If Christopher Nolan has been criticized for anything it's for his use of dialogue. He usually writes the screenplays to his films, sometimes with his brother Jonathan as credited co-writer. His knack for words is, shall we say, not as profoundly inventive as his visual eye or thought for story and detail. He has supposedly corrected that in "Dunkirk" by being more sparse with dialogue, instead opting for "pared back" dialogue and confirming the film is a "survival tale."
My colleagues over at [The Playlist] have translated French Premiere's cover story on Nolan's Dunkirk and an exclusive interview with the director himself.
“The film is told from three points of view. The air (planes), the land (on the beach) and the sea (the evacuation by the navy). For the soldiers embarked in the conflict, the events took place on different temporalities,” Nolan said (via Google translation). “On land, some stayed one week stuck on the beach. On the water, the events lasted a maximum day; And if you were flying to Dunkirk, the British spitfires would carry an hour of fuel. To mingle these different versions of history, one had to mix the temporal strata. Hence the complicated structure; Even if the story, once again, is very simple.”
“This is an essential moment in the history of the Second World War. If this evacuation had not been a success, Great Britain would have been obliged to capitulate. And the whole world would have been lost, or would have known a different fate: the Germans would undoubtedly have conquered Europe, the US would not have returned to war,” he said. “It is a true point of rupture in war and in history of the world. A decisive moment. And the success of the evacuation allowed Churchill to impose the idea of a moral victory, which allowed him to galvanize his troops like civilians and to impose a spirit of resistance while the logic of this sequence should have been that of surrender. Militarily it is a defeat; On the human plane it is a colossal victory.”
I've liked every Nolan I've seen except for his debut "Following," so there's no reason why I won't dig much of what I see in "Dunkirk," but will it have the transcendant feeling of watching "Memento," "The Dark Knight" or even "Inception" for the first time?
“Dunkirk” opens on July 21st.