Dunkirk Movie – not recommended

[Scott - A2A]

I just wanted to post my thoughts on the movie Dunkirk, as before I went I was very much looking forward to seeing another classic war movie on the big screen. Instead, Dunkirk is completely negligent on realism / history and weak on writing. Granted the effects were great, but that is pretty much expected from a movie like this.

Put it this way. At the very start of the movie, you see some writing that starts with “The enemy...” and my first impression was “omg, please don't tell me this movie is going to avoid using the word Nazi.” Well, to my recollection, not only was the word Nazi never mentioned, but I don't even recall ever hearing the word “German.” This kind of political correctness makes it no surprise that the writing was so poor. You can't be a good writer if you are not willing to talk about difficult subjects.

Aside from the effects being good, Christopher Nolan both wrote and directed the movie. He would have been better off letting someone else do the screenplay and because he did a nice job as director. How do I know? Well, all of the actors including Harry Styles did a reasonable job, and this only happens with good direction. But it was so unfortunate that his writing was weak and disjointed and the historical accuracy (and even physical accuracy in the CGI effects), was absent.

But I can't recommend this movie and hope to just give proper warning to anyone who hasn't seen it and has been on the fence. About the only historical fact you can take from this movie is, Dunkirk was a place where the British were pinned down and escaped by sea. And all movies don't have to be historically accurate, they just need to be good at something. Dunkirk unfortunately, is similar to most of its pilots who watched bandits pass time and time again past their gunsight without firing, missed the target completely.

I give the movie a C-, and I'm being generous as I have a soft spot for war movies.

Scott.

[Orlaam]

I don't know all the historical aspects of Dunkirk, except that it resulted in a retreat back to England, and is more or less considered a failure. It's too bad that modern educators, film makers, and political sects are attempting to blur history and present revisionism. The inaccurate portrayal of Swastikas in video games and movies along with the absence of Nazi ideology from modern movies is ridiculous. This is a very important part of modern history that people should know and understand.

Thanks for the information.

[Medtner]

I beg to differ.

If you are after a comment on the war and the political implications I'm sure you can raise those points and "hit your target", but I think you missed the point.

I found it to be a hairraisingly frigtening movie that makes a point of showing how bad the whole thing is. The enemy is just that, a faceless monster in the distance sometimes arriving to shoot and drop bombs. On that beach, powerless, one is only focused on getting away - no matter what. The hopelessness and the scary inhuman concept that is war really hit home for me in this movie - not by gore, not by arse-paralyzingly bad lovestories or patriotic voiceovers, but by the pure horror.

Why anybody would want to make a point of being politically correct, when there is hundreds of movies about it refering directly to nazis or Germans or whatever is beyond my understanding.
But doing so to make the horror and the desperate fight for survival the point, not the nationality/political leaning/race/color/gender/etc of the enemy. The enemy could have been anyone at that point - the local survival aspect is the focus. And thus it becomes more human - not an analysis from hindsight, but a desperate struggle to get home.

I'm usually a sticker for characters and their stories/development, but in this case the beach and the hordes of Brits were the characters, not any person in particular (although you get brief encounters).

Dunkirk wasn't aspiring to be one of the many "classic", as it were, "Saving Private Ryan"-copies that have infested the screens for so many many years. And for me it hit home and then some.

Go out and see it, by Merlin!

[Scott - A2A]

The political correctness was a minor flaw compared to the needless historical and physical errors. The worse part for me was just a weak story and shallow writing. I will admit the movie had some shock value at the start but that shock value went nowhere.

BTW I found Saving Private Ryan to be weak after the first 30 minutes, which was brilliant. Tom Hanks is one of the greats but that movie IMO was way over rated too.

Scott

[Killratio]

I'm with Scott on this one with an addition:

The plot device of merging stories ONLY works if the stories merge at a reasonably consistent rate (whether we know it at the time or not). In this case we were jumped forward and backwards in time at varying rates and on, sometimes, multiple occasions within a story (the Spitfire "apparently" gliding for an hour and a half being a case in point!! Anyone, and there were plenty, who missed the fact that it was from several different story lines at once, was left incredulous...Untidy.

What resulted was a confusing mess not unlike Pulp Fiction in "order" but COMPLETELY without reason, as in Dunkirk the stories were always meant to merge to a conclusion..in Pulp they were forever intended to do exactly the opposite ie bring you back to a single random point halfway through the story.

Dunkirk was a swing and a miss, for mine and I only hope to the heavens that Nolan doesn't EVER get his hands on the Battle of Britain!!!

As for air accuracy, at any rate, I can't believe they did anything other than ignore much of their own expert advice.. seriously, opening a cockpit to glide down, then closing it again for a wheels down forced landing on an uncertainly surfaced beach? (and yes.. I know they DID actually land that Spitfire on that beach... NOT in wartime, NOT on a beach potentially pock marked with shell holes, NOT in an emergency, NOT without significant preparation and very intentionally NOT in accordance with the very firm advice of the Pilot's Notes of the time.) I can recall a single instance, that some have alleged, of an emergency landing on a beach by a Spitfire with landing gear down and of which I am in no way certain at all.... but in any event that trick landed Al Deere with a serious head injury and having to be dragged from the wreckage.

best

Darryl

[Paughco]

My wife and I saw it last week, and I can't say I disagree with Scott's assessment. Man, they must have really tweaked that Spitfires aircraft.cfg file to get that long glide!

My wife's dad went over to England before the USA got into WW2. He rode around over the Atlantic in a Halifax loaded with electronic gear to help with the tweaking and peaking of some secret beam (GEE?) that they were going to use to help the bombers find their targets at night. Finally they got it right, and moved everything to beam out over Europe. They found out it worked when they bombed Cologne. My wife's dad found a lady over there, who he brought back to the USA, whereupon she became Carolyn's mom. She was brought back on a TWA L049, no less! Anyway, I can get my wife to go see those movies that involve England during those dark days. She didn't complain. I enjoyed the Spitfires.

Hey, Scott: watch this! (I captured this on my Canon G-16 at the FHCAM a month ago): [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9NWvTHPZY4[/youtube].

Seeya
ATB

[Molly - A2A]

I'm not going to make any political comments, but I would agree that Nolan seems to have a weakness in creating compelling characters and good, natural dialogue. I've actually enjoyed all of his movies a lot, but admittedly it's usually because of concepts and themes instead of interesting characters (the exception being Insomnia, which had an absolutely brilliant screenplay.) I have not seen Dunkirk yet but I certainly will give it a watch when it hits blu ray.

[Killratio]

I (the exception being Insomnia, which had an absolutely brilliant screenplay.)

And even then he was handed an absolute gem of a screenplay from the Norwegian film of the same name!

D

[addman]

Haven't seen the movie yet but NOT calling all of the German forces Nazis is IMO politically incorrect, which is a good thing. Werner Mölders is just one example of probably many, many people in the German armed forces of that time that did not share the views of the fanatical core of the Nazi political entity. The SS on the other hand, can almost exclusively be labeled as a political entity of the German armed forces.

Cheers!/Andreas

[Alfredson007]

Haven't seen the movie yet but will watch it eventually, not in theatre perhaps but from bluray or from netflix etc, if it has WW2 planes i'm in

Anyway, about those "evil nazi swastikas".. i couldn't agree more. I HATE we cannot have proper historically accurate symbols in many games like IL2, DCS and hearts of iron 4 for example. (Mods aside). I especially hate that even finnish air force swastika is banned way too often (had nothing to do with Hitler's swastika and was older). Nowadays, even the Red Cross symbol is "banned", many games have been updated after the Prison Arcitech incidence not to have red cross in them. If there is a red cross livery in FSX for a plane, is it breaking geneva convention?

[Paul K]

Haven't seen Dunkirk yet ( and in no great hurry to do so ) but I think Scott probably feels the same way about it as I do about Fury. Actually, he's probably a little more complimentary about Dunkirk.

Greatest war film I've ever seen? The Best Years Of Our Lives, without a shadow of doubt. In fact, it could quite possibly be the best film I've ever watched.

[bladerunner900]

I have not seen it yet, but I will probably watch it with a large dose of 'suspension of disbelief'. Same as I did for the Frank Miller/Zack Snyder film 300. I have been aware of this attempted PC re-write of history for many years now, but I'm not falling for it.

[CAPFlyer]

Having read several reviews of Dunkirk, I see many honest reviewers share much of Scott's apprehension about the writing. I think Leonard Maltin put it well in his review - "But in his effort to avoid the clichés and rah-rah patriotism of war movies past, writer-director Christopher Nolan has swung his pendulum to the other extreme."

From what I've seen (in the previews) and read from the reviews here and elsewhere, I think the avoidance of "Nazi" and "German" wasn't out of "political correctness", it was the above a conscious decision to remove them as a device to help avoid cliche. Unfortunately, I think that also will be one of the failures of it because it removes much of the motivations from the characters. Not putting the bigger event in perspective (which it doesn't by any account) and helping the viewer understand what these guys were running from. They weren't just running from "evil" or "the enemy," but an enemy that had swept across Belgium and France in a mere 16 days, had bypassed the much vaunted Maginot Line and was poised to eliminate a majority of the battle ready British forces in existence.

I think Nolan had a great chance to make not only a dramatically interesting movie, but an educational one as well (a much needed educational movie as Dunkirk has been far to ignored outside of the UK and maybe France), but he missed the mark completely.


Oh yeah - on the subject of swastikas - Game Developers don't have a choice on that. If they want to release their game in much of Europe, they are legally bound from using the swastika because of EU prohibitions against its use in any manner. So, don't blame the developers - blame the politicians.

[Alfredson007]

Oh yeah - on the subject of swastikas - Game Developers don't have a choice on that. If they want to release their game in much of Europe, they are legally bound from using the swastika because of EU prohibitions against its use in any manner. So, don't blame the developers - blame the politicians.

Swastikas are not banned in EU. Some countries may have individual nazi-paranoias left but it's not banned by EU and in most european countries nazi swastika is not totally illegal. In russia i believe swastika is very much banned. Usually if there are some laws about swastika in europe it is about public use, but is ok for movies and games etc. Many countries in europe do not have laws about swastika at all.

Then there are things already mentioned like Finnish air force swastikas that also get banned, for no real reason.

[Mr.Mugel]

Interesting, I thought it was very refreshing to see a movie not following the usual concept (Father was a war hero and he couldn´t wait to serve his country and was by chance an almost superhuman soldier who just does everything right throughout the movie kind of stuff). Not really knowing the characters and their backgrounds was a stylistic move I quite enjoyed. What good would it have been to know their stories? This way I felt I could get into the characters quite well.

I also liked it a lot that they used little CGI. The sound and visuals were great in my opinion. Well, the round fuselage of the "Spitfires" during the fixed outside shots along the fuselage was a bit off, but it still worked for me in general. The 45° attack angles of the Stukas were weird too, they couldn´t have guessed what they actually bombed at that angle. Still all the "plane" scenes were lightyears ahead of CGI infested stuff like "Red Tails" for example.

Timelines disturbed me a bit as well until I realized that the scenes just weren´t running in parallel.

So I just can´t agree with the general opinion in here. Might even go back to see it another time with the original soundtrack (Not the german dubbed version). Good thing that we can all have our own opinions though.