Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk

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Czech version here ^[2]

Dunkirk is Christopher Nolan’s most emotionally powerful movie. It deals with the evacuation of 400,000 British, Canadian, and French troops trapped on the beach at Dunkirk after being defeated by the Germans in the Second World War.

Dunkirk is a strange work, especially for Christopher Nolan, who typically directs long films with complex plots, extensive character development, and lots of dialogue. Dunkirk, however, is only 106 minutes long. There is no single storyline.The movie consists almost entirely of action sequences. There is a large cast, but most of the characters have no names. Most of the actors are unknowns. The few big names have small parts. There is no real character development. There is hardly any dialogue.

The story simply begins at Dunkirk. There is almost no context. The Germans are referred to simply as the “enemy.” German aircraft are seen during the movie, but German soldiers appear on screen only in the final minutes, and I never saw a swastika. It is mentioned that the enemy tanks stopped, but no reason is given. (The answer is that Hitler was too kind ^[3] to the British.)

Instead of a single storyline, there are three: soldiers trying again and again to escape from the beach, fighter pilots providing cover for the evacuation, and a private boat joining the rescue flotilla. The storyline of the beach escapees is the most harrowing and depressing. The stories of the pilots and the boat are the most inspiring. The film moves between the three storylines, but in a non-linear fashion, made most clear when daytime and nighttime scenes are intercut.

Dunkirk is masterful at creating suspense. The cutting between the three storylines makes it feel less like a story and more like a musical fugue. The soundtrack by Nolan’s frequent collaborator Hans Zimmer is dreary, electronic, and industrial. The music and the sound effects are shockingly loud. Again and again, I found myself wincing and squirming in my seat. This is aviation, industry, war, and speed as music — Italian Futurism on film.

But as the movie reaches its conclusion, all the elements fall in place into a series of emotionally shattering climaxes — when Zimmer’s electronic noise melts into Elgar’s Nimrod ^[4] variation, when we see that the single boat we have followed is part of a vast flotilla, when two young evacuees look out a train window and once again see England’s green and pleasant land, when the wheels go down on a fighter that has run out of fuel. Dunkirk will wring tears from the flintiest hearts. This film is a masterpiece, and Christopher Nolan is one of our greatest living directors.

Naturally, those humorless culture-killing religious fanatics of the diversity cult are complaining that Dunkirk is too white and too male, since not only must white men be engineered out of England’s future, they must be airbrushed out of her past. But Leftists are right to dislike this film. Unlike virtually every other movie about the Second World War, Dunkirk does not serve as propaganda for multiculturalism. It is not a movie about those dirty, Jew-killing Germans, whose deeds — we are constantly told — are somehow the refutation of every nationalistic sentiment, even in the people who fought against them.

Instead, Dunkirk is a movie about England. It is a movie about coming home. It is about the patriotism, social solidarity, ingenuity, hard work, and bravery of countless humble white people whose primary mistake was to trust the leaders who delivered them into two World Wars and are now overseeing their replacement with the scum of the Third World. Leftists fear Dunkirk because it gives white men a glimpse of a nice white country we could someday restore, and the virtues we must find again if we are to defeat the real enemy this time.