Dunkirk

• Composed by Hans Zimmer
• WaterTower / 2017 / 60m

Christopher Nolan’s latest choice of project surprised many – Dunkirk follows the events of Operation Dynamo in which hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers were almost miraculously evacuated from the town in northern France.  At first it seems quite an about-turn for the director but he found very much his own way of doing it.  As has become customary with Nolan films, various instructions have been issued to cinemas brave enough to want to show the film – projectionists must prove they are of pure birth, only people who can prove they have recently emptied their bladders and bowels are allowed in, that sort of thing – but the reaction from those who have managed to see it has been overwhelmingly positive.

Nolan is the most significant directorial collaborator of composer Hans Zimmer in the 21st century.  The five scores so far have all been controversial to some degree or other, but while I’m not a great fan of the ones for the Batman trilogy, the other two – Inception and Interstellar – are arguably the two finest pieces of work Zimmer’s ever done.  Whatever debate may have surrounded those, it’s nothing compared with the completely polarised response to Dunkirk.

Jerry Goldsmith used to say that the first rule of being a good film composer was to be a good composer.  This score proves that actually the dividing line between what could be considered music and what is more like sound design is a thin one and what will I’m sure go down ultimately as a very successful film score can actually be much more like the latter than it is the former: its use in the film is not without controversy itself (some commentators feel the film may have been even more powerful without it, which leads me to suspect they don’t know what they’re talking about) but most agree that the score is an absolutely pivotal part of Nolan’s jigsaw, contributing to the raw, visceral feeling that pervades all.

If the previous Nolan/Zimmer score, Interstellar, was ultimately about emotion (and despite all the manufactured hype about the use of an organ, as if it were the first film score ever to do so, it was about emotion) then this one is – by the director’s own admission – about precisely the opposite.  He says he wanted the composer to eschew emotion, to avoid sentiment and so on, and focus instead exclusively on building tension, and while that isn’t entirely true for reasons I’ll come on to, that is ultimately what much of the score does.

Years ago, when Zimmer wrote Black Hawk Down for Ridley Scott, his score was a musical representation of the chaos of war.  I said at the time that I thought it was a brilliant creation and the years haven’t dampened its impact; and Dunkirk could be considered in some ways a more extreme follow-up to that.  But I’m not sure it is necessarily more extreme: instead it is quite possible that in Black Hawk Down Zimmer was focusing on the internal chaos within the characters as much as the external chaos with which they found themselves surrounded; this time round I think he has gone entirely for the external, I think actually trying to provide something which approximates the almost unbearable sounds which would have faced the soldiers at the time.

The use of a ticking clock has been much-discussed – it may be a somewhat hackneyed device now, but it’s still effective.  Less-discussed are the various other effects: in the opening cue “The Mole” we hear what sounds a bit like a siren repeating, and that effect persists for much of what follows; stereo effects seem to simulate shell shock; there are times where the ticking clock is more like a heartbeat; there are confused whispering synth effects; and so on.  It’s fascinating and tremendously effective.  I have little doubt that it will go down as a seminal work in the Zimmer cannon and if the film’s a great success it may go on to be considered as one of his finest achievements by mainstream film critics: the only real question is whether something that is so ingrained to be part of the overall immersive experience of the film can be extracted from it and enjoyed on its own terms.

My feeling is that it can’t: regardless of its virtues as a film score, as an hour-long soundtrack album it just doesn’t function.  That’s not Zimmer’s fault, not anyone’s fault – it’s just that this is on the “wrong” side of that dividing line between music and sound design to be satisfying to someone looking at it from a purely musical perspective, which is what I’m doing here.  I suspect it will end up being up for a lot of “best music” awards when the film award season kicks in, but I doubt many soundtrack album reviewers like me will give it the higher marks when it comes to ranking albums.

I promised to return to the subject of emotion, and here it is: about two-thirds of the album are over and late in the cue “Home”, after forty minutes of the most unimaginable, visceral tension, up springs one of the most glorious, unabashedly emotional melodies from all of classical music, Edward Elgar’s “Nimrod” – that’s just a teaser because later it goes even bigger in “Variation 15 (Dunkirk)”, co-credited to Elgar and Benjamin Wallfisch (it’s amusing to me beyond what I can express using the written word that I’ve already read various comments from people who assumed that Edward Elgar must be a new kid on the Remote Control block).  The arrangement is unique, coming across a bit Vangelis-like, but that keeps it feeling very much a part of the fabric of the score as a whole.  It’s as if everything is building up to that emotional release – and that’s because, obviously, it is.  (Other very fleeting moments of emotion come with occasional trumpet solos, which have a certain antiheroic feeling.)

I’ve been reviewing soundtrack albums for over two decades.  Every time, after writing the words, I’ve come up with a star rating.  For the first time ever, I seriously considered refraining from doing so, this time.  Contrary to a lot of negative reactions I’ve read from others, I think it’s a brilliant achievement by Zimmer, a perfect execution of the vision Nolan had.  As an album, it’s a particularly raw experience, quite unlike any I’ve experienced before – ironic, given the number of previous Zimmer scores that have been hailed beforehand as being unlike anything that’s been heard before, this one may actually be worthy of the tag.  I have little to offer but praise for the way it’s been done.  Trouble is, so successful is it at offering a sonic impression of a place and circumstance the horror of which is far beyond what someone like me, a privileged 21st century westerner, can even comprehend – I very much doubt that after writing these words I will ever want to listen to it again.

Rating:
**
Don’t focus on the rating, read the words…

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