Christopher Nolan’s newest film,“Dunkirk”, starts off silent. Papers float down from the sky, bearing a warning: WE SURROUND YOU. From the beginning, that silence is a device that gives the entire movie an unsettling and highly suspenseful quality whenever Hans Zimmer’s extraordinary score is not present. His music, an almost constant noise in the background, is so subtle viewers almost don’t realize they’re reacting to it. It builds the tension in the film higher and higher throughout, and the anticipation it helps create is vital to the tone of the movie.

Again, from that very first scene, that feeling of suspense is established, but it is also confirmed as valid. “Dunkirk” opens with a group of soldiers, all at their most vulnerable: one is squatting to relieve himself, and another is drinking from a hose. Seconds later, all but one of that group, the story’s lead, has been shot. While the lead manages to get away, it is only minutes later that the he narrowly escapes injury from a bombing. The plot continues as such, with short spans of suspension, all eventually ending in some incident that builds on to a growing anticipation of the final event that will determine whether or not the movie’s protagonist makes it out alive.

It is not, however, only the protagonist audiences are rooting for. It is 400,000 soldiers, trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk, with no way out but the English Channel. The Germans surrounding those shores are made out as a sort of omniscient enemy who need only lift a single finger to have everyone obliterated. They are never discussed in-depth, and that only seems to make them bigger and more threatening as the British grow more and more frantic in finding a way out and their rescuers risk everything to bring them home.

The stories of those coming in by sea, those coming in by air, and those on the beaches are told from three points of view, all over different periods of time. The beaches are told over a span of a week, the air an hour, and the sea a day. This is not Nolan’s first movie that experiments with time; one of his first films, “Memento”, is famous for it, and he brings that expertise to his newest film. Nolan’s use of time in “Dunkirk”  seems to weave the story together in a strange, yet fitting way. He does it brilliantly enough that any viewer could understand the switches between days and hours, but also so that it allows Nolan to use it as a foreshadowing tool. In one scene about halfway through the movie, in a point of view from an aerial perspective, audience members can clearly see a shot of an overturned boat that viewers will see from the ocean view in a pivotal scene towards the end of the movie.

“Dunkirk”’s gorgeous cinematography not only allows viewers glimpses of vast beaches and open expanses of ocean, but also aids in establishing an important theme of the film: isolation, and the lengths people will go to to survive it. Throughout the movie, audiences are given expansive shots of thousands of soldiers, all lined up on the beaches or clamoring for a spare spot on a medical vessel that could bring them home.

This theme, however, is not only showcased through cinematography. When learning he has been rescued, an unnamed soldier goes so far as to seriously injure a young boy while trying to convince his rescuers to go back home instead of sailing on to the beaches of Dunkirk, where he had just escaped. When finding their boat filling with water after used as target practice by the Germans, a group of British soldiers decide to kick a French soldier off to lighten the load so they can continue on, something that would have likely ended in the Frenchman’s death.This continued idea of isolation and the extent a person will go to escape it is essential to this film but rather uncommon in its genre.

This particular theme is only one of many things that separates “Dunkirk” from other war films. Instead of focusing on elaborate battle scenes or complicated strategy, “Dunkirk” is a story of the bravery of thousands of civilians to rescue three hundred thousand British troops; it is the story of determination, desertion, and, most importantly, home. And while it can be noted that it is seriously lacking in character development, with the majority of characters’ names never even mentioned, ‘“Dunkirk” instead chooses to look at the event as a whole, with it’s plot, score, and cinematography more than making up for any shortcomings. Altogether, “Dunkirk” is yet another masterpiece from the genius Christopher Nolan.