Dunkirk vs. Saving Private Ryan

[spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] DUNKIRK PODCAST Dunkirk vs. Saving Private Ryan: What is Your Screenplay About? by Jacob Krueger This week we are going to be looking at Dunkirk by Christopher Nolan. On top of being an extraordinary cinematic experience, Dunkirk is a particularly interesting script to look at as screenwriters, because it breaks pretty much every rule that you’ve likely been told about screenwriting or about filmmaking in general, or certainly about the war movie genre. When we think about big budget war movies, we generally think about movies like Saving Private Ryan, movies about great heroism and winning the battle against incredible odds. And yet this is a war movie that (for the most part) isn't about winning but about losing. This is a war movie about a retreat, about a surrender, but also about the kinds of miracles that happen when people care about each other. This isn’t a typical Joseph Campbell Hero’s Journey about one great man, one great woman who saves the world. This is a movie about a lot of little individuals. Some of them are behaving bravely, and some of them are behaving cowardly. Some for their own survival, and some for the survival of others.   Dunkirk is a movie that flies in the face of every traditional notion of star-power and how it’s supposed to be used in a big budget feature. This is a movie with an American budget with no American actors and no American characters. In fact, it features an actor in a starring role that we have never seen in a major motion picture before-- who spends most of the movie, from the very first scene, simply running away! He’s not “Saving the Cat” or behaving in any of the courageous ways we’ve been taught our main characters are supposed to behave. Not trying to help other people, but trying to save his own life in whatever manner is possible. He’s a guy who will pretend to be a Red Cross worker in order to try to sneak onto the boat that is evacuating the wounded. And yet we are able to connect with this character, we are able to care about him; we are able to feel for him. This is a movie that stars Tom Hardy and sticks him-- for most of the film-- in the cockpit of a plane and behind a mask that obscures so much of his face that we can’t even tell it is him! That takes its biggest name star and hides him from the audience that cloaks him in anonymity. And though in some ways this is an inside joke-- a nod to the recurring trend of directors covering half the face of one of the best actors in the business in roles ranging from Bane to The Road Warrior-- it’s also a thematic decision -- one that captures the anonymity of real heroism. That evokes the memory of the thousands of forgotten heroes of World War II and countless other wars. Dunkirk is also a movie that ignores most of the standard rules of the war movie genre. This is a big budget war movie with firefights shot almost entirely from the point of view of the pilots. It’s a war movie in which planes don’t explode in spectacular fashion but rather disappear silently into the ocean. A movie in which fighter pilots are more concerned with running out of fuel than with bad-ass lines of dialogue. A movie in which we watch not from the perspective of an audience being entertained by the fireworks, but from the perspective of exactly what it feels like to be a fighter pilot in the middle of battle. It’s an action movie in which the “good guys” don’t always win, and in which the bad guys can actually shoot. Where there are no supervillains, but no super heroes either. Where the Nazi pilots are as anonymous, and as good at their jobs, as the British ones. It’s a movie which assembled the largest naval unit in film history, not for a spectacular battle sequence, but for a simple journey against the waves of the English Channel. A movie in which Battleships don’t participate in ...