Invading Axis powers begin to tighten their grip in this tense trailer tease for Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan’s long-anticipated WWII epic designed to recount the heroic tale known in military speak as Operation Dynamo.
The year is 1940. World War II has transformed mainland Europe into a melting pot of wartorn fronts and desolate cities, and the French seaside town of Dunkirk is now a bottleneck of Belgian, Canadian, British, and French scrambling for survival. Cut off from Allied forces, and with the enemy closing in fast, those stranded on the beaches were left staring death in the face, and it’s this death-defying tale that Christopher Nolan will project onto the silver screen in a few months’ time.
It is, without question, one of Warner Bros.’ biggest summer blockbusters – Wonder Woman is arguably another pretender to that throne – and the sweeping sense of scale cannot be overstated. Thankfully, today’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it promo is an exercise in restraint, as it favors a flickering title sequence – coupled with the mind-boggling figure of 400,000 troops – over a deluge of new footage. Warner Bros. is no doubt holding fire until later this week, when the full trailer will report for duty. Trailer Track reported – and the studio later confirmed – that said promo will be online at 9am PT (12pm ET/5pm GMT), at which point we’ll surely get another look at Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh, Fionn Whitehead and even Harry Styles in action.
Christopher Nolan will orchestrate the miracle of Dunkirk across 70mm/35mm film and digital formats on July 21st. Ever the proponent of IMAX cameras, the award-winning filmmaker has captured extensive footage with the large-screen format in mind, but those mooted reports of him crashing a vintage WWII plane – a vintage WWII plane retrofitted with IMAX cameras, no less – look to have been bogus.
