With news that footage from Dunkirk went down a treat at CinemaCon, Christopher Nolan has explained just why his World War II evacuation drama has received his usual PG-13 rating.
Speaking to the AP while at CinemaCon, The Dark Knight director said: “All of my big blockbuster films have been PG-13. It’s a rating I feel comfortable working with totally. Dunkirk is not a war film. It’s a survival story and first and foremost a suspense film. So while there is a high level of intensity to it, it does not necessarily concern itself with the bloody aspects of combat, which have been so well done in so many films. We were really trying to take a different approach and achieve intensity in a different way. I would really like lots of different types of people to get something out of the experience”.
The age rating shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone familiar with Nolan’s work. It will be interesting however to see how the rating affects the aesthetic of the WWII setting, especially in comparison to the intensely graphic World War II Mel Gibson drama, Hacksaw Ridge.
Dunkirk is set for release on July 21st 2017 and features a cast that includes Nolan regulars Tom Hardy and Cillian Murphy alongside Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, Jack Lowden, James D’Arcy, Barry Keoghan, Tom Glynn-Carney and newcomer Fionn Whitehead.
Originally published April 4, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
