NOT JUST ANOTHER DAY AT THE BEACH

Opening this weekend:

Dunkirk--In the hair-raising opening scenes of this historical epic from Christopher Nolan, a young English soldier tries to make it to the title town's beach alive, and just barely succeeds. Aside from surviving, all he really wants to do is find a peaceful place to evacuate his bowels. This is the sort of human detail that many war movies leave out, or treat jocularly, but realities like this are the core of Dunkirk.

Well-played by a newcomer named Fionn Whitehead, the character is listed in the credits as "Tommy," but his name hardly matters. He's an everyman--an everykid, really--and the other young soldiers he meets, played by Aneurin Barnard and One Direction's Harry Styles, are similarly generic. Nolan's script, clearly by design, offers no real characterization, presumably on the theory that backstory, in these circumstances, would be grotesquely irrelevant.

Instead, Nolan relies on his actors to fill in the stock figures. Since the cast includes such vets as Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, James D'Arcy and Tom Hardy, it need hardly be said that this proves a sound strategy.

Almost everything Nolan tries here seems to work. The movie focuses on the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of English and French soldiers, surrounded by the German army and threatened from the air by the Luftwaffe, across the Channel to England in late May and early June of 1940. Nolan cuts between three main strands, "The Mole," aka the breakwater where soldiers like Tommy waited days to be picked up by Navy vessels, "The Sea," in which we follow one of the "Little Ships of Dunkirk," the small civilian commercial and private crafts that took to the Channel to rescue the trapped men, and "The Air," in which we follow three RAF pilots in Spitfires trying to down German airplanes before they can bomb or strafe the evacuees.

The dialogue, sparing to begin with, battles the ambient noise, Hans Zimmer's brooding, gut-vibrating score, and (for us Yanks especially) thick accents, to the point that after a while I mostly gave up and just tried to follow what was going on by context. Similarly, because of the differing travel times required for the three modes of Channel crossing, Dunkirk employs another of those intricately non-chronological time-schemes, as in Momento, so that Nolan can use crosscutting to maximum emotional effect. And while emotional it certainly is, I must confess that in the final third of the film I found myself disoriented at times by where we were in this reticular narrative. But that may have just been me.

In any case, it didn't detract from the overall impact of Dunkirk, which at its best has something like the sweep and punch of the great silent war epics (I saw the film on an IMAX screen, by the way, and recommend this format if it's available to you). The performances, the incongruously gentle hues of Hoyte van Hoytema's exquisite cinematography, and the sustained assurance of Nolan's direction all combined to make this sad, terrifying yet ultimately uplifting story one of the more potent movie experiences I've had in a while.

YET ANOTHER DIRECTION

In my characteristically snide review of One Direction: This Is Us—you can read it here—something I neglected to mention is that The Kid laughed and laughed at the behind-the-scenes antics of the title boy band. I should also have mentioned that, in the years I’ve been taking her to movies, This Is Us is, if memory serves, the first movie she’s ever requested to be taken to a second time.

All of this probably serves as a more relevant review of the film for the target demographic than my initial one. Anyway, in response to the flick’s unexpectedly strong showing at the box office, opening today is One Direction: This Is Us—Extended Fan Cut. Because it’s also in 3D, the title’s been succinctly abbreviated to 3D 1D: Fan Cut. It features about 20 minutes of additional footage, and four additional songs.

QUINTESSENTIAL

The backpack in which The Kid carries her books to school bears the smiling mugs of five British boys. So does a beach bag she takes swimming, and so does a t-shirt she frequently wears. Said mugs belong to a boy band known collectively as One Direction—though I keep referring to them, accidently but perhaps aptly, as “One Dimension.”

The members of One Direction (I just had to correct myself, I started typing “Dimension” again) were assembled in 2010 out of also-ran solo auditioners from the Brit TV talent show X Factor. Taken under the wing of none other than Simon Cowell, they failed to win on the show but became wildly popular anyway via social media fandom. As Cowell rather sheepishly notes in the documentary One Direction: This Is Us (which he co-produced), the boys became stars before they ever released a record.

Then they released a record, and really became stars. The movie, directed by Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), gives a swift 101 course in the band’s history for those of us who were uninitiated, and a few rather touching glimpses of their “Mums” and other family members, but principally focuses on life on the road—the genuinely grueling, maybe rather exploitative tour schedule that these lads are kept on.

I’m not trying to be a dick when I say—I can’t keep these guys straight in my head. The only one I can remember is the one The Kid likes, Zayn (“the mysterious one”). The other four—Harry (“the charming one”), Niall (“the cute one”), Louis (“the funny one”) and Liam (“the sensible one”; how bad does that suck as a signature trait?)—just sort of blur together in my mind.

The same goes for their music. A couple of music critics are heard in the movie, claiming that One Direction’s sound is “anarchic” and has “a bit of an edge.” This, I guess, is why I couldn’t make it as a music critic, because I sure can’t hear it.

Most of their songs sound, to me, neither good nor offensively bad. They’re just cheery, weightless, badly-rhymed pop that flatters little girls—a couple of fans astutely observe that One Direction says the things the boys they know never say. But even by boy band standards, it’s thin stuff. To call it “bubble gum” would be to insult the nutritional properties of bubble gum.

All that said, as a movie the fast-paced One Direction: This Is Us is pretty watchable. Spurlock employs some clever asides—like a German scientist explaining what happens in the brains of young girls when they hear the music—but mostly he mixes tricked-out concert footage with generous helpings of the lads blowing off steam behind the scenes, tussling and roughhousing like the guys in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Most of them seem to come from working-class backgrounds, and I found it hard not to wish them well, even though the One Direction they’re aimed is, of course, straight at the pocketbooks of little girls.

I think the sweetest moment may be when the five are sitting around a campfire, and one of them imagines mothers in the future telling their daughters about how One Direction was the popular boy band in their day. It’s probably healthy that these guys start thinking about their current situation as temporary, before one of them becomes a big star and the rest become bitter and/or relieved to be out of the limelight.