Dunkirk Movie Themes

With Dunkirk Christopher Nolan has reached new heights of filmmaking and he seems to have employed a whole new set of techniques. Gone is the dialogue and one-liners that we associate with Hollywood. No famous Hollywood stars (with a couple of exceptions) are present either. Speaking of stars, the director focuses on the anonymity of a few people, without revealing their names most of the time. And if you expect to watch a war film like Saving Private Ryan you will be disappointed. According to the IMDb trivia, Nolan himself has said that he didn’t wish Dunkirk to have the tension he felt when watching Spielberg’s film.

Of course, some of Nolan’s themes are still there, like the repetition of time. The film starts in the middle of the action, with an escape scene through the alleys of Dunkirk, and from them on follows the main plot: three different storylines warped in time and inspired by the four elements. The air storyline takes place in an hour, the sea in a week, and the ground in just a day, thus running into each other.

This is not a war film, but rather a thriller, as the director has described it. In Dunkirk the …show more content…
I have to agree. With Dunkirk Nolan seems to have found the missing ingredient: that of distilled emotion, which he offers here with virtuosic flair. There is this point in the film where the aggressive strings and menacing percussion of the soundtrack stop abruptly and we hear an arrangement of Nimrod. The effect is more than soothing for we, the viewers, can identify at least with something human, something that seems to belong to our world. The use of soundtrack in Dunkirk is in fact so effective, that if someone had showed me the final minutes of the film, without telling me the name of the director, I’d have assumed that this was actually a Terrence Malick feature (with the latter’s characteristic voice-over and all). Such is the poetry Nolan creates in some