Christopher Nolan doesn’t do anything small these days, and if you need proof, look no further than these set videos from his new film, Dunkirk. Per the official logline:

Dunkirk opens as hundreds of thousands of British and Allied troops are surrounded by enemy forces. Trapped on the beach with their backs to the sea they face an impossible situation as the enemy closes in.

For those that don’t know, Dunkirk will focus on the evacuation of the eponymous town. “Operation Dynamo” was a British military operation that saved the lives of 330,000 Allied military servicemen, and was hailed as a “miracle of deliverance” by Winston Churchill. The difficulties faced by the stranded servicemen were memorably depicted in the long tracking shot in Joe Wright’s Atonement.

Nolan is reteaming with his Interstellar cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema for the pic, which features a terrific cast led by Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, and newcomer Fionn Whitehead. The ensemble is filled out by Aneurin Barnard, James D’Arcy, Jack Lowden, Barry Keoghan, Tom Glynn-Carney, and of course One Direction member Harry Styles, as Nolan set out to cast fresh faces to play the film’s leading men.


As you can see from these set videos, Dunkirk looks absolutely epic in scope. While it’s ostensibly an action film, Nolan should be able to get some serious drama out of these major set pieces. It will also be interesting to see how this ensemble cast interacts with each other as the drama unfolds throughout the story.

Additionally, Nolan is shooting the whole thing on a combination of IMAX 65mm and 65mm large-format photography, and you can see from these images that he’s strapped an IMAX camera to a helicopter, which should provide some eye-popping aerial shots of the action.

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Check out the set videos below. Dunkirk opens in theaters on July 21, 2017.


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Image via Paramount/Warner Bros.