It may not leave Harry Styles agonizing over a spinning top or Tom Hardy sending love from the fifth dimension, but Dunkirk’s ending is still a mammoth of thematic and narrative complexities that will have audiences debating well until Christopher Nolan’s next movie arrives.

The film is nothing if not a major departure for Nolan. The director has been making movies with sci-fi infections since 2005, but for his tenth feature he’s finally stepped into fresh waters and lent his meticulous eye to something more grounded; the evacuation of British troops from the beaches of Dunkirk by civilian ships in the early days of World War II (you can check out a rundown of the real events here). It’s the most Nolan war movie you could imagine, told in a unique way that ramps up the intensity and - especially when viewed as the director intended in IMAX - puts you right there on that fraught beach.

Yet for all it sees the director expand his vision, it’s still dealing with the same themes that have been the beating heart of every single one of his movies since Following. Everything, from the distressing historical concept to the multi-stranded, non-linear timeline aren’t just directorial flourish but clear choices made to best explore and advance what interests him.

The movie’s ending isn’t as ambiguous as Inception’s or confusing as Interstellar’s, but it still leaves audiences with a lot of questions about character’s fates, timeline convergence, the future of the war and what it all really means. Let’s break it all down.

The Timelines Explained (This Page)

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The Timeline Explained

Dunkirk’s timeline is so intricately woven that it would take a whole other article to fully explore, but to explain the ending we do need to have a strong grounding of everything that’s happened thus far, so here’s a quick recap.

The film is told in three timelines that unfold concurrently but are in fact of varying in-movie lengths and dilated to fit; “The Mole” (the land portion, named after the French stowaway amongst the British soldiers) takes place over the course of a week, “The Sea” covers a day and “The Air” is a mere hour of the whole ordeal. Ostensibly done so each part of the story gets equal focus (Tom Hardy’s dogfighting would be a minor blip if this was told conventionally), these all overlap but due to the narrative structure they often do so out of order. For example, the civilian reserve naval fleet is called in at the start of “The Sea”, but isn’t even mentioned as a possibility until halfway through “The Mole”.

Everything eventually converges as the escaping soldier’s ship sinks, Mr. Dawson’s (Mark Rylance) boat comes across a bombed minesweeper, and Farrier (Tom Hardy) takes on the bomber. It’s the film’s narrative culmination and is in many ways a slow purpose reveal of why Nolan has told the story in this way; Dunkirk really is a movie about the telling (evidenced in how he’s called it a suspense thriller), highlighting how Operation Dynamo’s success was the result of many seemingly disparate people all unknowingly working together. After this still-complex interchange, the threads each diverge to give each set of characters their own ending.

What The Timeline Really Means

It’s not just to craft a cinematic epic that Nolan’s done this, though. By telling Dunkirk in such a distinct way he is using technical form as a way to explore the movie’s themes: sacrifice for duty, the perception of time and the nature of storytelling. These ideas run through his entire filmography - see The Prestige’s magician rivalry devolving into a debate on art’s purpose and Interstellar’s decade-traversing love story - but this time more than any before the movie is built from the ground up to accommodate them.

Time is the most obvious element here given the structure, but it’s more than Nolan being quote-unquote “smart”. There’s a strong idea of “lost time”, best shown in the youth of the characters in greatest peril and amplified by the constant ticking on the soundtrack as we jump between narratives. However, what the multiple timelines really do is play with perception. They’re told exclusively from a set of POV characters with no jumping in the middle - we don’t have an obvious cut to Harry Styles when Tom Hardy’s flying over the boat - that aims to convey the sprawling nature of the Dunkirk from singular perspectives. It’s about the individual in a shared experience.

And this brings us to the storytelling. Many have talked about Dunkirk as a purely visceral experience, and while it definitely is, everything is really in service of an exploration of how and why we tell stories. The movie exists in a time bubble devoid of the context of the past or future of World War II, which makes us consider only what’s on show. And to each of the main characters in the story - Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), Mr. Dawson and Farrier - this event in Dunkirk is equally important and impactful on their lives, regardless of actual time spent in the fray. Their stories are put alongside each other to highlight that; to Farrier, the dogfight and repeated sacrifice is no less daring than Tommy’s repeated attempts to get off the beach. This aspect is running through the film, but doesn’t reveal its full purpose until the very end, where each of the three plots is wrapped up with a distinct, resolute point.

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The Mole Ending Explained - Cowardice Or Heroism?

“The Mole” (which unlike the other two stories gets its name from the events within) concludes with Tommy and Alex (Harry Styles) escaping Dunkirk on Mr. Dawson’s boat after several of their compatriates are killed by the crashed bomber. Getting the train from Dorset, they collapse from exhaustion and believe themselves failures - this was, after all, a mass retreat of the final line of defense that leaves the British Isles open to invasion from the German forces. However, arriving in Woking it becomes apparent that they’re being celebrated for their bravery. Alex is given a beer and an apple while Tommy reads out Churchill’s iconic “We will fight them on the beaches” speech.

Here we have those on the ground taking one thing from the evacuation, while everyone back home hearing the story reads the exact opposite; the ending note is the difference in the official war narrative from the soldier’s perceived reality. As the core of the Dunkirk evacuation story, there’s definitely a historical drive here, with Nolan showing how retreat can be victorious. Alongside that, though, there’s the power of the reading - Churchill and propaganda trump the soldier’s and their emotions - and, more partisanly, the relation of imbued and developed meaning; Alex was incapable of understanding the bravery of everything he’s done.

Having Tommy read the speech aloud, which scores the movie’s ending, is particularly effective, giving intimate underscoring to grandiose words and a reverse of the British government’s appropriation of the events.

The Sea Ending Explained - A Story Is More Powerful Than Truth

This dual perception of stories is also present in “The Sea” narrative. Ostensibly this section is about mounting pressures on normal people - which, lest we forget, the majority of soldiers on the beach were - as Mr. Dawson, who by all accounts is a regular retiree, sees his calm and righteous demeanor challenged by the increasing horrors of war. He’s evidently a natural hero, but through the movie is pushed to his limits and becomes increasingly desperate; saving crashed pilot Collins (Jack Lowden) is a choice driven my emotion. Eventually his efforts are rewarded - he saves a pilot and many of the soldiers from the beach - but his son’s friend George (Barry Keoghan) dies in the process.

George dies when Cillian Murphy’s unnamed “Shivering Soldier” pushes him down the boat’s stairs in panic; part of the movie’s exploration of PTSD in a time when it wasn’t a recognized condition. We see Murphy pre-shell shock in “The Mole” as a very proper British officer refusing Tommy and Alex space on their rowing boat after the first minesweeper is sunk (in the narrative shown after we see a broken man), succinctly showing how sudden a change it can be.

What’s interesting is how Dunkirk resolves the thread. Both Dawson and son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) lie to the soldier and tell him George is OK, and once the affair is over Peter tells the local paper about his Dunkirk hero friend. In both cases they’re playing liberally with the truth, but only because there’s an understanding the story being told is more powerful than reality. Murphy gets to leave the already traumatic events in France without the added burden of having accidentally killed a child, while the newspaper ensures George’s death wasn’t in vain. If “The Mole” is about the reading of a story, “The Sea” is the reason for telling it in a specific way.

There are some interesting parallels here to Their Finest, Lone Scherfig’s recent film about the making of a propaganda film about the Dunkirk evacuation. The movie-within-a-movie is likewise based on an increasingly skewed version of the truth, but its power in the war narrative and as a work of art is heightened by the elaboration.

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The Air Ending Explained - Ambiguity and Historial Context

“The Air” side of Dunkirk is the most removed from the rest - the dilated timeline meaning an hour event unfolds at the same pace as day or week - and yet its impact is unavoidable. The fighters are called in to aid the boats and manage to stop several major catastrophes. The mission wraps up with Farrier shooting down one final fighter before landing on the Dunkirk beach; in the framing of the film, the lone Brit in France (not in actuality, but it’s a strong image). He casually berths the plane, burns it and waits for the Germans to turn up and be captured. The last we see of him he’s being led off, destined to be stuck in a Prisoner of War camp for the rest of the conflict.

Thematically, the majority of the flight is focused on the pressures of time and duty, with the storytelling side taking a backseat. The entire sequence is told under an unreliable ticking clock; Farrier is unable to gauge his fuel level and so every decision has to be made intuitively with the full knowledge he may be on his last gasp. His makeshift measurement, using fuel readings from Collins’ spitfire and cross-referencing with his watch, is very much a scrappy summation of how Nolan views time as something ever present yet never truly controllable.

Farrier’s capture is where the storytelling aspect comes into “The Air” - while Dunkirk is presented as a totally isolated experience, this final moment juxtaposed with the “Beaches” speech serves as a lone reminder just how early on in World War II we are. This is a year-and-a-half before Pearl Harbor brought the US into the conflict and over two years before Churchill declared “the end of the beginning” (in another iconic address). Given that this is a known event primarily in Europe and Britain specifically, it creates several alternate viewing points: in other territories, Dunkirk exists in part devoid of the bigger picture.

Of course, Nolan doesn’t explicitly get into any of this historical context. The evacuation is set up with three brief lines of text that only go as far as saying where the soldiers are in the moment (and not what brought them here), and it ends without a single word hinting at the future (there’s just a heartfelt tribute to all affected by the event). If anything, the final note is as ambiguous as Inception’s; you have Alex believing invasion is imminent, Farrier marched off to an uncertain fate, and then an apple bite cut to credits.

Dunkirk is purely concerned with this one moment in time for these people. That’s where the intense, all-encompassing thriller elements come from, but the exact same filmmaking technique leads to Nolan going deep into the ideas he’s always been interested in. The movie is about shared experiences and how we all read them differently as much as it is a simple “experience movie”. Now that’s directorial vision.

Next: Dunkirk Review

  • Dunkirk Release Date: 2017-07-21