Dunkirk

Judged on structure, and the film is lean: the subtractive test fails across its spine, because each strand carries what no other can. The Mole gives the trapped army and its repeated failed escapes, the hospital ship, the minesweeper, the beached trawler. The Sea gives the civilians and the cost of going. The Air gives the cover that makes the evacuation possible and the one man who chooses to stay. The shivering soldier is required twice: he is the army’s trauma on the little boat, and his blow kills George, the price of the rescue. What gives lies at the edges: the trawler repeats the minesweeper’s lesson at length, Collins’s ditching spends time, and two officers on the mole explain.

Score: 8.6 / 10

What the film discloses can be stated, and it holds: in a disaster, survival is the whole of what most men can do, and it is enough; and the nation’s legend is made afterward, out of fear, luck and small decencies, by people who did not feel heroic at the time. It is given in act and image. Alex on the train expects contempt for retreat; a blind man hands out blankets and says “Well done”, and told that survival is all they did, answers “That’s enough”. A second truth comes through image and sound: the soldier’s war is the next minute, and other men’s water and other men’s boats. What holds it below the gate: much of its force is dread held at one pitch, nearer a mood than a meaning, and the legend at the close is honoured more than opened.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Elevation is frequent and mostly dreadful. The opening: leaflets falling on an empty street, gunfire from nowhere, a boy running to the dunes, and the beach seen as a sea of waiting men. Stukas over the queues, the men lying down in lines as the bombs walk toward them. The hospital ship and the minesweeper rolling over, men in the dark under the hull as the water rises. The warm summit is the little boats coming over the horizon and Bolton’s answer, one word, “Home”. The cold one is the Spitfire gliding silent over the beach with its engine dead, landing on the sand and burning in the dusk. Held below the top: so much is one register of tension sustained, and the warm heights lean on Elgar and on the score more than on the image alone.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The pattern is the deliverance from the shore, and the film builds it rather than names it: an army trapped between an enemy it cannot see and a sea it cannot cross, saved by a fleet of the ordinary. It bears load. A father goes himself, with his son, because men his son’s age are being sent; a boy dies on the way and is made a hero in print; a pilot stays behind and is taken, a sacrifice set against the army’s escape. The national myth of the evacuation is shown in its making, by the newspapers at the end, so the film builds the legend and watches it built. What holds it below the gate: the figures are kept deliberately thin, types more than particulars, most barely named, and the archetype is the event’s own, inherited from history.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The inheritance is the British and American film of battle and evacuation, the 1958 Dunkirk among them, and the combat film after Saving Private Ryan (1998). The departures are real and many: almost no backstory and little dialogue; an enemy almost never seen; three strands on three clocks intercut so that the same events return from other angles; continuous suspense in place of the battle film’s arc; a score of ticking and rising tones that never resolve. The stake was large: a studio summer release on IMAX film at great cost, about a retreat, with no star at its centre and a pop singer in a principal part. What holds it a step below the gate: the cross-cut, convergent timeline was already its maker’s proven means, here applied to history.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Told in order on one clock, it is an evacuation picture. Told as a week, a day and an hour folded into one movement, it makes the viewer hold three experiences of time at once, and the knowledge is that the soldier’s week, the sailor’s day and the pilot’s hour are one event at different pressures. The repetition across strands is knowledge too: the Spitfire’s ditching seen from the air and then from the boat, so that the viewer learns how little any one man sees. The withheld enemy is the form of the soldier’s experience, death from above and out of frame. Held from the top: the convergence is also a device of suspense, and where day and night alternate across the cuts the clocks blur.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Nine years is little evidence, and the axis is part forecast; but the questions that have stayed open are real. Whether the film honours the Dunkirk legend or dismantles it, since the close lets the speech and the newspaper stand without comment. The absence of the French and of the Indian and colonial troops present at Dunkirk, argued since release. Whether the anonymous form discloses a collective experience or avoids character. Formally the film rewards return, in the matches across its three strands and in the scoring, where the same event is placed again from another clock. What holds it here: the yield is chiefly of construction and of the debate over omission, much of the meaning is open at first viewing, and nine years have shown little beyond that.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Field: the cinema of the 2010s, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: a large-budget war film made as an experiment in time and sound, whose suspense structure is the whole form; and a case, unusual at that scale, for photochemical large-format film and for exhibition built around it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: three Academy Awards, for film editing, sound editing and sound mixing, among eight nominations; a sound design and ticking score widely imitated in the trailers and scores of later years; Sam Mendes’s 1917 (2019), a war film built on a formal constraint, commonly placed beside it; and renewed interest in the evacuation itself. The limit stands: it perfected a manner more than it reorganised what film could do, and much of what spread was texture.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across nine years. The form is whole: one cut, surviving as released, the same in every format. Presence is wide: IMAX re-releases, home video in every format, television, and continued circulation in the study of sound and editing. Nine years are still nine years, and survival is credited only for what they have shown. The surface is charged: the film’s fullest form depends on IMAX 70mm projection, a technology already rare and narrowing, and in ordinary exhibition the image is cropped and the sound smaller, so part of what the film is lives in conditions that may not last. The subject and the anonymity of its figures age well.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Read to the anchors every desk shares, and the making bears weight throughout. Hoyte van Hoytema’s large-format camera goes into the cockpits, onto the water and below decks, the horizon held level as the ships go over. Lee Smith cuts three clocks into one rising line. The sound mix makes every gunshot and engine a physical event, and Hans Zimmer’s score, fused with it, holds one tension for an hour and three quarters. Ships, planes and crowds are practical. Mark Rylance makes Dawson the film’s one full person in a few lines; Fionn Whitehead carries the Mole almost without words. The costs fall where they count: the dialogue that exists is functional or stiff, most performances are bodies under stress, and the seams of the time scheme show.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the blind man on the shore handing out blankets in soft English light, and men drowning in the dark hold of the trawler as the tide fills it. One law governs both: survival is the whole of the task, and each survivor owes a debt to strangers. The trawler is survival at others’ cost, Gibson found to be French and ordered off the boat; the blankets are the debt acknowledged. The shivering soldier, Farrier’s choice to stay and the lie told about George obey the same law, across a range from dread to elegy. The strain: the close moves from survival into national celebration, a speech read over the rescued and the captured pilot, in a key warmer than the law; and the time scheme, where it shows, bends the physics it set.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged on what a film of about 106 minutes holds, and it holds several orders in one structure. The army as a mass; the state, in officers and a naval command deciding whose troops go first; the nation, in civilians and their boats and in the press making the legend; the family, in Dawson, his son and the elder son he has lost; war as machinery; and the natural order, tide, sea, oil, fire and air, held more fully than any other. They are integrated: the tide is the plot and the state’s decisions are the queue. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: consciousness is withheld by design, no inner life entered except by sound and face, and the allies, the enemy and the history beyond the beach are left out of the frame.

Score: 7.1 / 10