Dunkerque

This movie is so paper thin I really can't write much about it. So many missed opportunities in a film about one of the most spectacular and complex battles of WWII. I can see what Nolan tried to do here, a kind of British "Thin Red Line" (there's even wind in the grass, lol, i kid you not), but he failed spectacularly. There are no memorable characters to be found here, and one wonders even if there are any actual characters at all. Not one, not one of them has any semblance of a character arc. Not one. Again, I see how Nolan tried to convey the impersonality of war and insignificance of the individual but he did it with such a heavy, clumsy hand, providing us with no counterpoint with which to drive the point home. It's basic screen writing stuff really. I'd expect such ineptitude from a first year film student but not from a supposed "master of the craft".

But anyways, this could have been forgivable if the film was more about the event itself, but it fails at that too. After watching the film, you'd be given to believe that the Battle of Dunkirk was fought by three Spitfires (100 were lost over the beeches alone), 1 German heinkel, a couple of stukas, 2 destroyers or a dozen or so boats... Oh yes and maybe a few hundred men standing quietly on a beach, doing nothing except desperately trying to look morose and dejected in a faintly passive-aggressive way. It's ridiculous. We are talking about total and absolute chaos happening there, hundreds of thousands of rifles alone discarded on the beach, not to mention guns, artillery, trucks... Burning and sinking ships of all sizes all across the horizon, parts of beaches inaccessible from rotting corpses washing up with tides. This was actually way bigger than D-Day landings in terms of men and equipment stuffed in a very small patch of land. Half a million desperate men stuffed in a small town, bombarded incessantly and under constant attack from bombers. Where did all those people defecate, what did they eat ffs? I wanted to know that, really. That at least would have given some much needed humanity to the so-called-characters Nolan keeps yanking around like so much puppets. So many missed opportunities there...

If Nolan wanted to do a tight little film about isolation and desperation of being on the loosing side of the war, he had plenty of other places and battles to choose from. Just ask around. Or if he simply had to insist on Dunkirk, then we should have seen this total chaos all around our protagonists, in the background at least - that would have served as a really powerful, so desperately needed counterpoint to the individual suffering and heroism.

And this brings me to the final point. The movie is one tone only. A monotone repetition of sights and emotions we've seen and experienced before. No one cracks a joke. No one really breaks down. No one has an embarrassing moment. There are no ups and downs, it's just some morose faceless robots performing obvious actions leading towards a bleedingly obvious goal. One single emotional and narrative tone from the beginning to the end. The entire emotional and narrative content of the movie would have fit snugly into a 20 minute short, and that is pretty much how long it takes before you start yawning. The best thing that can be said about the movie is that individual scenes are well directed and worth experiencing. But that is the real problem here - the film is constructed as a series of impressive "experiences" rather than cohesive piece of drama (And this particular historical event is almost uniquely stuffed with dramatic opportunities. It's almost as if golden-age Hollywood writers wrote the script for the actual event.) In other words, it's a Dunkirk theme park rather than a movie. You take rides. And that's it. And even those become repetitive after a while.

If you read through the swarm of negative reviews, you might notice a common theme: boring, dull, lack of characters. It's incredibly disappointing that they seemed the miss the entire point of the film.This is not a film about heroic soldiers triumphing against all odds while blowing up Nazis with transformer-esque explosions.

This is a movie about scenes, not characters. -and every scene is memorable, from the bombings to the torpedoes to the aerial dogfights. My co-worker, who is obsessed with WW2 planes, noted how incredibly perfect they got the British Supermarine Spitfire from the roar of the Rolls-Royce engine to the rattle of the components in the cabin. The accuracy and intensity of the dogfight was captured perfectly as well, mimicking the aerial maneuvers, firepower and damage in a realistic and dramatic fashion. The torpedoes noticed only moments before impact with it's slow monotonous movement sent chills of realization down my spine. Even in the beginning of the film, the way in which the Nazi leaflets were presented gave you some glimpse into the panic and anxiety felt by those soldiers.

I felt the "lack of characters" was realistic and served the film as well. War is not about larger-than-life personalities with specialized weapons being bad-asses. It's about nameless and faceless soldiers facing an existential crisis, the possibility of randomized death, and how they can either respond with despair or hope.

If you want characters you can root for and a happy ending where the bad guy in vanquished, then there are plenty of movies for you. But if you want a small glimpse into the despair, anxiety, hope, courage, and will of the British WW2 fighters then there is no better film ever made than this one.

Before you decide to watch "Dunkirk" I have a bit of a warning. While you would expect death and blood in a war film, some of the scenes in the film are amazingly tough to watch. There's actually very little blood, but there are some drowning scenes which are intense and awful. Now I am not saying don't watch it...just be prepared.

The story is a retelling of the escape of the British* from the beaches of Dunkirk. The German army was coming and the combined British and French forces were trapped with little apparent chance to escape. And, as an army of over 300,000 Brits dug in and waited, the Luftwaffe began chipping away at them....and ultimately would have killed and/or captured them all if it wasn't for a rag-tag flotilla of private boats which hastily arrived and spirited away about 80-90% of the men.

By the way, early in the film you hear someone speaking to the pilot (Tom Hardy) over the radio. The voice is that of Michael Caine....an odd and brief cameo.

The story is gripping, well told and brilliant. I have only one complaint, and I am surprised it made it to the film considering how amazing a director Christopher Nolan is. At one point, the scene switches between some men in a boat being attacked and a private yacht rescuing downed pilots. The scenes kept switching back and forth....but one was clearly at night and the other clearly was in daylight. This really didn't make any sense. Still, otherwise an amazing spectacle...a truly amazing war film.

Director Christopher Nolan offers the viewer a pretty straightforward re-telling of the evacuation of British soldiers from the French port of Dunkirk in May of 1940, as the Germans encircled the town. The story is told from a strictly British perspective. Although we see some German planes involved in battles with RAF fighters as far as I can recall there isn't a single glimpse of a German soldier anywhere. Nolan then tells the story from three perspectives within that British perspective: on the land, on the sea and in the air. The land focuses on the solders awaiting rescue, the sea focuses mostly on the small private boats that made such a huge contribution to the effort (focusing on one boat in particular) and the air focuses on the battle by a small number of RAF pilots to protect their compatriots beneath against German planes. That structure was a bit confusing at first (especially as it was captioned on screen) but the story makes sense and that odd narrative structure is only a brief distraction.

There's not really a main character involved in this. The point seems to have been to portray the breadth of the Dunkirk evacuation at the expense of character depth. There's also no one moment that seems truly central, which means that the movie strikes you in the end of not really having built up to anything (aside from the actual evacuation, which admittedly is the most important thing.) But in some respects that made this movie seem at times less of a drama and more of a docu-drama if that makes any sense. The story-telling was a little bit lacking. I did appreciate that while the heroism of the British soldiers was front and centre, there was no shying away from a few more negative portrayals - shell-shocked soldiers, soldiers who just didn't want to fight anymore, soldiers who wouldn't even help their French allies. In that sense, this had a somewhat gritty feel, as befits a war movie.

It's not a bad movie. To me, it just missed the mark a little bit in terms of what I was expecting. (6/10)

I love Christofer Nolan. Great director. Great movies. No doubt about that. But unfortunately I think the movie was boring. It had awesome fight scenes, with different camera angles, music, costumes but it did not keep you at the edge of your seat like his other movies.

Almost no dialogue. You can say that it is realistic, because it is a war scene but the viewer needs to know something about the characters in order to identify with them. I felt like I was watching on youtube different war scenes in a 2 hours movie. It did not create the suspense I was hoping.