Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk: (Up: Trailer #2 in OP)Movies 

http://www.comingsoon.net/movies/reviews/870665-dunkirk-review#/slide/1

Dunkirk is Christopher Nolan’s greatest cinematic achievement, a masterpiece on every level. This is a film for the ages, and it’s not often we get to see a genuine classic happen right in front of our eyes. Find it on the largest, biggest, loudest screen you can. As a snapshot of history, as an experience, as an exploration of humanity during war, Dunkirk is unforgettable.
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IMAX on Saturday - I'm there 100%.
 
Going to see this at the weekend, rather looking forward to it. The TLDR of the reviews so far is epic action, beautiful cinematics, no attempt at breathing any depth into the characters beyond the usual Eagle comic stereotypes. Perfect :D
 
Well, that really wasn't so great.

Big huge plot spoilers:

It looks fantastic, sounds great, and has Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy and Kenny Branagh Darling. Other than that it's a real missed opportunity to properly tell an incredible story of civilian bravery.

In real life hundreds of small civilian vessels spent over a week rescuing over 300,000 men from the Dunkirk beaches with the ever present threat of unterseebooten and the Luftwaffe. Operation Dynamo (or The Miracle of Dunkirk) was one of the defining early strategic moments of the war. Unfortunately the film requires you to believe several things:

- The evacuation was in fact carried out by a handful of boats in the course of something like a day. Maybe two.
- The British in this version of Dunkirk had forgotten all their trucks, tanks and other heavy equipment or had parked them out of sight somewhere. Along with about 250,000 other soldiers.
- The Germans sent two Heinkels (maybe three, the choppy editing makes it hard to tell) and a handful of Stukas.
- The above was okay because the RAF only sent 5 Spitfires.
- Only about twenty dead bodies were knocking about on the tide.
- If you run out of fuel in a Spitfire you still have enough glide to chase a Messerschmitt to one end of Dunkirk beach and then glide back in the other direction to take your applause from a beach packed with soldiers. You won't have to land until sunset when the beach is empty and all the ships are gone.
- It's okay for Harry Styles to talk in films.

In all the film completely misses the opportunity to reflect the sheer scale of the retreat and the subsequent evacuation. It concentrates sporadically on the efforts of two soldiers to reach safety, a boy who gets onto one of the outbound boats, world champion glider Tom Hardy and angsty Rear-Admiral Branagh Darling. Nothing at all is made of the life of the soldiers on the beach or the fascinating story of the miniature town that they built up - they just seem to stand in lines on the beach waiting. I suppose if they only need five boats and an afternoon to escape then that's okay.

To begin with it suggests that the content will be shown in episodes but it seems that after titling episode three the editors got bored of that idea and so what remains is chopped together in and out of time. The scene of a Spitfire ditching are cut across about fifteen minutes - that would be okay in itself but the Heinkel that's attacking a nearby minesweeper seems to alternately be damaged/okay and attacking/fleeing. The feeling in the bar after the film amongst the twenty or so in our group was that this was the part of the film that made the least sense. We collectively wondered if that would be re-edited at some point.

It's not a bad film, but it's not a very good one.
 
Having no prior education on the history of this event (yeah, none) I thought it was pretty good. I could see where knowing exactly what went down could ruin the movie for you. Makes me glad I didn't. I particularly loved the Spitfire scenes. One thing that I didn't like is how they kept skipping around in the timeline. You think a scene is over with and then suddenly you're looking at it from a different point of view several minutes later. But it wouldn't be a Nolan movie without having to think.

Other than that, we had to sit in seats off to the left side of the screen (IMAX) so with it being curved it throws off your perspective a bit and sort of ruined the experience for me. Next time I'll purchase tickets ahead of time to avoid that. Overall for me it was probably a 7/10.
 
I got such an overwhelming sense of helplessness. That's just about all I can say, Christopher Nolan has done it again.
 
That was one of the most incredible, emotional and heart-pounding films i have ever seen in my life.


And the ending omg the feels....
 
TenEightyOne
Well, that really wasn't so great.

Big huge plot spoilers:

It looks fantastic, sounds great, and has Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy and Kenny Branagh Darling. Other than that it's a real missed opportunity to properly tell an incredible story of civilian bravery.

In real life hundreds of small civilian vessels spent over a week rescuing over 300,000 men from the Dunkirk beaches with the ever present threat of unterseebooten and the Luftwaffe. Operation Dynamo (or The Miracle of Dunkirk) was one of the defining early strategic moments of the war. Unfortunately the film requires you to believe several things:

- The evacuation was in fact carried out by a handful of boats in the course of something like a day. Maybe two.
- The British in this version of Dunkirk had forgotten all their trucks, tanks and other heavy equipment or had parked them out of sight somewhere. Along with about 250,000 other soldiers.
- The Germans sent two Heinkels (maybe three, the choppy editing makes it hard to tell) and a handful of Stukas.
- The above was okay because the RAF only sent 5 Spitfires.
- Only about twenty dead bodies were knocking about on the tide.
- If you run out of fuel in a Spitfire you still have enough glide to chase a Messerschmitt to one end of Dunkirk beach and then glide back in the other direction to take your applause from a beach packed with soldiers. You won't have to land until sunset when the beach is empty and all the ships are gone.
- It's okay for Harry Styles to talk in films.

In all the film completely misses the opportunity to reflect the sheer scale of the retreat and the subsequent evacuation. It concentrates sporadically on the efforts of two soldiers to reach safety, a boy who gets onto one of the outbound boats, world champion glider Tom Hardy and angsty Rear-Admiral Branagh Darling. Nothing at all is made of the life of the soldiers on the beach or the fascinating story of the miniature town that they built up - they just seem to stand in lines on the beach waiting. I suppose if they only need five boats and an afternoon to escape then that's okay.

To begin with it suggests that the content will be shown in episodes but it seems that after titling episode three the editors got bored of that idea and so what remains is chopped together in and out of time. The scene of a Spitfire ditching are cut across about fifteen minutes - that would be okay in itself but the Heinkel that's attacking a nearby minesweeper seems to alternately be damaged/okay and attacking/fleeing. The feeling in the bar after the film amongst the twenty or so in our group was that this was the part of the film that made the least sense. We collectively wondered if that would be re-edited at some point.

It's not a bad film, but it's not a very good one.
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I agree with this

If you notice in Nolan's last movie, Interstellar, he took a very big situation, the 'destruction' of the Earth, and somehow made it feel very small and local. The entire planet is dying in Interstellar and apparently the military is bombing starving civilians and everything is in chaos, but you never see any of it, only a sleepy farm house in the middle of nowhere that gets hit by one dust storm. It's Nolan's attempt to keep the story focused, yet it has big shortcomings.

Here they say 400,000 men are on the beach, yet you never see more then a few hundred in any given shot.

Just like Interstellar, there's talk about how big and grandiose things are, but there isnt any visual evidence of it.

Nolan surely wanted everything to be real, with no CGI soldiers, and in some way it pays off, and in others it doesnt. Same thing with the number of boats. They're all real, but surely well short of the numbers that were actually there.

I do give credit to Nolan for how the story is very unconventional. But there was some things done good in this, and others things not so good. The pacing was excellent. The editing was confusing. The heroism was stirring. But you didnt know enough about the characters to really get attached to them. The situations were harrowing. But some seemed very contrived.
the flooding beached boat for example

I see what Nolan did with Dunkirk as very experimental filmmaking. He breaks out of the mold with this film and it pays off in some ways, but it also stumbles because of it. For example Im so very happy we didnt get the 'crazy drunk who is really good at something' stereotype that is in so many movies nowadays. All the characters feel very real but I think Nolan went too far with the writing by not adding more personality to them. Real people are not this bland.
 
R1600Turbo
Having no prior education on the history of this event (yeah, none) I thought it was pretty good. I could see where knowing exactly what went down could ruin the movie for you.
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I'd echo @Earth's post in reply to that - they explain how it went down and then show something much more small-scale. It's not a case of knowing what happened, it's a case of them explaining in the film what happened and then not delivering the spectacle.
 
TenEightyOne
I'd echo @Earth's post in reply to that - they explain how it went down and then show something much more small-scale. It's not a case of knowing what happened, it's a case of them explaining in the film what happened and then not delivering the spectacle.
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I think it just comes down to not wanting to use a lot of CGI, which that would require. Probably a choice on his part which I would agree with since too many movies these days rely way too heavily on it. But again, not knowing the history of the situation, it didn't ruin the movie for me.
 
Enjoyed it a lot. Stunning visuals and Audio. I liked that the character in the movie was Dunkirk rather than focusing on the soldiers.
 
As I feared, Nolan completely fails at capturing the scale of the operation. Additionally, he fails to establish any characters outside those on the small civilian boat, presents the Royal Navy as incapable of defending itself, and attempts (and fails) to keep the suspense going throughout the entire movie. The music gets incredibly annoying, and almost never stops. The jumping between time is frustrating and unnecessary. And the people who made sure the evacuation was even possible by holding off the Germans were almost completely ignored.

While it was a joy seeing real Spitfires fly about, I found myself questioning how the German pilots in the 109's seeming couldn't be bothered to pull any kind of defensive maneuvers. I'm certainly not an expert on WW2 fighter plane tactics, but something just felt off at how those battles for portrayed. The German pilots were rather useless. Also curious as to why the people responsible for audio made the German 111's sound like they were firing automatic cannons at the Spirfires, when, aside from the forward facing 20mm gun, their defensive guns were a mix of machine guns.

And again, the sense of scale isn't there. There is zero sense of genuine threat to the Allied soldiers at Dunkirk, as the Germans can't muster but a few planes, no artillery, and pretty much nothing is ever heard or seen of the German ground forces.

It's not all bad though. The horror of being on a sinking ship is well portrayed, and the sound of the JU-87's diving down to drop bombs was both accurate and horrifying. The audio in general was really good, aside from the obnoxious music and He-111 problem. But overall, I'd say Nolan failed at properly representing the evacuation itself, as well as failed to make a good movie.
 
Last edited:
sems4arsenal
I liked that the character in the movie was Dunkirk rather than focusing on the soldiers.
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How so? You didn't see any of the town, the attacks it was under or its occupation by 400,000 troops. You saw some of the mole and some of the beach.
 
TenEightyOne
Well, that really wasn't so great.

Big huge plot spoilers:

It looks fantastic, sounds great, and has Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy and Kenny Branagh Darling. Other than that it's a real missed opportunity to properly tell an incredible story of civilian bravery.

In real life hundreds of small civilian vessels spent over a week rescuing over 300,000 men from the Dunkirk beaches with the ever present threat of unterseebooten and the Luftwaffe. Operation Dynamo (or The Miracle of Dunkirk) was one of the defining early strategic moments of the war. Unfortunately the film requires you to believe several things:

- The evacuation was in fact carried out by a handful of boats in the course of something like a day. Maybe two.
- The British in this version of Dunkirk had forgotten all their trucks, tanks and other heavy equipment or had parked them out of sight somewhere. Along with about 250,000 other soldiers.
- The Germans sent two Heinkels (maybe three, the choppy editing makes it hard to tell) and a handful of Stukas.
- The above was okay because the RAF only sent 5 Spitfires.
- Only about twenty dead bodies were knocking about on the tide.
- If you run out of fuel in a Spitfire you still have enough glide to chase a Messerschmitt to one end of Dunkirk beach and then glide back in the other direction to take your applause from a beach packed with soldiers. You won't have to land until sunset when the beach is empty and all the ships are gone.
- It's okay for Harry Styles to talk in films.

In all the film completely misses the opportunity to reflect the sheer scale of the retreat and the subsequent evacuation. It concentrates sporadically on the efforts of two soldiers to reach safety, a boy who gets onto one of the outbound boats, world champion glider Tom Hardy and angsty Rear-Admiral Branagh Darling. Nothing at all is made of the life of the soldiers on the beach or the fascinating story of the miniature town that they built up - they just seem to stand in lines on the beach waiting. I suppose if they only need five boats and an afternoon to escape then that's okay.

To begin with it suggests that the content will be shown in episodes but it seems that after titling episode three the editors got bored of that idea and so what remains is chopped together in and out of time. The scene of a Spitfire ditching are cut across about fifteen minutes - that would be okay in itself but the Heinkel that's attacking a nearby minesweeper seems to alternately be damaged/okay and attacking/fleeing. The feeling in the bar after the film amongst the twenty or so in our group was that this was the part of the film that made the least sense. We collectively wondered if that would be re-edited at some point.

It's not a bad film, but it's not a very good one.
Click to expand...
I'm with you in these comments too. Found it an alright film overall but don't think I'd ever watch it again. Isn't even in my top 3 movies of the year.
 
R1600Turbo
Doesn't really come across as such. Better words could have been chosen.
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No offence, but I don't think I can be blamed for your lack of reading comprehension. It'd make for very monotonous reading if everyone had to write "in my opinion", whenever they were expressing something that was subjective. Additionally, unless a person specifically states otherwise, it should be automatically assumed that a person is stating his or hers opinion when saying if a movie is good or bad.
 
Jawehawk
No offence, but I don't think I can be blamed for your lack of reading comprehension. It'd make for very monotonous reading if everyone had to write "in my opinion", whenever they were expressing something that was subjective. Additionally, unless a person specifically states otherwise, it should be automatically assumed that a person is stating his or hers opinion when saying if a movie is good or bad.
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Suit yourself.
 

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