Dunkirk (2017)

In the opening scene of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, we meet Tommy, a retreating British soldier played by Fionn Whitehead. Tommy and his mates are walking through the deserted streets of the French town of Dunkerque, leaflets fluttering gently from the sky, when their stroll is interrupted, fractured by gunfire.

The fusillade is deafening, and startling, and the boys start to run, but only Tommy makes it over a wall to temporary safety. This begins Tommy's quest for escape and survival.

The enemy makes himself heard by dropping bombs that explode, firing guns that shatter the air, and especially by dive-bombing Stukas that sound like banshees. We never see the face of the enemy; in fact, the enemy is completely disembodied throughout.

War is loud because it's supposed to be. Dunkirk is loud because ear-splitting instruments of ruin represent chaos, and Dunkirk is a movie about the essentiality of order from within chaos.

That's also why we never see a German soldier. The enemy is unseen, yet potentially everywhere. They ply the English Channel in U-boats, submerged by the water that is itself an agent of chaos, and a barrier to safety.

The unseen German soldier represents the unknown. The unknown is an archetypal form of chaos. Outside your island of safety, of tea and toast with jam, of all that is known, there is an infinite universe that is hostile or indifferent to your existence and survival. The unseen German soldier is a reminder that outside the ordered realm, there exists a vast realm where the chances of not surviving are nearly infinite.

The promotional tag-line for Dunkirk reads, "When 400,000 men couldn't get home, home came for them." Home is the rolling green countryside viewed from the window of a train that must have been a welcome change from a beach pelted by wind that would blow the foam across the sand.

Home represents the ultimate orderliness, in a very British stiff-upper-lip manner. Order is personified by Commander Bolton, played by Kenneth Branagh. Calm, rational, stoicism is deeply embodied by Mr. Dawson, played by Mark Rylance, who pilots his motor yacht Moonstone across the channel to help the evacuation.

Order is the scores of life preservers neatly stacked belowdecks of Moonstone. Mr. Dawson doesn't even turn around at the sound of approaching aircraft. He knows they are Spitfires from the engine's thrum, saying, "Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, sweetest sound you could hear."

Stoicism is embodied by Mr. Dawson telling the shivering soldier he rescued, "There’s no hiding from this." And it's symbolized by the masses of soldiers queuing in neat lines down to the shore, dispersing when the Stukas appear, and reassembling when the Stukas move off.

This order has counterpoint in the utter chaos of war. Tommy hides along the mole, hoping to sneak aboard the next boat after being kicked off a hospital ship. The hospital ship is bombed at its berth, and sinks within minutes, men diving off the wreckage to safety.

Tommy boards another ship, which is torpedoed during the night crossing, and sinks also. His journey through chaos is nowhere near done, and neither is Britain's. Tommy's imperative is his own personal survival, by whatever means, but Nolan imbues him with virtue nonetheless. When Tommy's ship is torpedoed, he opens a hatch that allows a few boys a passage to safety. It's a very small act compared to the hundreds of boys and nurses trapped on board that will surely drown.

But it's not nothing. When Tommy arrives safely back on the dock in England, a man congratulates him, "Well done lads!" Tommy replies, "All we did was survive."

"That's enough."