Dunkirk

[Broomstick]

The film is about bitter failure, right?

Sooooooort of. In the cultural zeitgeist The Battle of France is considered a defeat, but Dunkirk itself a success more than a victory. Kind of have both sides of the coin.

Let's use the term from Apollo 13: "successful failure". Yes, it's a failure, but there was a heroic salvage in the midst of the failure that saved lives and exemplified bravery and improvisation,

[The Romulan Republic]

How much more exposition do you need if you have already seen the trailor really? All you need to know is that the British are on the beach (though curiously little seems to be shown of the french sacrifice lol), they need to get off it and the bad germans are bombing them. What more exposition does an american audience need?

"What's a beach?"
"Who is Churchill?"
"Where's France?"
"Which war is this?"
"Help me, Christopher Nolan. You're my only hope."

Never underestimate ignorance. I talked to someone about this recently and they appeared not to know what event "Dunkirk" referred to.

[Eternal_Freedom]

That's sad.

When I saw it on Sunday, I happened to be next to an old guy who was quite impressed with it. He should know since he was there after all. Though he freely admits that he didn't get much of a view, either while waiting on the beach or on a destroyer heading back across the channel.

[houser2112]

Never underestimate ignorance. I talked to someone about this recently and they appeared not to know what event "Dunkirk" referred to.

Exactly. Americans who are not all that interested in WWII will only know of the major battles that occurred while the US was involved: Pearl Harbor, Normandy, Battle of the Bulge, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Hiroshima/Nagasaki (if you're willing to call them "battles"). They may not even know that much.

[K. A. Pital]

I thought nowadays the younger generation is more interested in battles which had little or nothing to do with the US e.g. the battle of Kursk Salient, the awareness is growing due to popular culture making these events, even if in a distorted form, accessible (Call of Duty as an example).

[ray245]

I thought nowadays the younger generation is more interested in battles which had little or nothing to do with the US e.g. the battle of Kursk Salient, the awareness is growing due to popular culture making these events, even if in a distorted form, accessible (Call of Duty as an example).

Those that played Call of Duty are likely to be people who had better historical knowledge than the average person on the street.

[Iroscato]

Been a long time since a film stunned me into silence. Good lord. That was intense.

[houser2112]

I thought nowadays the younger generation is more interested in battles which had little or nothing to do with the US e.g. the battle of Kursk Salient, the awareness is growing due to popular culture making these events, even if in a distorted form, accessible (Call of Duty as an example).

Those that played Call of Duty are likely to be people who had better historical knowledge than the average person on the street.

Call of Duty is the archetypical "bro-gamer" game. I would say the typical CoD player is average at best. If you're talking World of Warships, then maybe I'd agree.

[The Romulan Republic]

Never underestimate ignorance. I talked to someone about this recently and they appeared not to know what event "Dunkirk" referred to.

Exactly. Americans who are not all that interested in WWII will only know of the major battles that occurred while the US was involved: Pearl Harbor, Normandy, Battle of the Bulge, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Hiroshima/Nagasaki (if you're willing to call them "battles"). They may not even know that much.

Don't know if this is an American thing, as this conversation took place in Canada.

Edit: Yeah, and I really don't know if you can call Hiroshima and Nagasaki battles. More massacres.

[Broomstick]

Say the film today.

Wow, they did not waste any time establishing what sort of utter hell the men at Dunkirk were facing, did they? Brutal. Absolutely brutal. Not just in the men being shot like fish in a barrel, but also addressing stuff like taking equipment from the dead, and what people are willing to do to simply survive and get the hell out of a situation like that. Also addressed the risks to the civilians taking part in the evacuation, including injuries and deaths among them, including a rather mundane (on a certain level) manner of death that had nothing to do with bullets.

We deliberately did NOT see the IMAX version and I'm glad, because the sound track was overwhelming at times. However, in the context of this story I think that was appropriate. War is loud. Just happy there wasn't a smell track to go with the sound track.

Man, when the naval officer spots the boat lift appearing on the horizon it just made your heart sing, didn't it?

Of course, the story wasn't over and there was more blood and death before the end.

Yes, sometimes the accents and/or soundtrack did make it hard to follow the dialogue (and even a few bits were in French, not English, which probably didn't help for many folks). It really doesn't matter. This was a story that showed instead of told. I really loved that, that's how great stories are supposed to be - you don't tell people, you show them and grip their emotions and swing them around to where you want them to be.

It really gave extra meaning and context to Churchill's words, about fighting and never surrendering.

I wish they had given a bit more to the rescue of French troops - in addition to several hundred thousand British troops something like 100,000 French were also taken off the beach and while the officer in charge at Dunkirk did have a line about staying for the French if you didn't catch that it does somewhat give the impression that the French were abandoned.

Both the scenes at sea and in the air were breathtaking, alternating between claustrophobia and agoraphobia. Having done a real emergency landing and learned some of the WWII navigation techniques in flight school I probably had a slightly different appreciation than average for some of those scenes.

I was strongly reminded of my uncles. They were not at Dunkirk, but they enlisted in the US Marines in December 1941 and stayed in for the duration. All of them were front line soldiers getting shot at for years half of them in Europe and half island-hopping in the Pacific. They were not in the habit of discussing the war, but they did make comments over the years. Yes, my uncles undoubtedly killed people, if they hadn't they wouldn't have survived, I know at times they ate what would normally be considered garbage (including crabs that had been dining on drowned marines) and if they had stolen a dead man's boots to cover their bare feet, well, this movie sort of makes it clear why that's a reasonable thing to do under the circumstances. The thing was that they were, on a certain level, very ordinary people who survived extraordinary circumstances and I think this movie also conveyed that - these were ordinary people, both the soldiers and the civilians who took their fishing boats and pleasure yachts and sailed into an active warzone, unarmed, to try to rescue nearly half a million stranded men with the dangers of being torpedoed from below and strafed from the air. And dammit, that IS heroic.

(Yes, in real life most of the boats were helmed by naval guys, the ones taken back and forth by civilian owners were few in number, but for the sake of this story I'm OK with the narrative as it stands. They can't cover everything, and really, ANY civilians sailing into that mess were to be commended.)

I didn't mind the set up - no, we don't find out in detail how all those guys wound up stranded on the beach but that doesn't really matter for the point of the story. Yes, the story was non-linear but it worked for me, I was able to follow along and even cross-link where the storylines overlapped. I could understand if some found it confusing but it wasn't to me.

I thought it was a really powerful movie.

ETA: I will also note that in addition to using real airplanes for the flight scenes, I found out 12 of the "little boats" of the evacuation seen in the movie were actual boats used for the real evacuation. Damn. Historical authenticity.

[Ziggy Stardust]

I just came back from seeing it. I thought the movie was technically impressive, with some gorgeous individual scenes, it just didn't feel like a cohesive unit. Just a series of random vignettes, with the attempts to tie them together more distracting than interesting. There were times in the movie I actually got a little bored, because I was thinking to myself, "Yes, I KNOW this is the same boat we saw sinking from a different angle earlier, you don't need to hammer it home by showing it 10 more times."

In general, I'm fine with the lack of characterization, focusing more on the atmosphere of the situation and the struggle than the individuals themselves. However, I think Nolan resorted to half-measures in pursuing this theme instead of going all out, and in the end I think the film suffers from some real shoe-horned in "Hollywood moments" that don't really fit the general theme/tone of the movie.

In short, I think it's a GOOD movie, but not a great one. It was just a little too disjointed (and I don't mean the non-linear narrative, I mean disjointed in tone and style) and at times too willing to rely on cliche (it was almost a good thing that the film had so little dialogue, because what dialogue was spoken was truly awful ... Kenneth Branagh shouldn't have to suffer through such tripe). Not on my short-list of best war movies, and not even in my top 3 favorite Christopher Nolan movies, but a solid movie overall.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Speaking of the soundtrack, that first moment when the Spitfires fly past the camera, you could feel the roar of those Merlin engines. And it felt awesome.

[Zaune]

I thought nowadays the younger generation is more interested in battles which had little or nothing to do with the US e.g. the battle of Kursk Salient, the awareness is growing due to popular culture making these events, even if in a distorted form, accessible (Call of Duty as an example).

I guess for a non-European audience the younger generation might not have got as far as the bits that happened before their ancestors had any personal stake in what was happening. Up until Lend-Lease got up to speed, and German U-Boats and the US Navy started taking officially unsanctioned potshots at one another, the war was something people in the US only really experienced through the newspapers and the radio.

[The Romulan Republic]

Who was the writer for this one?

I usually find the dialog in Nolan films good enough, but "Good visuals and music, good acting, slightly shaky plot", is a pretty good summary of Nolan films in general, in my experience.

[Broomstick]

Christopher Nolan has the writer credit.

[The Romulan Republic]

Huh.

Usually, as I recall, he wasn't the writer on his films, or at least not the sole writer.

Interesting.

[JLTucker]

Huh.

Usually, as I recall, he wasn't the writer on his films, or at least not the sole writer.

Interesting.

He wrote Following, Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk. He worked on the screenplay with the others, if I remember correctly.

[Elfdart]

Normally I find Nolan's movies tedious but Dunkirk was very good. My only issue was how loud the movie was. I work for an airline and am often around jet and sometimes turboprop engines; I've been to some incredibly loud concerts and I've watched several of the new wave of war movies featuring explosions in surround sound. This movie was louder than all of that. Luckily for me and my nephews, I took them to see it right after work and I still had several sets of foam earplugs in my pocket. I made the mistake of pulling them out right before one of the pilots ditched in the ocean and I thought my eardrums were going to burst.

The best scene -and the one that sums up the plight of the Tommies best- is the very beginning, where a half dozen of them are stopping to catch their breath and try to drink from a garden hose when suddenly they have to run for their lives. The looks on the faces of the French soldiers manning a barricade in the streets while one of the British survivors passes through is something I won't soon forget. The RAF pilot was one of the truly heroic characters in any film I've seen recently.

Dunkirk is the best movie I've seen in the theater in a while.

[ray245]

There seems to be some complaints about the movie in how it treated racial minorities combatant during WW2:

In my mother’s family scrapbook, there is a tiny box camera snapshot of a very young Robert staring at the Luftwaffe-smashed “mole” leading out to sea from the port of Boulogne – sixteen years after British troops evacuated under fire in May 1940 as their comrades stood on the beaches of neighbouring Dunkirk. In the photograph, the right-hand side of the Boulogne jetty remains, in dilapidated, post-war France, just as it was when British soldiers scrambled aboard the last ships to Britain, the concrete, right-hand side of the mole collapsed into the sea, just a few old hawsers showing where it stood.

I remember that when our car ferry docked from Dover, passengers still had to “walk the plank” across a bridge of duckboards suspended above the water with ropes on each side to cling onto above another bombed-out part of the jetty. A day later, my father drove our Austin up to Dunkirk to see the famous beaches. It was a grey, cold day and the sand was grey and there was some unrecognisable, rusting junk along the promenade and several of the old beach hotels were still under repair. That was it. History had passed this way and the Brits had returned to other beaches 250 miles further west four years later and Hitler killed himself and we dropped atoms bombs on Japan and, by the time I reached Dunkirk, we’d lost soldiers in Korea and the poor old French were just starting their doomed war to hold onto Algeria.

From time to time, during our drive towards the German border that dank summer holiday, there were road bridges still under repair – the war had only ended eleven years earlier – and squads of French soldiers guarding them would stand up and cheer when they saw the little Union flag my father had fixed to the front of our Austin. “Don’t wave to them, fellah,” he would admonish me. “They let us down and surrendered.” So the anti-French contempt briefly witnessed in Christopher Nolan’s new film – as a British officer refuses to allow French troops to join the evacuation – was nothing new in cinematic history. My Dad, who’d fought in France towards the end of the First World War, still felt the betrayal of the country he’d risked his life for when it capitulated to the Germans in 1940, less than three weeks after the last British – and French – soldiers had left Dunkirk.

The Brits had already been softened up to hate their French allies by General Mason-Macfarlane, who gave an off-the-record briefing to journalists in London on 28 May 1940 in which he told them to blame French troops for the demise of the British Expeditionary Force; reporters ran “exclusives” next day – no sources, of course (as usual) – precisely reflecting the words of the general.

Mason-Macfarlane was, I suppose, a Farage of his time. In the decades to come, British historians would denigrate French troops in 1940 as drunkards and cowards although they also wrote of the looting and binge drinking by the Brits in Dunkirk town – a theme clearly hinted at in the magnificent five-and-a-half minute Dunkirk beach “take” in Joe Wright’s Atonement. Intriguingly, there were more French soldiers – shooting their horses, marching with discipline to the beaches, one of them dying in a London hospital – in Wright’s film, in which Dunkirk was only an episode, than in Nolan’s epic.

Much has been made, inevitably in The Guardian, of Nolan’s failure to acknowledge the presence of Muslim troops at Dunkirk – Muslim Indian Commonwealth soldiers (from what is now Pakistan) and, of course, Algerian and Moroccan regiments in the French army. Atonement did contain a black British soldier in the retreat to Dunkirk although no photographs appear to exist of black UK troops in 1940 France – and Leslie Norman’s much older Dunkirk movie, which premiered two years after I first visited the beaches, contained no black soldiers – John Mills’s companions in the retreat to Dunkirk were all white – although in the film French civilians risk their lives to help save British troops. Of course, even in this early stage of the Second World War, ethnic minority British citizens did show enormous courage – one of the bravest ARP men during the Blitz was black, although we have yet to see a film about him.

Disgracefully, the post-war Moroccan and Algerian governments declined – until very recently – to honour their soldiers who fought in the French army against the Nazis. Arab nationalism counted for more than anti-fascism in post-independence Algeria. The French film Indignes – released in the UK as Days of Glory – recalled the bravery of Algerian soldiers fighting the Nazis after the Allied landings in southern France, and the racism of their French white comrades. As one of the North Africans lies wounded, praying the words of the Quran, he is executed by a German soldier. Intriguingly, the post-independence Muslim nations who deleted their Second World War history – fighting the Japanese as well as the Germans – reflected the First World War amnesia which afflicted the post-independence republican Irish who, until recently, had no time for their men-folk who died on the Somme, at Gallipoli and Passchendaele in British uniform.

A justly cynical revue of Nolan’s Dunkirk by Francois Pédron in Paris Match points out, correctly, that 18,000 French troops paid with their lives to hold the Dunkirk perimeter and 35,000 were made prisoner – almost 140,000 French soldiers were rescued from Dunkirk – but that not only do the victors write history. Filmmakers write the “history” too, Pedron wrote. He is right. The true story of the Algerian and Moroccan units has still to be filmed. It would make a terrifying drama. The Germans threw raw meat into the prison cages of Algerian and African troops – to show cinemagoers how they fought for the food and tore it to pieces like animals. Algerians were massacred by the Nazis on racial grounds – an act which strongly supports the suspicion of some intellectual Arabs today: that Hitler, after destroying the Jews of Europe and the Middle East, would have next turned his exterminating fury against their Semitic Arab brothers.

But of course, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem sought exile in Hitler’s Germany and exhorted Muslims to support the Nazis and thus allowed Israel forever to equate the Arabs with Nazi Germany – even though Arab Palestinians dead lie in the Commonwealth graveyard at El-Alamein alongside Jewish Palestinians. How do you explain this on film? If the French can be humiliated in the latest Dunkirk, what chance for Muslims? Or black soldiers? No wonder Farage urged us to watch Nolan’s movie. The Brits in 1940 were, at last, alone. It took another generation to create a Europe in which there would be no more international slaughter. 72 years of peace. And now we are committing Dunkirk all over again.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/dun ... 74501.html

I'm not sure if Dunkirk is the right movie for people to have a massive issue with regarding the diversity of troops at the time. It's quite clear that Dunkirk is focusing on a far more narrow aspect of the war, with it being primarily centered on British troops trying to run away.

We've barely seen the French or the German troops ( even though they are in significant numbers at Dunkirk) because Nolan practically sees them as a distraction on his 3 main storylines.

There were non-white British units in Dunkirk, but I'm not sure if including them in this movie will be anything more than mere tokenism.