41  destroyers operated in Operation Dynamo. Rescuing with cold and big destroyers don’t make a warm human story. It is worth pointing out that seventy percent of the vessels were sunk because of collision and misadventure and only 30 were sunk because of air attack.

One thing that misses a lot is portraying other nations other than the white British soldiers. French have limited part in the movie although they helped defend the town of Dunkirk while the evacuation was in progress. During operation Dynamo over 100,000 French soldiers had been brought back to England in. The involvement of African and Indian soldiers was also either limited or left out of the film.

The movie also missing real feel regarding wounding and death like in Saving Private Ryan. Deaths are too clean and ships sunk too fast.

CONCLUSION

Dunkirk is history experiment that turned right; a blockbuster movie without Americans and without a victory that made a lot of money and received prominent nominations and awards.  It is one of best effort to bring history closer to the audience although all characters are fictional. Perhaps, that it is a better way because no one could say; that is not a way it happened to me/my father/etc.

Lack of CGI and use of real objects bring us closer to actual history, but it also makes the opposite effect. Everything looks empty. From sky and planes to the beaches, ammo, rifles, all vehicles and people everything looks and feels smaller and less important. Nevertheless, film crew did a superb job of making clothes, finding and painting vehicles, recreating docks etc.

Without generals and their big plans, we are left with survival stories of common people trapped in one peculiar time and place. There are no big heroes in the movie with big moves that change the fate of war. We don’t even see villains because we don’t see Germans. All that is a big plus because we had enough of big history; with mention of Second World War most people we all first think on Hitler, Churchill, Stalin etc. Rarely someone thinks of a plain soldier stuck in a mud, trying to get out and survive. Dunkirk exceptionally well shows us that plain soldier, his efforts, decisions, problem and we all can hope that we will have more similar movies in the future.