Dunkerque

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.

I would concur with many that the film was overhyped. Nevertheless, to give something as breathtaking in its cinematic efforts a one or two is ridiculous. I guess people who are into war film are not unlike the fanboys in the Marvel world. This is an intense film. I'll admit that if I had to depend on it to explain the actual events of the Dunkirk rescue, I would say it was lacking. It's no "Tora Tora Tora" or "The Longest Day" which depict the breadth of the subject of war. It focuses more on fragile individuals who are more realistic. One reviewer referred to two of the men as cowards, doing whatever they could to stay alive. As if those who were trapped by the Germans wouldn't do whatever they could to stay alive. Yes, there is a bit of tackiness. These are fictional characters. There's lots of heroism to go around. There is cowardice. This is war and war is not desirable. Still, with a big picture attempt it would have been much better.

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.

The most important lesson in the history of our humanity, surpassed in genre, religion among other moral aspects, is simply the survival of the species or a human being in question. Our most basic instinct is survival and when we unite, forgetting our differences (as a group of Individuals, not nations), for the sake of our survival and our well-being, the human race shines in the most intense sense possible. The cooperation between several elements, to come out alive from a complicated situation.

One scene, caught my attention when a group of Allied soldiers were surrounded in a ship and this same ship was being attacked on all sides by the German troops. One of the characters was being forced out of the ship to see if the tide sea was rising or not. Out of fear, this character did not want to leave the ship, it was when an English soldier replied: for the others to survive, one person has to die.

The theme of this film is survival, especially surviving in a difficult situation, is in itself a great victory

Nothing is better expressed in this film and executed in a way with as much talent as Nolan achieved in making with this film. Not only by itself, the message is passed to the audience in a clear and perfect way as is demonstrated in small scenes that help convey this message and build a fitting end to the film itself.

The film goes straight to the narrative and action of the movie without losing in passing with interesting monologues, unlike Inception, a film in which Nolan himself created a character with the sole purpose of explaining the rules of this universe for the audience, this is the apex of Nolan as a Film director and he performs his work in a simple and exemplary way. So Dunkirk is his smaller commercial movie, but with the bonus without unnecessary scenes that could crumble the experience of the film.

The performances are excellent and accompany the director's talents (the direction of the film itself) and the script in a cohesive, simple and direct way, highlighting Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance and of course the very competent Kenneth Branagh. These excellent actors help immerse the audience in the cinematographic aspect of the movie itself to make the experience as real and emotional as possible.

Again, congratulations to Nolan for choosing actors relatively unknown to the general public, but outstanding in their work of acting. Instead of trying to choose famous actors (whose private lives are always in the mouths of the people and the magazines), these people are celebrities and not actors. For this reason I never managed to pass the first act of Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg made a mistake filling his film with the most popular Hollywood All Star cast of famous actors at that time (their lives were so exposed that it was hard to see those people as soldiers or survivors of WWII). At this point, Nolan fared better than Spielberg.

By completing this great experience, special and sound effects are applied in an exemplary way and these same technologies make almost perfect use of the IMAX screen. The technical and aesthetic aspects are very good, as it comes this habit in this type of film with this type of budget (105 millions). The cinematography is very good (almost perfect, like in most of Nolan movies) and the camera movements are agile and very beautiful.

See the aerial combat of the characters of Tom Hardy (Farrier) and Jack Lowden (Collins) in aerial planes that looked with great and amazing beauty in fighting against the planes of the Germans. A technical amazing work of Nolan and his production team. Amazing, no doubt. Especially on the IMAX screen, where the film shows all its beauty, and if there is a movie that deserves to be seen in IMAX, it is one, this new work of Christopher Nolan, no doubt. The ambitious ideas of the filmmaker and the great sequences in parallel assembly that characterize his works. Making the storytelling move to viewers in three different locations (The Mole, The Sea and The Air). In a cohesive, precise and confusing way. This film shows a great talent of Nolan, and it reaches his talent to create sequences in parallel assembly the characters of the film in a brilliant way. The soundtrack composed by the veteran Hans Zimmer is amazing, Hans in turn creates a memorable theme for the theme of World War II. Fantastic and great.

The great and only problem I see that disturbs the experience of the film is limited by the PG-13 and thus limit the blood and violence, for God's sake, it is a film about a war blood and violence are common. At times it seemed like I was looking at some scenes and these same scenes seemed so artificial and displaced from the film itself, like the scene of the soldiers corpses coming to the beach, or the English troops being smashed by the sinking ship (two clear examples that PG-13 influenced negatively the movie).

One problem that some people go through seeing this movie is the lack of depth in some characters, however there are characters with depth, but not the kind of depth shown through dialogues or exposition. Nolan wanted to show something bigger. And I think Nolan did it. Nolan created in this movie to show the question of survival and its consequences in the lives of the people close to war and the soldiers who were fighting in that war. He wanted to show us how and survival define us, and I think he got the message very well across this movie. Even for this, he sacrificed some dramatic depth. Depth for certain characters, however Nolan passed a larger message, which surpasses any dramatically deep element. Nolan wanted to get something bigger. And in my opinion he did it.

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.