Why ‘Dunkirk’ is the Best Film of 2017

American Greatness

"Let us begin at the end of the beginning: “Dunkirk” is the best film of 2017. It is an epic war movie, where names are neither memorable nor necessary because the scenes are unforgettable. And the suspense is almost unbearable, as the story is more about psychological terror than physical turmoil. The terror of aloneness. The terror of bombardment from air, land, and sea. The terror of abject failure, as the enemy attempts to destroy Europe’s only hope for freedom and drown England’s only chance to remain free. The terror of watching this epic unfold in record time (106 minutes), without having to hear the voice of Hitler or the shouting of the Nazi Hun.

“ 'Dunkirk” uses minimalism to maximum effect. It shows us how inconsequential man is in the face of nature, while it proves how consequential men can be when they face—and overcome—the worst of human nature.

"It shows us the actor Cillian Murphy as a shell-shocked soldier clinging to the propeller of a torpedoed ship, where each blade is as brown—and dead—as the petals of the biggest flower. He is a speck in the flotsam of the English Channel, impotent before the laws of physics and immobile before this unlawful attack of Nazi aggression. He is inseparable from that flower, which symbolizes his all-but-inevitable burial at sea. The terror of the sea is not its turbulence, but its totality: a seemingly endless expanse of water, unfit to drink and unrelenting in its drive to down whatever touches the surface.

"Murphy is a tragic figure, as much a sign of God’s wrath as he is a reminder of what happens when men violate—and mock—the warnings of a prophet. That prophet is Winston Churchill. He speaks to us through Tommy, the everyman’s name of the British soldier from the Great War, when the boy reads the words of England’s greatest leader.

"He reads them aloud, hearing for the first time what the audience listens to as the film’s final words; that “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.' ” . . .