Nolan's Dunkirk never shows a clear German face, and that is deliberate
Christopher Nolan built his war film around a retreat, not a victory, and kept the enemy almost invisible, just as soldiers on the beach experienced it. Its three stories run on different clocks: a week on land, a day at sea, an hour in the air, weaving together until they collide.
The idea dates to the mid-1990s, when Nolan and Emma Thomas, later his wife, crossed the English Channel by boat along the route taken by the little ships of 1940. He toyed with improvising the entire film without a script until Thomas talked him out of it. The screenplay he finally wrote in 2015 ran just 76 pages, roughly half his usual length, and its tight structure called for invented characters rather than figures drawn from eyewitness accounts.
Nolan wanted pictures and sound, not speeches, to carry the tension. He dropped scenes of Winston Churchill and generals in war rooms to avoid the politics, and any Germans who appear are out of focus. He was drawn to the subject because it turned the familiar Hollywood template upside down: a Franco-British withdrawal instead of triumphant Americans. His habit of letting separate storylines converge, normally saved for a final act, here runs through the whole film. Historian Joshua Levine advised, and interviews with veterans supplied details such as men walking into the sea in despair.
Filming began in Dunkirk itself in May 2016, after Nolan and designer Nathan Crowley rejected Suffolk as a stand-in, and finished that September in Los Angeles. Hoyte van Hoytema shot on IMAX and 65 mm film. Practical effects dominated, with thousands of extras, real small boats from the evacuation and period aircraft. The cast mixed veterans such as Mark Rylance and Kenneth Branagh with newcomers, including Harry Styles in his first feature.
Released on 21 July 2017, it earned over $530 million worldwide, the most for any Second World War film until Nolan's own Oppenheimer overtook it in 2023. It collected eight Academy Award nominations and won three, for sound editing, sound mixing and film editing.
Source: Dunkirk (2017 film)
