Dunkirk

This is a documentary of the Dunkirk evacuation over 10 days in the summer of 1940. The British Expeditionary Force is trapped against the coast along with French and other Allies. It is purported to be accurate. There are the shakey cam recreations intersperced with some old footage. There are recognizable actors. It's quite straight forward in its telling. After watching Nolan's Dunkirk recently, this is a good companion piece. It has some more information and the rear guard action that is missing from Nolan's movie. There are compelling real historical figures. It's solid work for TV doc that is compelling to watch all the way to the end.

I watched this dramatization some years back and thought it did an excellent job of telling the real-life story, capturing the desperation of the retreat, case in point, only smoke bombs for one group of soldiers tasked with holding back the German tanks!

Buy it on Blu-ray or DVD if you can find it. Perhaps its also downloadable. Its well worth the time spent watching it.

After watching this re-enactment, I found Nolan's 2017 Dunkirk to be an utter disappointment. It greatly saddened me to see how the Dunkirk story could be so badly told, and more so when I read reviews about how it gives you a sense of what war is like - rubbish. These people really should watch the 2004 Dunkirk dramatization and Saving Private Ryan, and I'd also recommend Schindler's List.

Curious programme as it seems to almost deliberately and consciously write the Merchant Navy out of the evacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk. Even when what is clearly a Merchant ship is being attacked by Stukas, in contemporary black and white film, the narrator refers to Royal Navy destroyers! When Merchant ships are referred to they are almost invariably called personnel ships or supply ships, almost never Merchant ships. The only actual reference to a Merchant ship is where one is on fire and a group of Royal Navy people go onboard to fight the fire. Even then there don't seem to be any Merchant Navy people present. Is this a deliberate omission, or one based on ignorance?

• was what Churchill called the evacuation from Dunkirk, and as narrator Tim Dalton informs us, the quarter of a million British troops snatched from Nazi claws in June 1940 were to be the core of the British Army throughout the war.

Churchill reminded his countrymen "not to assign to Dunkirk the attributes of victory," but still - it proved to be event that would bolster England for the war in general and the Battle of Britain - only a month away - in particular. The British pluck in the face of an enemy that had by then defeated all of Europe helped bring in the Americans without which the war would undoubtedly be lost.

We cannot be reminded often enough what might have happened, and what nearly did happen in 1940. As the film shows with admirable accuracy, Churchill was pretty much alone in his decision not to give in to appeasement policy and make bargains with the Germans, for which determination his fellow politicians, Chamberlain and his ilk, awarded him with the moniker 'warmonger'.

We don't seem to have many Churchills these days, among the heaps of Chamberlains that persist in telling us that 'war is not the answer.' Sometimes it helps to have the question repeated. As in this film. Back in 1940, the question was how to respond to German imperialism, Nazi atrocities and disregard for Geneva Conventions. It was a defense of the British values that Churchill so eloquently voiced.

BTW, I hardly recognized Simon Russell Beale as Sir Winston. Excellent bit of make-up, that.

Having recently watched this again, for a third time, I must strongly disagree with a previous reviewer who described this as meretricious rubbish.

It's true, some of the camera work was a little intrusive, and sometimes the music also got in the way, but these are minor irritations. On the whole, I thought the filmmakers told the story very well. Bearing in mind that at the time the incidents displayed were over over sixty years old, it must have been very difficult to tell the stories of so many men - from the government down to a private on the ground - with complete balance and historical accuracy, but overall I found everything very believable. The acting was top notch, with some well known faces, and Timothy Dalton's narration was also top drawer.

I would recommend this series wholeheartedly.