This will have spoilers for both Dunkirk and 1917.
I would like to start this by saying that both of these movies are good. Great maybe. But I believe that one is a better film, and I think its interesting to explore why this is so.
Dunkirk is based on the real event, where allied forces were trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk, and their eventual rescue by civilian boats. 1917 tells the story of two soldiers that must sneak through no man’s land to deliver an important message to save a battalion of soldiers from a suicidal attack.
Do these films warrant being compared? They are about different wars and are structured completely differently. 1917 is set in World War 1 and Dunkirk is set on World War 2. 1917 is tightly focused on the two main characters, while Dunkirk has a massive ensemble cast told over a week. But I think that these films have enough similarities to be compared, and deserve to see why one works a lot more than the other.
For one, both are told in unconventional ways. 1917 is filmed with long takes and camera tricks to create the illusion of it being all in one take. Dunkirk is three different stories that take place at different time frames which all meet up at the end. These are also both realistic war films that use a lot of tension throughout the film.
1917 is the second movie that I have seen to be cheated to seem filmed in one shot. The first was of course Birdman (Or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). That film was filmed to seem as one shot because it was directly tied to the theme and plot of the movie, and the one shot style lends itself better to the conversation-heavy Birdman film. Unfortunately, this amount of thought is not put into the reasoning behind the single shot method in 1917. I think that it greatly hobbles some of the action scenes, and the volume of them in the movie, as it is insanely difficult to film large, complex action scenes in one take. When the film does partake in action, it is always filmed very well, and at points the scale is mind-blowing, but I found these moments a bit scarce.
Dunkirk is composed of three timelines: the Mole which takes place over one week, the Sea which takes place over one day, and the Air, which takes place over one hour. The stories are woven together perfectly to ebb and flow into each other, ratcheting up the tension by never letting the audience rest for too long.
The positive about the long takes in 1917 is how the camera moves. Since the camera needs to be in certain spots throughout the film, it swings around to get into position for the next spot. Generally, in action thriller films like this one, the camera spins around to reveal new information, generally a new threat to the characters. Since the camera is always spinning in this way, the audience is constantly on edge, wondering if the next spin is just to set up the next shot, or to reveal something sinister.
The one negative I can point out about Dunkirk’s presentation is that it does not ever fully convey the length that the soldiers were trapped on that beach. It is mentioned at the beginning of the film that this third of the film takes place over one week, but I don’t think that I would have known that this time frame spans that amount of time without that title. More tension could have come from the situation if the audience could really feel the length of time those soldiers were trapped and the impending enemy soldiers that are steadily marching on them. However, I don’t know how that time could be conveyed without ruining the blistering pace that the film has, so this is a small complaint.
There is one big difference between 1917 and Dunkirk, and that is how they choose to show the horrors of war. 1917 focuses more on the blood, gore and tragedy of war, while Dunkirk shows that the true horror of war is the crushing impersonal nature of war and death.
Dunkirk was not rated R and shows very little in wounds and blood, and there is no gore whatsoever. 1917 shows the gorier side of war, with rotting horse carcasses in no man’s land, to walking by bodies strung up gruesomely in barbed wire and Schofield being startled into putting his hand into a wound in a rotted corpse. The gore of war is a large part of why war is so horrible, and seeing those bodies in such a gruesome way is definitely realistic, but I would say that it is less effective over repeated watches and can fade into the background, especially as movie viewers have lost some of their sensitivity to gore. The cold, uncaring nature of war is something that I think is far more effective and something that a movie has not really focused on, at least in the mainstream.
I think this difference in philosophies is best exemplified by one scene in 1917. The film’s two main characters, Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Lance Corporal Schofield (George Mackay) are walking through the countryside after narrowly surviving a tripwire bomb left in an abandoned German trench. Here we learn that Schofield had traded his medal for a bottle of wine, because he was thirsty and, as he states, “Its nothing but a bit of tin”. Blake cannot believe this, as he believes that the medal symbolizes more, its special and makes the owner of that medal special.
That is the main difference between Dunkirk and 1917. Dunkirk is like Schofield. It feels like anyone can die at any time, and there really isn’t a “main” character in a sense. Any character can die and the movie would continue in mostly the same way. This gives the movie more tension simply because anyone can die within the story.
This is not the case with 1917. At least one of the main characters, Blake or Schofield, must survive to the finale, because that is the way that the story is structured. If both characters die before they reach the battalion they are warning, or before the end of the movie, then the anything before that point in the movie would be moot. All the character work and motivations built up in the movie prior would feel pointless if they did not make it to the end of the film.
And when Blake dies part way through the film, it has the effect of robbing the rest of the film of tension for Schofield. The film is shot in one shot, and that means it is completely focused on Schofield. There is no where to cut to, no b-plot or other characters to add tension to the film. We are just following a character we know cannot die at least until the end of the movie, and for me, that killed the tension for the rest of the movie completely. Luckily, I thought the visuals in the movie really picked up after Schofield is knocked out, and I thought most of the shots afterwards, particularly the burning city and the freshly dug trenches to be stunning.
A small difference I found in the ability of these films to build up tension was the soundtrack choices. The soundtrack for 1917 was fine, but nothing stood out to me for it. It did its job, but never really stood out good or bad. The soundtrack for Dunkirk however, is not much like any soundtrack I had previously heard, and does wonders to ratchet up the tension. The ticking clock motif rams home the lack of time that the boats and planes have to rescue the soldiers on the beach and the impending enemy forces. I think this is particularly effective when a large group of soldiers are trapped in a grounded ship that is being fired at as target practice with the rising tide, along with a pilot that is trapped in his crashed plane in the middle of the ocean with the plane quickly sinking. Not only is this scene stressful in itself (the soldiers in the boat and the pilot in the plane could all realistically perish at this point in the film), but the music does a really fantastic job of keeping the momentum while cutting between these two scenes and keeping the tension mounting.
In conclusion, I think that these are both good movies. Each does have its flaws and high-points, like every movie. However, I feel that the highs are higher in Dunkirk rather than 1917. Most of the things that I enjoyed about 1917 were very surface level, and the problems I had with it were deeper. I found some of the story decisions and plot points stupid, like Schofield trusting an enemy soldier to stay silent after attacking him or the river dumping Schofield right where he needed to be. These are not large problems, but do add up and Dunkirk, I feel, had very few of these moments. And while the characters of 1917 were more central to the plot and well developed than those in Dunkirk, I think it hurt the film, more than helped it. The lack of main character in Dunkirk gives the film much more tension and greatly shows the coldness of war, better than what 1917 was capable of.
The Sensations of Storytelling 