Dunkirk

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.

For a teenager today, Dunkirk must seem even more distant than the Boer War did to my generation growing up just after WW2. For some, Christopher Nolan's film may be the most they will know about the event.

But it's enough in some ways because even if it doesn't show everything that happened, maybe it goes as close as a film could to letting you know how it felt.

"Dunkirk" focuses on a number of characters who are inside the event, living it minute by minute.

Tommy, the soldier at the centre of the story, seems at first glance to be the antithesis of the Dunkirk legend. Maybe he fits a New Millennium sensibility rather than a 1940's one, more like a contestant on "Survivor". He does show initiative, but a soldier who throws away his weapon then "helps" wounded to the rear risked a court martial in every army from the Roman Legions on. The lines of stoic soldiers waiting patiently on the beach, the enduring image of the evacuation, seem almost like a backdrop as Tommy and his mate run through them.

The man who embodies the spirit to the full is Dawson, the civilian captain of the Moonstone. He is the sort of man who wins wars; the bloke who sticks to the task when others buckle under pressure; "There's no hiding from this thing son," he says to an officer whose nerve has cracked, all the while steering his little boat towards Dunkirk.

The scenes of aerial combat look so real it makes all other depictions pale in comparison. Peter Jackson once planned to do a remake of "The Dam Busters", but possibly Christopher Nolan would add another dimension to the retelling. The brilliant special effects serve the story. Much of the panorama of Dunkirk is glimpsed almost incidentally from the cockpit of fighter planes or by men struggling in the water.

There are surprises for anyone who thinks they know the story or have seen documentaries or other recreations of the event; it's very different to the crowded Dunkirk of "Atonement".

An unsettling score helps heighten the tension in a film that has you holding your breath in scene after scene.

This is a film that demands more than one viewing.

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.

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.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised how many people don't like this movie in an era of CGI, reboots, remakes, sequels, prequels, and generally easy to digest movies/tv shows. This is a real Christopher Nolan movie, not a Batman, but a real Christopher Nolan movie like Memento or Prestige. Watch it a few times. Pay attention to the details. Appreciate the sensory experience.

Most of these bad reviews are because the person watched it once and was upset they weren't spoon fed every aspect of the characters and story. There is a ton of characterization and a great story but you have to pay attention.