Summary
As more bombs drop, Tommy dips beneath the surface of the water. Mr. Dawson takes more men onto his boat and tells one of the men to go below deck or get off the boat, as they are trying to get as many men on before the nearby oil spill catches fire. When the soldiers go down the stairs, Peter urges them to be careful, but Alex turns around to tell him that George is dead. "So be bloody careful with him," Peter says, trying to maintain calm.
The shell-shocked soldier asks Peter if George will be okay and Peter simply says, "Yeah." Dawson looks at Peter and nods.
Tommy swims towards a bombed destroyer just as it completely overturns. From Moonstone, Collins watches as Farrier shoots down several German planes. Seeing one of the planes going down, Collins urges Dawson to go quickly. As Dawson speeds away, Peter holds on to the arm of Tommy, who is in the water, dragging him along. The plane crashes into the ocean and erupts in flames. Many of the Scottish soldiers who were in the trawler get burned by the fire. Lying on the deck of Moonstone, Tommy says "Take me home."
After shooting down the German planes, Farrier has to land with barely any fuel left. As he flies over the beach, the engine completely stops and he drifts through the air above Dunkirk silently. On the mole, Bolton greets a nurse on a boat out of Dartmouth, before watching Farrier's plane fly overhead.
On Moonstone, Tommy looks at Alex mournfully. Above deck, Collins notices a fighter plane and Dawson instructs Peter to take the tiller. As the fighter flies towards them, Dawson instructs him to turn, and they evade getting shot at. Before the fighter can hit the mole, Farrier guns it down, much to Bolton and the soldiers' relief. They all cheer for Farrier as he flies past.
Collins asks Dawson how he knew how to deal with the fighter and Dawson tells him that his son was in the army. Collins asks Peter if he was in the army and Peter tells him it was his brother, who flew Hurricanes and died the third week of the war.
Meanwhile, in the air, Farrier flies along the beach looking for a place to land. On Moonstone, Tommy and Alex come up above deck to see the cliffs in Dorset. When they dock, someone notes how many soldiers Dawson carried back with him. A soldier approaches Collins and aggressively asks, "Where the hell were you?" but Dawson gives Collins some words of comfort.
A blind man tells the soldiers "Well done" as they walk down the docks and Alex says to him, "All we did was survive." "That's enough," the man replies. When Tommy walks past, the blind man puts his hand on his face and says "Well done," and Tommy continues on. On the train, Alex complains that the older man would not even look the soldiers in the eye.
Back on the mole, the following day, Bolton and Winnant prepare to head back to England, with Bolton noting that they almost got 300,000 soldiers back. As Winnant boards the boat, Bolton tells him he's going to stay behind for the French and Winnant nods respectfully.
On the train, Tommy and Alex look out the window in Woking, and a young boy throws Alex a paper at his request. Seeing a headline about Churchill addressing Dunkirk at the commons, Alex is disheartened and asks Tommy to read it. "They'll be spitting at us in the streets," he says. As Tommy reads the article, they find that they are being celebrated, as a man taps on the window and hands two beers through it to Alex. The civilians applaud for the soldiers as they arrive home, and Tommy reads the article aloud.
Peter goes to the newspaper to tell the editor about George's death, and later Dawson sees the article, which celebrates George as a hero at Dunkirk, who died at just 17. Farrier lands his plane on the beach, where his plane catches fire and he is apprehended by German soldiers.
Analysis
A tragic event occurs in this final section of the film when George dies on the mission with Dawson and Peter into the war zone. As the soldiers climb below deck on Moonstone, a worried Peter tells them to be careful. It's Alex who delivers the news that George is dead, and Peter's expression barely shifts as he says that he still wants people to be careful. George's death is made all the more tragic by the fact that he was a late addition, jumping onto the boat at the last minute to join in the fun.
In the process of accompanying his father, Peter learns that war is hell. After his friend dies, the shell-shocked soldier, who is responsible for George's death, asks him whether George will be okay. Seeing now that there is no way through to the traumatized soldier, Peter simply says, "Yeah," and the soldier is contented. When Peter looks at his father, Mr. Dawson simply nods as if to say, "Now you know how difficult this all is." What seemed like a simple adventure at the start transforms into a traumatic experience, a sobering maturation for Peter.
While the film does not have a central protagonist, Tommy is perhaps the closest we get to having a main character. He is the first character who appears in the film, and we follow his precarious journey from the moment he pretends to be a medic on the mole, onto a destroyer that gets torpedoed, then onto the grounded trawler, and then finally as he gets picked up by Moonstone. When Peter rescues him just in time from the flames of the downed plane in the oil spill nearby, his survival comes as a relief to the viewer, for whom he has been the protagonist.
In this section we learn more about why Dawson is so committed to saving soldiers in the war. On Moonstone, after a particularly impressive avoidance of a fighter overhead, Collins asks Dawson how he knew what to do, and he tells him that he had a son who was in the army, and Peter adds that he died three weeks in to the war. In this instant we can see just how important the rescue mission is to the stoic Dawson, how saving the other soldiers is important to him because it gives him a way of grieving for the loss of his son, taken from him too soon.
Dunkirk portrays a pivotal moment in the Second World War in which victory was met with ambivalence, and its miraculous qualities were overshadowed by tragedy. While the evacuation of soldiers and the heroism of everyday civilians was specific and miraculous, not everyone saw the operation as a success. This ambivalence is depicted in the soldiers' return to England. On the docks, Alex replies to an older man's congratulations by simply saying, "All we did was survive." Essentially, Alex is correct, but he fails to recognize all of the heroic sacrifices that people made in the process, and the man's retort, "That's enough," sums up the film aptly.
