I’ve finally seen this movie and thought it was brilliant. Commonwealth troops weren’t mentioned and the little boats were given the lion share of the credit as expected (Typically sentimental Brits, though admittedly it was a propganda coup), despite the fact that only 98,671 men were taken off the beaches while 239,555 were taken off the mole.
Besides those inaccuracies the film had me feeling stressed and pressured throughout. Few words are spoken to great affect. Typical Christopher Nolan thriller in many respects and a brutally blunt and honest historical film in another. Few films have me close to tears, but this was one of them, and I’m man enough to admit it.
Just like every other Nolan movie. This is why he is my favourite acript writer/director. From the beginning until you get off that seat, you never feel safe. Anything could happen and it’s an amazing experience.
I think Nolan has a bit of a problem of becoming obsessed with one technical feature, in this case the real special effects. He should have used a little bit of cgi just to fill in the bits that slightly took me out of the film. Just a little bit to make the beach look like it had tens of thousands of men on it, removing a few post war buildings from the town perhaps making the air attacks look like more than three planes are in the air at any one time. Apart from that it was obviously amazing.
Yea it didn’t actually feel like a WAR movie int the truest sense of the word. But I don’t think it even tried. It tried to be a thriller from the perspective of a few soldiers/civilians, the war was only the setting, not the end goal.
Exactly, this was more of a psychological movie than historically correct. French divisions have bled to death to defend Dunkirque, there was way more everything (movie looks more like CNTO operation with 2 or 3 vehicles). I expected something like Saving Private Ryan in terms of scale but …
Although I liked the movie, its sort of pandering to british audiences. The british spirit of cooperation and pulling together in a crisis is blown out of proportion somewhat with the whole privately owned boat fleet sub-plot, since some of those boats were commadiered by the navy and not given willingly, and most of the evacuation was done through the navy… as mentioned. No mention of the commonewealth troops as stated above, and not much of the french.
I feel like cristopher nolan has a nack for giving us appropriate movies for the times we live in, as the message of cooperation is something people seem to think we need right now with brexit, terrorism, a moron in the whitehouse.
But there’s also something…nefarious about that. It’s a little brit-centric…and i can’t figure out if its being patriotic or displaying the horror of war and the clamour to survive… or saying something like, british people should be acustomed with tragedy, explosions and death and remain composed.
Also I felt they could have included the sinking of the Lancastria, which was a bigger disaster than the titanic.
As for historical innacuracies, sparing as they are… I believe spitfires had better range than they were portrayed in the film, and I think bf109s didn’t have the iconic yellow nosecone at that period in time. But iconography is everything in film.
Also many of the evacuees were french, as far as I know one frenchman for every englishman evaccuated, which was not just us being jolly good allies but more of an incentive for the french to hold off the germans.Initially there was some conflict, but churchil insisted we do so, and it was probably a good call in the long run despite french surrender, as it gave the dunkirk defenders reason to fight on.
I feel like some details as to why we ended up in a dunkirk situation to begin with would be good too… the belgium situation, blitzkrieg… teach those moviegoers some history.