The first teaser for Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” is here and it’s intense

As moviegoers around the world take in Jared Leto’s new Joker in Suicide Squad, we find ourselves thinking about Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy a lot.

It’s not as though Ben Affleck and Leto can’t hold their own as Batman and the Joker, but that Nolan’s since left the comic book movie universe to focus on epic films on very different subjects. First, there was Interstellar, a space odyssey which took on, among other subjects, time and deep space travel. And now we’re finally getting our first look at his next project Dunkirk, a World War II epic that’s unlike anything he’s ever done before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM9BWtppzko?feature=oembed

Much of the early hype around Dunkirk has, fairly or not, centered on the fact that none other than (ex?)-One Direction member Harry Styles is in the cast. (And, cut his much-loved hair to better fit the mold for a British soldier.) But from what we can glean from this (alas) super-short teaser is that just because this story doesn’t involve superheroes/space travel/magicians doesn’t mean that it’s any less epic than any of Nolan’s other efforts.

“At the point of crisis / At the point of annihilation / Survival is victory” — the teaser’s text alludes to the film’s central event, the Dunkirk evacuation which led to the fraught rescue of Allied Forces from the beaches of Dunkirk, France. The final shot in the trailer, of stranded soldiers looking up as the buzz of a low-flying plane approaches, is a masterclass in small-scale but intense action. We can’t wait to see the full thing… next summer, on July 21. Love those far off film schedules!