How Will ‘Dunkirk’ Stack Up Against the Great WWII Movies?
Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, Spike Lee, Clint Eastwood, Angelina Jolie, Steven Spielberg—all have made movies related to World War II.

Now Christopher Nolan joins their ranks with “Dunkirk,” the story of the military and civilian evacuation of more than 300,000 Allied troops trapped on the beaches of northern France in 1940. The big-budget Hollywood picture out this week, written and directed by the British-American filmmaker behind “The Dark Knight” trilogy, is not about an Allied victory, but a rescue at a highly precarious moment in history.

Directors who want to test their mettle continue to turn to World War II, the subject of more American movies than any other conflict in U.S. history, film experts say. U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan remain intermittent screen subjects, but World War II, with its sense of moral clarity, is a constant. The war formed the backdrop of several movies last year and returned this year with pictures including the Holocaust film “The Zookeeper’s Wife” and the D-Day drama “Churchill,” as well as the Winston Churchill biopic “Darkest Hour” coming in the fall.

“Dunkirk” fits into a tradition of historical recreations of the war while bringing the latest camera and sound technology and a major Hollywood budget to bear on its subject—what Mr. Nolan has called “virtual reality without the headset.” Sounds of rushing air and whizzing bullets thump the bodies of viewers in their seats, while the wide-screen format delivered with the help of six IMAX cameras costing $1 million each. The new technology brings out the tiny details of grime on a soldier’s ear, foam on the ocean,​ bootprints​ in the sand. The end result is a film with hyper-real shots of soldiers getting strafed on beaches, underwater images of men in doomed naval vessels and speeding aerials of dogfights.

“I knew I didn’t want to make a film that could be dismissed as old-fashioned, something that wasn’t relevant to today’s audiences,” Mr. Nolan wrote in a column for the Telegraph earlier this month. “My pitch to Warner Bros was: ‘We’re going to put the audience into the cockpit of a Spitfire and have them dogfight the Messerschmitts. We’re going to put them on the beach, feeling the sand getting everywhere, confronting the waves.’”

Many World War II films reveal at least as much about the times in which they are made as they do about the conflict itself. “It’s possible that 20 years from now we’ll look back at ‘Dunkirk’ and say, ‘That movie was so 2017,’ and everyone will know exactly what that means,” said film historian Mark Harris, author of “Five Came Back,” a book about Hollywood and World War II that was also the subject of a recent Netflix documentary.

Around the beginning of the war, films served a practical purpose, rallying American solidarity behind the conflict. In 1940, Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent” featured a reporter calling for action with guns and battleships in a scene of a radio broadcast: “It’s as if the lights were out everywhere except in America,” he says. Chaplin, who directed and played the lead speaking role in 1940’s “The Great Dictator” about an Adolf Hitler-like figure, delivers a final speech directly into the camera that includes the line: “Let us fight to free the world.”

During the war, filmmakers churned out movies in close to real time, going from script to screen in as few as six months, said Mr. Harris.

“Films made about World War II during the war are special because we don’t know we’re going to win,” said Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University who wrote “Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II.” “I’m always surprised when I look at World War II movies made during the war just how stern the lessons are. The guy you really like is often killed in the film.”

Soon, the anxieties of the atomic age begin to surface. “In Harm’s Way,” a 1965 film starring John Wayne as a naval officer in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor, ends with a shot of the ocean that morphs into what looks like a mushroom cloud. Mixed feelings around the Vietnam War enter the picture with movies like 1967’s “The Dirty Dozen,” a subversive take on conflict told through the story of death-row convicts on a mission to kill Nazis.

Veterans of World War II and Vietnam and civilian Baby Boomers might have taken different messages from 1970’s “Patton,” at once a portrait of a victorious general and a man driven by ego and ambition. Douglas Cunningham, co-editor of “A Wiley Companion to the War Film” and a teacher of film history at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, recalled a scene where Patton slaps the helmet of a soldier suffering from shellshock. “By 1970, you would have had plenty of folks returning from Vietnam traumatized in ways that would have been familiar to some members of that audience,” he said.

In time the Holocaust became a central part of the screen version of World War II, with movies like 1982’s “Sophie’s Choice,” about an Auschwitz survivor, and Spielberg’s 1993 drama “Schindler’s List.”

Movies have furthered an idea that the Holocaust was known to most American soldiers during the war. A scene hinting at that connection occurs in Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” when a Jewish soldier holds up the Star of David on his dog tag and repeats the German word for Jews—“Juden”—to captured enemy soldiers. “This is the way America sees World War II now—that it was all about the Holocaust and the Holocaust was the governing point,” said Robert Burgoyne, professor of film studies at the University of St Andrews and author of two books on U.S. history as told through the movies. “The Holocaust was not known to American culture generally. It is simply a kind of rewriting of World War II according to the contemporary generation’s perspective.”

In 1998, “Saving Private Ryan” presented the war to a new generation, starting with its harrowing opening of Allied troops storming Omaha Beach on D-Day. “In terms of stoking interest in World War II, these are the most important 20 minutes in cinema history,” said Rob Citino, senior historian at The National World War II Museum in New Orleans.

Within the last decade, films have dug into less-explored angles on the war. “Inglourious Basterds,” Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 revenge fantasy, is “a thoughtful commentary on the powerful role film itself plays in war,” said Mr. Cunningham, recalling a scene where Hitler is shot to death in a blazing movie theater that incinerates its Nazi audience.

Other contemporary films have examined war through the lens of identity politics. “The Imitation Game” is a 2014 film based on the biography of Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who helped crack the German spy code and was later punished for his homosexuality. “Today we’re going to tend to focus on issues of race, ethnicity and sexuality, where in the past maybe it would be the Jew, the Irishman and the Italian you’d see in the combat squad,” said Mr. Doherty.

All the elements of World War II—weapons, intrigue, fear, bravery, psychological breakdown—make for great storytelling. “If we wrote books and made TV shows and movies about World War II from now until 4,000 AD,” said Mr. Citino, “we still wouldn’t exhaust it as a source of human drama.”

The Dumbing Down of ‘Dunkirk’

On May 28, 1940, Winston Churchill held a meeting of his government’s ministers. “I described the course of events and showed them plainly where we were, and all that was in the balance,” Churchill later wrote. “Then I said quite casually . . .: ‘Of course, whatever happens at Dunkirk, we shall fight on.’ . . . I was sure that every Minister was ready to be killed quite soon, and have all his family and possessions destroyed, rather than give in. . . . There was a white glow, overpowering, sublime, which ran through our island from end to end.”

“Dunkirk,” opening in theaters Friday, is noteworthy in many respects. Not least for its creator’s decision—on the interesting ground that it would make things clearer for audiences—to avoid any appearance of Churchill. Of, that is, the newly appointed prime minister central to this story: the voice of that embattled Britain whose citizens, answering their government’s call, set out to rescue its army, stranded on the beaches of northern France in May of 1940.

Director Christopher Nolan, whose credits include “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight,” has said he wanted to avoid making a film “not relevant to today’s audiences” and that he didn’t want to get them bogged down in “politics.”

This says more than Mr. Nolan intended about his estimate of today’s moviegoers—whose capacities, he fears, would not be equal to a film involving images of a historic figure. There were other worries. Mr. Nolan didn’t want to make a film that could be seen as old-fashioned, he informed his interviewer. It appears further that the director wanted to avoid taxing today’s film audiences with any specifics about the foe that had the British Expeditionary Force fighting for its life on those beaches.

“We don’t have generals in rooms pushing things around on maps,” Mr. Nolan explained. “We don’t see Churchill. We barely glimpse the enemy.” All true. Though there are quite a number of enemy planes, bombers smashing the troops on the beach. The bare glimpse Mr. Nolan mentions is of the insignia identifying the nation to which those planes belong. Who could it be?

On the other hand, the markings on the British fighters engaging the enemy in dogfights loom large and clear. As do the reasons for all of the above. For, as Mr. Nolan has told us, he considers Dunkirk “a universal story . . . about communal heroism.” Which explains why this is—despite its impressive cinematography, its moving portrait of suffering troops and their rescuers—a Dunkirk flattened out, disconnected from the spirit of its time, from any sense even of the particular mighty enemy with which England was at war.

When an event in history has become, in the mind of a writer, “universal” it’s a tip-off—the warning bell that we’re about to lose most of the important facts of that history, and that the story-telling will be a special kind—a sort that obscures all specifics that run counter to the noble vision of the universalist.

No wonder those German Stukas and Heinkels bombarding the British can barely be identified as such. Then there is Mr. Nolan’s avoidance of Churchill lest audiences get bogged down in “politics”—a strange term for Churchill’s concerns during those dark days of May 1940. One so much less attractive, in its hint of the ignoble and the corrupt, than “communal” and “universal”—words throbbing with goodness. Nothing old-fashioned about them either, especially “universal”—a model of socio-babble for all occasions.

The certainty of the Nazis’ threat is what preoccupied Churchill. His testament to the sterling attitude of his ministers, quoted above, kindly omits mention of the protracted arguments from those in his war cabinet who pressed for some respectable accommodation with Hitler, for some effort at least to open talks.

There was, for Churchill, no acceptable accommodation with Hitler. He knew the disastrous impact on British morale of any word of talks or arrangements with the Nazis. They would instead hear from their new prime minister only the iron determination to defeat the enemy, the confidence that it would be done—which had not a little to do with the strengthened spirit of the British public. They had been asked to fight for victory at all costs, and most knew why they must—among them those pilots of small boats braving German fire to rescue the army.

The film’s aim, as its director says, is to tell a universal story of individuals struggling for survival. A struggle for survival under terrifying assault is exactly what we see through most of the action. Left out of this saga is any other sense of the importance of Operation Dynamo, the unexpectedly successful rescue of 338,000 soldiers who could, instead of being marched off to captivity by that barely visible enemy—call it Nation X—return to an England desperate for manpower.

Continuing the fight was, to this England facing invasion, everything. To leave out of this story, in addition to Churchill, any sense of England’s peril or the might of its enemy is to drain much of the life out of history.

All this falls into the category of facts, irrelevant history, that Mr. Nolan would consider wrong for today’s audiences. To the very end no image of Churchill defiles the sanctity of this film’s safe space. One of the final scenes does present an exhausted evacuee returned from Dunkirk, reading aloud to himself from a newspaper of Churchill’s most famous address, of June 4, 1940. The “We shall never surrender” speech is spoken by a young soldier, making it all reassuringly relevant—no trace of the man himself.

It’s possible of course that a director less apprehensive about appearing old-fashioned might have risked an actual clip of the prime minister without undue harm to the audience.

In the bleak days of 1940, Churchill told his cabinet: “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking on his own blood on the ground.” If Batman ever said anything remotely as interesting, he’d have our devoted attention.

‘Dunkirk’ Review: Finding Humanity in Calamity
Christopher Nolan revisits the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Allied troops from a French beach during World War II

In “Dunkirk,” an astonishing evocation of a crucial event during the first year of World War II, Christopher Nolan has created something new in the annals of war films—an intimate epic. The scale is immense, and all the more so in the IMAX format that shows the action to best advantage. The density of detail is breathtaking; it’s as if the camera can barely keep up with what’s happening inside and outside the frame. Yet the central concern is steadfastly human. Whether we’re watching a huge Allied army encircled by Nazi forces on a beach in France or tracking the progress of their would-be rescuers, the drama turns on individuals and their feelings—of terror, excruciating vulnerability and fragile hope that they will make it back home, only 26 miles across the English Channel.

What the film excludes is historical context. It is not, and wasn’t meant to be, an explanation of the circumstances that led, in the spring of 1940, to the entrapment of some 400,000 British, French, Belgian and Canadian troops, including what Prime Minister Winston Churchill called “the whole root and core and brain of the British Army.” Instead, “Dunkirk,” which Mr. Nolan directed from his own screenplay, is a fictionalized, impressionistic account of a calamity that culminated in a near-miracle, although many lives were lost in the process—the rescue of 338,000 of those soldiers by shallow-draft naval vessels plus a large civilian flotilla of fishing boats and yachts.

With sparse dialogue, a minimum of digital simulations and an emphasis on spectacular images, the production follows, among others, a young British enlisted man, Fionn Whitehead’s Tommy, from the moment he emerges from the streets of Dunkirk to join vast throngs of other men, most of them young and all of them frightened, on the sands of what was formerly a vacation resort. They have no more idea than he does what’s in store for them. All they know is that they’re totally vulnerable to German tanks and planes, and unlikely to survive. (The cast includes Harry Styles, of One Direction, making his acting debut.)

“Dunkirk” is hardly the first film to depict the mad chaos of modern war. The champion in that category remains “Apocalypse Now,” with “Black Hawk Down” and “Saving Private Ryan” as strong contenders. Still, Mr. Nolan has spoken of his own list of influences being topped by “The Wages of Fear,” Henri-Georges Clouzot’s peerless thriller, made in 1953, about desperate men in South America driving nitroglycerin-laden trucks over primitive roads. What’s the common denominator? Existential terror, for sure, an awareness that one’s life may be snuffed out at any moment, but also classic suspense.

A superlative thriller in its own right, “Dunkirk” wields its power in equal measure through the general (in one memorable overhead shot, hundreds of troops standing defenseless on a breakwater look up to the sky as Nazi bombers scream in for the kill) and the particular (countless vignettes of soldiers in extreme peril and anguishing suspense). Who will live and who will die as bullets fly, bombs drop, water rises in the hull of a sinking ship? Those are familiar questions in war films. The difference here is that we care intensely even though no one on screen has been characterized through familiar speeches about hopes for the future or dreams of girls back home. Long dialogue-free stretches of “Dunkirk” could qualify as silent film if—a big if—it weren’t for the shattering sounds of war, and for Hans Zimmer’s brilliantly piercing, keening score, which often merges with those sounds of war. It’s the images that tell the essence of the story, and you should try to see the film in the largest format possible, either IMAX or a 70mm print. (The production was designed by Nathan Crowley and photographed by Hoyte Van Hoytema. )

Until now Mr. Nolan’s stories—in “Memento,” his Batman trilogy, “Inception” and “Interstellar”—have been notable for their intricacy (or, to my taste on occasion, notorious for their opacity). This time he has dared to keep things simple, except for manipulations of the timeline that heighten narrative urgency without diminishing structural clarity. The structure is tripartite, with more or less equal attention given to tumultuous events on and around the beach and breakwater ( Kenneth Branagh has a small but significant role as a naval commander); in the air, where RAF Spitfire fighters woefully short on fuel struggle to protect the soldiers; and on the Channel, where the little boats of the civilian flotilla make their painfully slow way from Dover to Dunkirk.

The aerial sequences, featuring Tom Hardy as one of the Spitfire pilots, are a marvel. Once again, the form could hardly be more familiar. Dogfights—enhanced by hand-tinted muzzle flashes and engine fires—were an impressive part of the 1927 “Wings,” which won the first best-film Oscar, and the first one for special effects. Here, though, the use of IMAX cameras is transformative. By turns the screen is filled by pilots’ faces, Kabuki-like behind goggles and oxygen masks, and skies so capacious that we understand, as never before, the near-impossibility of keeping guns trained on the tiny gyrating dots of enemy fighters.

Simplicity also reigns at sea. Instead of spending time on various boats in the flotilla, as an affecting 1958 feature about Dunkirk did, Mr. Nolan’s film, surprisingly short (especially for him) at 106 minutes, focuses on a single 40-foot wooden yacht, the Moonstone, and its crew of three: the owner, Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance); his son, Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney); and George ( Barry Keoghan ), Peter’s 17-year-old friend. (They’re joined during the Channel crossing by Cillian Murphy as an unnamed survivor of a torpedoed ship.) It’s part of the film’s distinction that the taciturn Mr. Dawson is played by one of the world’s pre-eminent actors, but Mr. Rylance’s gifts aren’t wasted. When young George asks the yacht owner where they’re going, Mr. Dawson replies briskly, “Into war, George.” With three words he conveys the audacity of the voyage.