Klout and Warner Bros. have partnered together to offer Klout users the opportunity for tickets to an early screening of WB’s “Man of Steel.”
Klout is awarding 500 users and a guest of their choosing to a screening on June 10, four days before the film bows on June 14.The screening will take place on June 10 in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Dallas and Miami with users also getting the opportunity to watch guests arrive on the red carpet prior to their own screening.
Users are asked to go to Klout.com to see if they are eligible.
The site recently announced it has already awarded one million perks to Klout users from more than 400 brands which include Chevy, Nike, Sony, McDonald’s, Microsoft and American Express.
In the early scenes of “Oppenheimer,” J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), an American physics student attending graduate school in England and Germany in the 1920s, with bright blue marble eyes and a curly wedge of hair that stands up like Charlie Chaplin’s, keeps having visions of particles and waves. We see the images that are disrupting his mind, the particles pulsating, the waves aglow in vibratory bands of light. Oppenheimer can see the brave new world of quantum physics, and the visual razzmatazz is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a biopic written and directed by Christopher Nolan: a molecular light show as a reflection of the hero’s inner spirit.
But even when “Oppenheimer” settles down into a more realistic, less phantasmagorical groove (which it does fairly quickly), it remains every inch a Nolan film. You feel that in the heady, dense, dizzying way it slices and dices chronology, psychodrama, scientific inquiry, political backstabbing, and history written with lightning — no mere metaphor in this case, since the movie, which tells the story of the man who created the atomic bomb, feels almost like it’s about the invention of lightning.
Cillian Murphy, with a thousand-yard beam, the half-smile of an intellectual rake, and a way of keeping everything close to the vest, gives a phenomenal performance as Oppenheimer, making him fascinating and multi-layered. His “Oppie” is an elegant mandarin who’s also a bit snakelike — at once a cold prodigy and an ardent humanist, an aristocrat and a womanizer, a Jewish outsider who becomes a consummate insider, and a man who oversees the invention of nuclear weapons without a shred of doubt or compunction, only to confront the world he created from behind a defensive shield of guilt that’s a lot less self-aware.
Murphy, wearing Oppenheimer’s trademark wide-brimmed porkpie hat (or sometimes wearing nothing at all, a shock because we’re not used to seeing a science geek portrayed with this kind of sensuality), is at the center of almost every scene, and he imprints himself on your imagination. The movie needs that, because “Oppenheimer” is a relentless, coruscating piece of maximalist cinema that you watch on the edge of your brain. Nuclear fission means the release of energy that happens when the nucleus of an atom is split, and Nolan has conceived “Oppenheimer” as an act of cinematic fission. He fragments the story into parts that keep colliding, immersing us in the heat and energy that all gives off. It’s a style that owes a major debt to Oliver Stone’s “Nixon,” though that movie was a masterpiece. This one is urgent and essential, but in a less fully realized way.
The film opens with a flash forward to the 1954 hearing of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission that ultimately resulted in Oppenheimer, accused (among other things) of having hidden Communist ties, being stripped of his security clearance. This was the government’s way of silencing him, since in the postwar world he’d become something of a dove on the issue of nuclear weapons, a view that didn’t mesh with America’s Cold War stance of aggression. The hearing was the darkest chapter of Oppenheimer’s life, and using it as a framing device feels, at first, like a very standard thing to do.
Except that the film keeps returning to the hearing, weaving it deep into the fabric of its three-hour running time. Lewis Strauss, played with a captivating bureaucratic terseness by Robert Downey Jr., is the A.E.C. chairman who became Oppenheimer’s ideological and personal enemy (after Oppenheimer humiliated him during a congressional testimonial), and he’s the secret force behind the hearing, which takes place in a back room hidden away from the press. As Oppenheimer defends himself in front of a committee of hanging judges, the movie uses his anecdotes to flash back in time, and Nolan creates a hypnotic multi-tiered storytelling structure, using it to tease out the hidden continuities that shaped Oppenheimer’s life and his creation of the bomb.
We see how the Cold War really started before World War II was over — it was always there, shaping the rapt paranoia of atom-bomb politics. We see that Oppenheimer the ruthless nuclear zealot and Oppenheimer the mystic idealist were one and the same. And we see that the race to complete the Manhattan Project, rooted in the makeshift creation of a small desert city that Oppenheimer presides over in Los Alamos, New Mexico, meant that the momentum of the nuclear age was already taking on a life of its own.
In the ’30s, Oppenheimer, already a legend in his own mind, brings quantum mechanics to the U.S., even as his field of passion encompasses Picasso, Freud, and Marx, not to mention the absorbing of half a dozen languages (from Dutch to Sanskrit), all to soak up the revolutionary energy field that’s sweeping the world, influencing everything from physics to workers’ liberation. Oppenheimer isn’t a Communist, but he’s a devoted leftist with many Communists in his life, from his brother and sister-and-law to his doleful bohemian mistress, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). What really makes his eyes go bright is when the atom gets split by two German scientists, in 1938. He at first insists it’s not possible, but then his colleagues at Berkeley, led by Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), demonstrate that it is, and he realizes in an instant where all this points: to the possibility of a bomb.
By the time Hitler attacks Poland, in 1939, it seems like the Nazis might seriously be able to create their own nuclear weapon, which in Oppenheimer’s view means the potential end of Western Civilization. It takes a while for him to earn the trust that gets him invited into the Manhattan Project. But once he does, General Leslie R. Groves (Matt Damon), heading up the top-secret endeavor, appoints Oppenheimer to be its leader, and Murphy and Damon have the first of several terrific scenes together. It would be hard to imagine a scientist more worldly, or a hard-ass general more grudgingly in tune with the academic mind.
“Oppenheimer” has a mesmerizing first half, encompassing everything from Oppenheimer’s mysterious Princeton encounter with Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) to his far from utopian marriage to the alcoholic Kitty (played with scalding force by Emily Blunt). Just about everything we see is stunning in its accuracy. “Oppenheimer” isn’t a movie that traffics in composite characters or audience-friendly arcs; Nolan channels the grain of reality, the fervor and detail of what really happened. And the buildup to the creation of the first atomic bomb just about ticks with cosmic suspense. There are Soviet spies at Los Alamos, as well as a sinister comic grace note: the possibility (“a little more than zero”) that the chain reaction begun by the nuclear explosion could spread to the earth’s atmosphere and never stop, an apocalypse that theoretical physics can’t totally rule out.
But the big bang itself, when it finally arrives, as the bomb is tested in the wee hours of that fateful day code-named Trinity, is, I have to say, a letdown. Nolan shows it impressionistically — the sound cutting out, images of what look like radioactive hellfire. But the terrifying awesomeness, the nightmare bigness of it all, does not come across. Nor does it evoke the descriptions of witnesses who say that the blast was streaked with purple and gray and was many times brighter than the noonday sun.
And once Oppenheimer shoots past that nuclear climax, a certain humming intensity leaks out of the movie. We’re still at the damn A.E.C. hearing (after two hours), and the film turns into a woeful meditation on what the bomb meant, whether it should have been dropped, our rivalry with the Soviets, and how Oppenheimer figured into all of that, including his relegation to the status of defrocked Cold War scapegoat. What happened to Oppenheimer, at the height of the McCarthy era, was nothing less than egregious (though it’s relevant that he was never officially convicted of disloyalty). At the same time, there are scenes in which characters take him to task for his vanity, for making the bomb all about him. In one of them, he’s dressed down by no less than President Harry Truman (an unbilled Gary Oldman). Is Truman right?
The most radically authentic line in the movie may be the one where Oppenheimer, just after the Nazis have been defeated, explains to a room full of young Los Alamos scientists why he feels it’s still justifiable to use the bomb on Japan. We all know the dogmatic lesson we learned in high school: that dropping those bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war and saved the lives of countless U.S. soldiers. From the age of 15, I’ve never bought the rationale of that argument. But I buy what Oppenheimer says here: that by using a nuclear weapon, we would create a horrific demonstration of why it could never, ever be used again. (It’s not that that’s a justification. It’s that it’s an explanation of why it happened.)
But the Oppenheimer who then goes on to fight the invention of the more powerful hydrogen bomb, as if it were some utterly different weapon from the one he created, and who is desperate to rein in the existence of nuclear weapons in general, is the spokesman the film ends with. And in a way, for all his crusading fervor, he’s the wrong messenger. Oppenheimer, of course, had every right to be haunted by the weapon he’d created. But he also possessed a kind of masochistic naïveté, forgetting the key lesson of the revolution he was at the center of: that human beings will always be at the mercy of what science makes possible. “Oppenheimer” tacks on a trendy doomsday message about how the world was destroyed by nuclear weapons. But if Oppenheimer, in his way, made the bomb all about him, by that point it’s Nolan and his movie who are doing the same thing.
“Good Time” and “Uncut Gems” director Benny Safdie expands his acting career with a prominent supporting role in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” He plays Edward Teller, the real-life theoretical physicist known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb.” Teller joined Oppenheimer to work on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M., focusing on nuclear implosion and uranium hydride research. He was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, and had a thick accent, which presented Safdie with one of his biggest acting challenges.
“The accent was something I was so nervous about,” Safdie recently told Vulture. “I remember Chris asking me, ‘How’s the accent coming?’ And I’m just like, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to accomplish this?’ I didn’t know if he was going to want me to do it. But he sent me all of these interviews and we talked about how Teller speaks and who he is. It was a long process of working together to really nail it down.”
“I remember finally I was like, ‘You know what? I could sound crazy, but I don’t care. This is what Teller sounds like and I’m just going to do it,’” Safdie added. “I sent a voice-memo where I just narrated what my breakfast was and how Teller really liked pineapple.”
Because “Oppenheimer” spans several years, Safdie also had to find a way to change his accent as Teller grew older. Screaming ended up being a solution.
“Before each take, I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to yell. I’m going to really break up my vocal cords,’” Safdie told Vulture. “It makes such a big difference. We also came up with this weird laugh-snort that Teller has when Kenneth Branagh is talking and we realize the Germans are behind and we’re ahead of them. Snorting and hitting the leg. We spent so long on that! Just that little snort. You’re not afraid to look stupid in a lot of ways, because when you’re free like that, it’s a fun place to be.”
Another signature part of bringing Teller to life was his eyebrows. Safdie sports some pretty thick brows in the film, which he said Christopher Nolan was adamant about.
“I am proud to say that it’s all my eyebrows,” Safdie said. “Teller had the best eyebrows. Every once in a while I have a straggler that I’ll just pluck out, cause it looks a little too crazy. But Chris said, ‘Don’t do that. Let’s just let it go crazy.’ I had the most insane eyebrows for months and months, and you just had to brush them out and then they shined in all their glory.”
“Oppenheimer” is now playing in theaters nationwide from Universal Pictures.
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The script behind Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” has jumped to the top of bestseller lists on Amazon following the film’s smashing blockbuster release last month.
The film, based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “American Prometheus,” tells the definitive story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb. The film, starring Cillian Murphy as the eponymous scientist, pulls straight from the 700-page biography, which traces Oppenheimer’s life starting with his time at Cambridge, where he earned a reputation as an intellectual prodigy. As a physicist, Oppenheimer made significant contributions to quantum mechanics and theoretical physics, earning him great respect among his peers.
The narrative takes a dramatic turn with the onset of World War II, when Oppenheimer was appointed as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, a top-secret government initiative aimed at developing the first atomic bomb. His leadership and organizational skills were instrumental to the project, which culminated with the devastating nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 200,000 Japanese people.
In his introduction to the screenplay, Bird praises Nolan’s skill in extremely complex life story and miraculously turning it into “visual art that is faithful both to the history and the man.”
When Bird read Nolan’s screenplay, he was “struck by how faithful it was to the book, capturing what was always most important to Sherwin: the paradoxes at the heart of Oppenheimer’s character and the intimate details that dovetailed with enormous plate shifts of world history.”
Having memorably explored the Caped Crusader’s origins in “Batman Begins,” director Christopher Nolan puts all of Gotham City under a microscope in “The Dark Knight,” the enthralling second installment of his bold, bracing and altogether heroic reinvention of the iconic franchise. An ambitious, full-bodied crime epic of gratifying scope and moral complexity, this is seriously brainy pop entertainment that satisfies every expectation raised by its hit predecessor and then some. That should also hold true at the box office, with Heath Ledger’s justly anticipated turn as the Joker adding to the must-see excitement surrounding the Warner Bros. release.
With the Bruce Wayne/Batman backstory firmly established, “The Dark Knight” fans out to take a broader perspective on Gotham City — portrayed as a seething cauldron of interlocking power structures and criminal factions in the densely layered but remarkably fleet screenplay by helmer Nolan and brother Jonathan (stepping in for “Batman Begins’” David S. Goyer, who gets a story credit).
Using five strongly developed characters to anchor a drama with life-or-death implications for the entire metropolis, the Nolans have taken Bob Kane’s comicbook template and crafted an anguished, eloquent meditation on ideas of justice and power, corruption and anarchy and, of course, the need for heroes like Batman — a question never in doubt for the viewer, but one posed rather often by the citizens of Gotham.
Indeed, with trusty Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman, superbly restrained) and golden-boy District Attorney Harvey Dent (a cocksure Aaron Eckhart) successfully spearheading the city’s crackdown on the mob, even Wayne himself (Christian Bale) figures his nights moonlighting as a leather-clad vigilante are numbered. The young billionaire hopes to hang up the Batsuit for good and renew his relationship with assistant D.A. Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, an immediate improvement over Katie Holmes), who has taken up with Dent in the meantime.
But Batman’s stature as a radical symbol of good has invited a more sinister criminal presence to Gotham City — and, as seen in the crackerjack bank-robbery sequence that opens the pic, one who operates in terrifyingly unpredictable ways. Utterly indifferent to simple criminal motivations like greed, Ledger’s maniacally murderous Joker is as pure an embodiment of irrational evil as any in modern movies. He’s a pitiless psychopath who revels in chaos and fears neither pain nor death, a demonic prankster for whom all the world’s a punchline.
After Ledger’s death in January, his penultimate performance (with Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” still to come) will be viewed with both tremendous excitement and unavoidable sadness. It’s a tribute to Ledger’s indelible work that he makes the viewer entirely forget the actor behind the cracked white makeup and blood-red rictus grin, so complete and frightening is his immersion in the role. With all due respect to the enjoyable camp buffoonery of past Jokers like Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson, Ledger makes them look like — well, clowns.
The pic shrewdly positions the Joker as the superhero-movie equivalent of a modern terrorist (one of several post-9/11 signifiers), who threatens to target Gotham civilians until Batman reveals his identity. Batman, Gordon and Dent uneasily join forces, but the Joker seems to have the upper hand at every step, even from a jail cell; the city, turning against the hero it once looked to for hope, seems more fractious, vulnerable and dangerous than ever.
Though more linear than “Memento” and “The Prestige” (both also co-scripted by the Nolans), “The Dark Knight” pivots with similar ingenuity on a breathless series of twists and turns, culminating in a dramatic shift for Dent. This subplot reps the film’s weakest link, packing too much psychological motivation into too little screen time to be entirely credible. Yet Eckhart vividly inhabits the character’s sad trajectory, underscoring the film’s point that symbols of good can be all too easily tarnished.
From Wayne’s playful debates with faithful butler Alfred (Michael Caine) about the public perception of Batman to the Joker’s borderline-poetic musings on his own bottomless sadism, the characters almost seem to be carrying on a debate about the complicated realities of good vs. evil, and the heavy burden shouldered by those fighting for good. One of the few action filmmakers who’s capable of satisfying audiences beyond the fanboy set, Nolan honors his serious themes to the end; he bravely closes the story with both Gotham City and the narrative in tatters, making this the rare sequel that genuinely deserves another.
Viewers who found “Batman Begins” too existentially weighty for its own good will be refreshed to know that “The Dark Knight” hits the ground running and rarely lets up over its swift 2½-hour running time. Nolan directs the action more confidently than he did the first time out, orchestrating all manner of vertiginous mid-air escapes and virtuosic highway setpieces (and unleashing Batman’s latest ooh-ah contraption, the monster-truck-tire-equipped Bat-Pod). In a fresh innovation, six sequences were shot using Imax cameras, and will presumably look smashing in the giant-screen format (pic was reviewed from a 35mm print).
Though not as obsessively detailed as “Batman Begins,” “The Dark Knight” shares with that film a robust physicality and a commitment to taking violence seriously; a brief shot of bruises and scrapes on Bale’s torso conveys as much impact as any of the film’s brutal confrontations. Bale himself is less central figure than ensemble player, but the commandingly charismatic thesp continues to put his definitive stamp on the role, and also has devilish fun playing up Wayne’s playboy persona.
Tech work is at the first entry’s high standard, with many artists reprising their contributions here — from Nathan Crowley’s imposing production design, shown to flattering effect in Wally Pfister’s gleaming widescreen compositions, to the propulsively moody score by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. Perhaps most impressive is Lee Smith’s editing, confidently handling multiple lines of action and cutting for maximum impact.
Exteriors were lensed in Chicago aside from an early, plot-necessitated detour to Hong Kong, which marks the first time in a Batman film that the title character has left Gotham City.
Ryan Knapp woke up before sunrise one morning in July and left his home in northern New Hampshire at 5:30 a.m. to catch a movie.
It wasn’t just any day at the cinema. In fact, it was a 14-hour round-trip journey that involved crossing two state lines by car, train and bus. That’s because Knapp wanted to see Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” the way the director intended: in Imax 70mm, a rare format crafted from Nolan’s film negative, with physical reels spanning 11 miles and weighing 600 pounds. It’s a movie nerd’s dream — but it’s only available on 30 screens worldwide, 19 of them in the U.S.
So Knapp trekked to Providence, R.I., for a 2 p.m. showing. The verdict? “It was definitely worth it.”
“Oppenheimer,” an R-rated three-hour drama consisting mainly of people talking in rooms, is not the type of movie audiences typically clamor to see on premium screens. Yet Imax accounted for a whopping 20% of the film’s $180.4 million global opening. And the company’s share of the movie’s box office haul has increased each successive weekend, with the 70mm version raking in $17 million to date, an astounding figure for such a limited format.
Audiences have flocked to Imax screens because they offer an experience that cannot be replicated at home, according to box office analyst Jeff Bock, and “when a Christopher Nolan film comes out, that is an event in and of itself.” Plus, premium large formats like Imax 70mm are “a cinephile argument that has now carried over into the mainstream.”
According to Nolan, Imax 70mm is the ideal cinema experience because “the sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled.” But there are serious limitations when it comes to bringing the format to a wider audience. For one, Imax has only 30 Imax film projectors in rotation worldwide, and it takes three days to create each print. Since most theaters have switched over completely to digital projection, the company worked for two years to evaluate, reinstall and fix Imax 70mm projectors, sending tech teams to every site to perfect the audiovisual components. With “Oppenheimer,” Imax oversaw the hiring of 50 film projectionists globally and helped develop the first-ever Imax 70mm black-and-white film, bringing some of Kodak’s more experienced personnel out of retirement in the process.
Due to popular demand, Imax has twice extended “Oppenheimer’s” 70mm run. But on Sept. 1, exhibitors will have to cede those screens to Denzel Washington’s “The Equalizer 3.”
“We really want to support Chris and the movie in every way we can, but we have to balance that with our other commitments,” says Richard Gelfond, CEO of Imax. “We’ll play it by ear and see where it goes.”
Mark Jafar, Imax’s global head of corporate communications, adds, “Imax 70mm film lasts, on average, 10 times longer than regular 70mm or 35mm film. Those prints are assets that we’ll be using for the next 20 years.” He’s confident that specialty theaters like BFI in London and AMC Lincoln Square in New York will bring back “Oppenheimer” in Imax 70mm for Nolan retrospectives.
But it might return even sooner. With theaters selling out more than three weeks in advance — and fans like Knapp road-tripping to their nearest Imax 70mm showing — it’s likely “Oppenheimer” will come back to premium large formats after moviegoers have checked out “The Equalizer 3.”
As Imax 70mm continues to permeate the mainstream and draw in younger auteurs like Jordan Peele and Damien Chazelle, Gelfond’s hope is to “find more projectors and refurbish them.”
“It’s an art form that’s been fading away,” he says. “Imax is all in on trying to keep film alive.”
With $134 million generated from “Oppenheimer” alone, the premium film-tech company is largely responsible for bringing multiplexes out of the pandemic slump. “If Hollywood is going to invest in one thing,” says Bock, “it should have almost everything to do with Imax.”
Due to popular demand, “Oppenheimer” has extended its 70mm run at Imax theaters nationwide through the end of August.
The previous end date, which was already an extension of the film’s original run in Imax 70mm format, was Aug. 17. Tickets for Christopher Nolan’s atomic bomb drama are already on sale through Aug. 31 at some Imax theaters, as exhibitors will make them available on a rolling basis.
Nolan, a longtime vocal champion of the premium format, touted Imax 70mm as the “best possible experience” to see “Oppenheimer” because “the sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled.” Only 19 theaters in the U.S. (and 30 worldwide) have the capability to play films in Imax 70mm, including the AMC Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles and the AMC Lincoln Square in New York — making those screens some of the hottest tickets in town.
“It actually looks better in film,” Imax CEO Richard Gelfond tells Variety. “It’s not just about nostalgia. It’s a better experience.”
A lot of work goes into the 70mm experience, he adds. It takes three days to make an Imax film print, and each one is crafted directly from Nolan’s film negative. In the case of “Oppenheimer,” which clocks in at three hours, physical reels are 11 miles long and weigh 600 pounds.
The process is “time consuming and expensive,” Gelfond admits. But ultimately, it’s “worth it.”
Already, the historical biopic starring Cillian Murphy as the “father of the atomic bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer, has raked in over $550 million at the global box office, a triumphant feat for an R-rated drama that runs over three hours long. Imax has accounted for a remarkable $114.2 million (22%) of the film’s worldwide total.
“Oppenheimer” will control the Imax footprint until Denzel Washington’s “The Equalizer 3” takes its spot on Sept. 1. Later in the year, Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune Part II,” also filmed with Imax cameras, is getting an exclusive Imax run starting on Nov. 3.
Still, executives at Imax are confident this summer won’t be the last of “Oppenheimer” in Nolan’s preferred format.
“Imax 70mm film lasts, on average, 10 times longer than regular 70mm or 35mm film. Those prints are assets that we’ll be using for the next 20 years,” says Mark Jafar, global head of corporate communications for Imax. “Places like BFI [in London] or Lincoln Square will do Nolan retrospectives or bring back ‘Oppenheimer’ given how popular it is. We’ll be showing it in this format for years to come.”
Zeitgeist Films has formed a joint venture with Syncopy, Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas’ production company, to release Blu-ray editions of Zeitgeist’s prestige titles.
Nolan and Thomas have been friends of Zeitgeist since the independent distributor handled Nolan’s first feature film, “Following,” in 1998.
The first title in the partnership is “Elena,” from “Leviathan” director Andrey Zvyagintsev. “Elena,” which won the Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize, is a modern noir thriller in which 60ish spouses uneasily share a palatial Moscow apartment.
“Elena” stars Nedezhda Markina in the title role and features Hitchcockian music by Philip Glass. Zeitgeist has set an Aug. 4 release.
“We are excited to be able to release this beautiful film on Blu-ray for the first time,” said Zeitgeist co-presidents Nancy Gerstman and Emily Russo. “This is a dream project for us and we’re grateful to Chris and Emma for their support in making it possible.”
The next collaboration between Syncopy and Zeitgeist will be a compilation of the Quay Brothers’ animated short films to be released for the first time on Blu-ray in the fall.
“It’s very exciting to think that ‘Elena’ is receiving an American release in Blu-ray,” said Zvyagintsev. “As a long-time admirer of Christopher Nolan, I am honored that he is initiating his partnership with Zeitgeist with my film. I wish all the parties involved success.”
For decades, the three Oscar shorts prizes — live action, animated and especially documentary — have confounded those who watch the awards. Shorts were all but impossible to see and subject to a different set of rules. That was until ShortsTV came along to distribute the nominees, but even then, at the qualification stage, virtually every other category had to play theatrically, whereas the shorts didn’t, causing some to question whether they even belonged in the Oscar telecast at all. And then the pandemic hit: In 2020, hardly any features opened in cinemas, whereas short films enjoyed more exposure than they had previously, thanks to the rapidly expanding number of streaming platforms that carried them — from Netflix to Paramount Plus to outlets like The Guardian and The New York Times. Suddenly, the doc shorts category seems more accessible and relevant than ever.
Steven Spielberg laid claim to the Normandy beach landing, Clint Eastwood owns Iwo Jima, and now, Christopher Nolan has authored the definitive cinematic version of Dunkirk. Unlike those other battles, however, this last was not a conventional victory, but more of a salvaged retreat, as the German offensive forced a massive evacuation of English troops early in World War II. And unlike those other two directors, Nolan is only nominally interested in the human side of the story as he puts his stamp on the heroic rescue operation, offering a bravura virtual-eyewitness account from multiple perspectives — one that fragments and then craftily interweaves events as seen from land, sea and air.
Take away the film’s prismatic structure and this could be a classic war picture for the likes of Lee Marvin or John Wayne. And yet, there’s no question that the star here is Nolan himself, whose attention-grabbing approach alternates among three strands, chronological but not concurrent, while withholding until quite late the intricate way they all fit together. Though the subject matter is leagues (and decades) removed from the likes of “Inception” and “The Dark Knight,” the result is so clearly “a Christopher Nolan film” — from its immersive, full-body suspense to the sophisticated way he manipulates time and space — that his fans will eagerly follow en masse to witness the achievement. And what an achievement it is!
From the opening scene, “Dunkirk” places us in a state of jeopardy as German sharpshooters pick off a group of British soldiers just yards from the embattled beachhead. Not that things are any safer on the other side of the French-defended barricade. “We surround you,” reads an air-dropped leaflet that accurately represents the Allies’ ever-shrinking position. Backed against the sea, what remains of the British Expeditionary Force can practically see their homeland a mere 26 miles away, but are vulnerable to attacks from the air.
The first fly-by bombing catches us just as much off-guard as it does Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), thin, handsome and hardly more than a child. His dash to the beach could be a game, if the gunshots that fell his comrades and explode inches from his head weren’t so lethal or so loud (as always with Nolan, sound design dramatically heightens the intensity of the experience, which already feels extraordinary given his use of massive-scale Imax cameras).
Driven by a mix of naïveté and survival instinct, Tommy makes an ideal guide through the week-long ordeal, allowing us to experience the strange, almost random way that cowardice blossoms into courage on the battlefield. His storyline, labeled “The Mole” (possibly a play on words, seeing as how it’s set primarily on Dunkirk’s pier-like projection, or mole, but also introduces a somewhat unnecessary subplot involving a non-British infiltrator, or mole), is the most audacious: It features hardly any dialogue, relying instead on our ability to adapt to the unrelentingly harrowing situation, as when Tommy and another low-ranking soldier (Aneurin Barnard) grab a stretcher and use the injured man to board a hospital ship, only to be ordered off moments before it sinks.
No fewer than four British ships go down in “Dunkirk” — not counting the one from which Cillian Murphy’s nameless “shivering soldier” is rescued — and each capsizes alarmingly quickly. This isn’t “Titanic,” in which miniature melodramas had time to unfold as the boat slowly sank, either. Whereas air battles are drawn out and repeated for effect, Nolan and editor Lee Smith compress the doomed-boat scenes for ruthless efficiency, turning the water into a place of high-stakes peril.
While big military ships make massive targets for German bombers and U-boat attacks, Dunkirk’s rough waves and shallow coastline demanded a different approach, and so Operation Dynamo was born: an all-hands call to civilian sailors, asking that they steer any vessel they can, from fishing trawlers to pleasure yachts, across the English Channel to rescue as many of the stranded soldiers as possible. Labeled “The Sea,” this segment feels more traditional, emotionally manipulative enough to match the almost-corny 1940s British propaganda film in this year’s “Their Finest.” (Even in Imax, in which most of the movie fills the massive, nearly-square aspect ratio, this portion is presented in a relatively constrained 2.40:1 format — the same dimensions to which the entire film will be cropped in traditional theaters.)
During this sea-rescue segment, the characters are familiar archetypes, from duty-bound captain Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance) to determined teenage tagalong George (Barry Keoghan), and their predictable behavior is elevated by the actors’ fine performances. Rylance in particular speaks volumes even when saying very little, and several of the movie’s most poignant moments are conveyed almost entirely without words, via his expressions alone — as when Dawson realizes the likely death that awaits them just beyond the horizon.
Dunkirk’s beaches represent a special kind of hell in the film, a danger zone where the British are frightfully exposed to attacks from above — and where fate, in all its grim absurdity, forces a few of the characters to return multiple times. Just when the soldiers think they’ve escaped, the tide pulls them back in.
Though much of the Royal Air Force was ordered not to engage, a third strand called “The Air” focuses on two Spitfire pilots (Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden) determined to protect, as best they can, the rescue vessels from airborne German attack. Hilariously enough, the role finds Hardy once again in Bane mode, his mouth covered and his dialogue all but inaudible — and yet, the heroism shows through his actions and the determined glint in his eyes.
Both Murphy and Hardy have worked with Nolan before (each as Batman villains), but he uses them in character-actor mode here, treating these marquee talents as equals among a cast of newcomers (including Harry Styles, looking every bit the 1940s matinee idol). Playing the highest-ranking Navy officer on the beach, Kenneth Branagh provides the film’s only star performance, and even then, it all comes down to a meaningful salute delivered in “Dunkirk’s” final minutes.
By this point in the film, Nolan has tied the three storylines together. While unnecessarily confusing at times (and not especially satisfying as a puzzle — at least not in the way the ingenious backward-logic of “Memento” was back in the day), by splintering these three storylines, the director allows us to experience the Dunkirk evacuation from multiple perspectives. In his extensive pre-production research, Nolan pored over survivors’ firsthand accounts and inevitably found inconsistencies among them — a phenomenon he ingeniously incorporates into his screenplay. In “Dunkirk,” subjectivity is not merely a tool for in-the-moment suspense, but also for suggesting the innumerable different ways people both lived and remembered the week’s events: One moment, a Spitfire pilot might be swooping in to save a Navy ship, and the next, he’s the one in need of rescuing as his seatbelt jams and his cockpit fills with water.
And yet, Nolan never once privileges the German p.o.v. (a bold departure from most war movies, including “Tora! Tora! Tora!,” which showed both sides, or Michael Bay’s “Pearl Harbor,” which famously offered a Japanese bomb’s-eye-view of the attack). Nolan’s goal is to give an exclusively British account of events, zeroing in on how it must have felt to the everyday heroes who lived it, as opposed to the leaders calling the shots. When Winston Churchill is finally heard, his words are being read aloud from the pages of a newspaper by an ordinary soldier, rather than delivered by the prime minister himself.
And in that nuance is the great accomplishment of Nolan’s feat: On one hand, he has delivered all the spectacle of a big-screen tentpole, ratcheting up both the tension and heroism through his intricate and occasionally overwhelming sound design, which blends a nearly omnipresent ticking stopwatch with Hans Zimmer’s bombastic score — not so much music as atmospheric noise, so bassy you can feel it rattling your vertebrae. But at the same time, he’s found a way to harness that technique in service of a kind of heightened reality, one that feels more immersive and immediate than whatever concerns we check at the door when entering the cinema. This is what audiences want from a Nolan movie, of course, as a master of the fantastic leaves his mark on historical events for the first time.
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