‘Dunkirk’: 5 Key Things To Know About Harry Styles’ New Movie

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‘Dunkirk’ is finally hitting theaters on July 21. This is Harry Styles’ film debut! Here’s everything you need to know about the World War II movie everyone is talking about!

1. The movie is based on a true story. Dunkirk follows the story of what happened from May 26, 1940 to June 4, 1940, when Allied soldiers from Britain, Belgium, Canada, and France became trapped the German army on the beaches of Dunkirk. The British and the French slowly evacuated the beach using every naval and civilian vessel around during the Battle of Dunkirk. As a result of the heroic efforts of the Allied forces, more than 330,000 soldiers were saved in what was called Operation Dynamo.

2. Harry Styles, 23, isn’t the only famous face in Dunkirk. The movie also stars Tom Hardy, 39, Mark Rylance, 57, Cillian Murphy, 41, Kenneth Branagh, 56, and Fionn Whitehead. Dunkirk reunites director Christopher Nolan, 46, with two actors from his Dark Knight trilogy. Cillian starred as Scarecrow in Christopher’s Batman Begins, and Tom played Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.

3. Harry cut his hair for the role! As we all know, Harry used to have long, luscious locks, but he had to cut them off when he was cast as Alex in the World War II film. “I felt very naked,” Harry told Elvis Duran and The Morning Show about cutting his hair. “When I first told my parents I was going to be in a World War II film, they thought I was playing a lady on the train station waving the soldiers off, so we had to make the chop. But it was good! It’s very breezy.”

4. Dunkirk will have 3 points of view. Christopher is making sure what happened at Dunkirk is shown from 3 different angles. “The film is told from three points of view: The air (planes), the land (on the beach) and the sea (the evacuation by the navy),” Nolan told Premiere. “For the soldiers embarked in the conflict, the events took place on different temporalities.”

5. It’s not a war movie. Christopher has stressed that Dunkirk is not another Saving Private Ryan. “Dunkirk is not a war film,” he told the Associated Press. “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.”