The comparisons between Dunkirk and Saving Private Ryan and between Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg have already been made by many. What remains to be seen is whether these are accurate comparisons. I don’t consider Saving Private Ryan one of my favourite Spielberg films (I’m not really a huge fan of any of the movies he has made that are concerned with history) but its ample runtime of almost 3 hours does allow it to spend plenty of time on accurately depicting war and building characters for the audience to care about. Dunkirk certainly succeeds on the accurate depiction of war aspect, and indeed Nolan seems to have made this film solely to make the audience experience what it is like, but to the detriment of its characters of whom we learn far too little about for the most part - and in this aspect I think the Spielberg comparisons fail, because Christopher Nolan is many things but he is not the consummate storyteller that Steven Spielberg was and continues to be.

I will commend Nolan for making Dunkirk his least dialogue-heavy film to date, but it proves to be a double-edged sword in this film. He has always seemed to have difficulty writing characters who speak like actual people, a problem compounded by the fact his characters frequently have to spout complex exposition in order for the worlds they inhabit in Nolan’s films to make sense. (In comparison, another “dialogue is my downfall” director James Cameron’s stilted dialogue usually comes in moments of levity rather than extended scenes of worldbuilding.) The men in Dunkirk don’t talk too much and this saves them from those Nolan black holes of monologues where every other sentence is a meaningful axiom. However, it also makes it that much harder to care about the individual characters. The film has enough gripping sequences (especially a couple of scenes where men are in enclosed spaces that are suddenly and completely submerged in water) to make the audience care about the survival of the protagonists (and, I suppose, the British forces) as a whole - but not individual protagonists, because we simply don’t know anything about them apart from the fact that they want to survive.

Arguably this was Nolan’s intention, as survival is plastered all over the trailers and posters for this film. However, the film is a series of three stories about three small groups of people which eventually converge at the moment that the fleet of pleasure crafts descend upon Dunkirk and save the day, and so it seems paradoxical that Nolan wouldn’t focus more on the individual stories. Tom Hardy’s RAF pilot easily has the most exciting and most emotionally resonant scenes of the film and I would attribute that primarily to the fact his character has the simplest motives, outlined from the moment he is shown on screen, rather than simply being a nameless archetype of A Man Who Will Do Anything To Survive which almost every other on-screen soldier is reduced to due to Nolan’s avoidance of character-establishing dialogue. Harry Styles (!) comes the second closest playing a soldier who displays an unexpected side of his personality when confronted with the onset of death, but it feels like Nolan decided a character needed to have a sudden change of heart at some point and wrote it into the story then, rather than writing a character for whom a sudden change of heart might seem like a tragically real thing to occur.

Most of the other characters serve primarily to underline the film’s underlying message of survival against all odds and the enduring British spirit. This is par for the course with Nolan films where people more often than not represent concepts and values rather than, you know, actual types of people - and it’s not necessarily a bad message for the film to have, I just personally felt that a bit more focus on the individual might have made the scenes of group victory at the end feel more poignant. As I said - Nolan does succeed in making the audience root for the British in this film (and without ever really showing the Germans other than as divebombing planes), but the audience has really no concept of who individuals are in this British force depicted in Dunkirk, and attempting to evoke sympathy for the masses rather than for the few is an odd choice given the film clearly chooses to split off into the stories of three people at Dunkirk (whose lives will eventually intersect) from the very beginning.

The film is still worth seeing in cinemas. I doubt I’ll ever not be able to say that about a Nolan film going forward seeing as I’ve apparently said that for every film of his since The Dark Knight. The aerial sequences are really well-shot and make me wish Hoyte van Hoytema had borrowed some of that inspiration for Spectre, and as mentioned earlier several sequences involve underwater shenanigans which is quite gripping and tense. It appears to have garnered near-universal acclaim so far from critics and it is definitely not your run of the mill war story or war film - but it lacks emotion and felt distant to me. Maybe that was Nolan’s intention, to numb the audience the way a war can numb its combatants - but I won’t deign to give him that much credit.