One of the best war movies of the last few years is rocketing up the Netflix Top 10 most-watched films chart today, currently sitting at #6. I’m talking about Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, a dramatization of a key World War II battle in which retreating British soldiers were stranded on the beaches of the titular French town. The cast includes Kenneth Branagh, Harry Styles, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy and Tom Hardy (among many others), and the story is split between land, sea and air narratives, each taking place within a certain time frame.
The highlight for me is Hardy’s performance as a Spitfire pilot heading to Dunkirk to provide air support for the trapped soldiers. On the way, his squadron gets into a deadly dogfight, damaging his controls and requiring him to calculate his fuel manually rather than by the gauges. By the film’s conclusion, he’s running on empty, gliding eerily silently over the beach before crashing and being taken prisoner. It’s a very cool moment and Nolan’s action chops are on full display during it.
Dunkirk will also go down in history as the acting debut of Harry Styles on the big screen. The former One Direction star didn’t disappoint in his first major role and we’ve since seen indications that he’s going to focus his career on doing more movies. He’s soon set to play lead parts in My Policeman and Don’t Worry Darling, but there are whispers that he could even be considered as the next James Bond.
Whether you’re a fan of those two talents or not, Dunkirk is absolutely worth a watch. At just 106 minutes, it’s a fairly fast-moving film with a ton of excitement, and the split chronologies find Nolan being complex yet still comprehensible (something he failed to do in this year’s Tenet). The only real downside is that checking it out at home won’t be a patch on seeing it during its original IMAX release, but at least you stand a better chance of understanding the dialogue.
