• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

I did not care for Dunkirk *spoilers*

Jetboogieman

Somewhere in Babylon
DP Veteran
Joined
Jan 12, 2010
Messages
38,462
Reaction score
55,389
Location
Somewhere in Babylon...
Gender
Undisclosed
Political Leaning
Undisclosed
So I will preface this by saying I don't think Dunkirk is a steaming pile of ****, I really don't.

Some superb special effects and given how much of it was practical, an astounding achievement, you wanna talk about sound design, holy mother of god, every shot sounded like it was happening in my living room, acting was largely solid, some scenes done just unbelievably well.

I've always been a big history guy and this was a story that needed to be told and I'm glad someone went and green lit a project on this scale and backed it up with the budget it needed.

However... I do have some major gripes with this film.

The entire story and the way it was told, I just don't get it, why did it need to be done that way?

Why did the whole thing need to be split into 3 to 4 difference stories and told out of sequence, was that really necessary?

For me, I honestly believe that creative choice just destroyed what could have been a truly, truly great film and made it into a bit of a contrived mess.

Another piece of the puzzle that bothered me is I don't believe that the film really was able to convey the true sense of scale of what occurred at Dunkirk, it is truly amazing what happened and I don't really think the film captured it, like at the end I really didn't get that sense of scale or jubilation at the success of the operation that I believe from what I've studied it deserved.

I write this as I was reading the Rotten Tomato reviews and got a little annoyed, I mean no one had a problem with the narrative being sent through a paper shredder and re-assembled by a blind armadillo?

Anyway that's just my thoughts and opinions, do you think I have a point or am I being overly critical?

Edit: Yeah, I don't know why I put *spoilers* in the title either
 

The word that best fits Hollywood @ 2018 is infantile.

You are not wrong.

:2wave:
 

You are not alone.
Your review and mine would look exactly the same. Well actually, yours is a lot better.
I also believe they might had done a better explanation as to just WHY the panzers were ordered to stop and not roll them up right into the ocean.
They could have.
 

I agree with you but my gripes were slightly different: it didnt show the scale of the evacuation. It seemed like just a few hundred men were on the beaches instead of hundreds of thousands. Also the aerial sequences were well made but very unrealistic. Tom Hardy shoots down a German dive bomber while gliding, and the German fighter pilots acted like idiots when in reality they werent.
 

This is what happens when you specifically make a movie to be overambitious Oscar bait.
 

Maybe Hitler was pro British
 

I feel the same way.
 
theliq said:
Maybe Hitler was pro British
Click to expand...

Well, no. But he rightly surmised that France was in effect defeated and he wrongly assumed that Britain would not carry on the war alone.
 
Didn't the movie come out like 4 months ago?

Regardless... I could not stand it for many of yhe reasons that you stated. Directing/editing... three separate story lines out of sequence and lack of scale.
 
Sweden said:
Well, no. But he rightly surmised that France was in effect defeated and he wrongly assumed that Britain would not carry on the war alone.
Click to expand...

Actually there is a theory that he felt his generals were getting too powerful so he countermanded their orders to attack the beaches just to show them he was in charge. But he also did have some respect for the british because of their history of literature and art. He considered them sophiscated. He thought the Russians were animals.
 
Bodhisattva said:
He essentially was... or was that your point
Click to expand...

Yup, he wanted the UK alongside Germany in ruling the world. He repeatedly said, "England is not our enemy."
 
PoS said:
Yup, he wanted the UK alongside Germany in ruling the world. He repeatedly said, "England is not our enemy."
Click to expand...

He certainly saw them as potential allies at best but more likely they would just stop fighting snd sit it out. Hitlers goals were really always to the East.

He couldnt understand why England kept fighting...
 
Jetboogieman said:
Anyway that's just my thoughts and opinions, do you think I have a point or am I being overly critical?
Click to expand...

Frankly, I don't believe you were being harshly critical enough. It was a story told through today's sensibilities, concentrating on cowardice, shell shock and nonsense about the French troops defending the British at Dunkirk. The French forces defied their government and kept fighting. There was no need for the death of the boy sequence, and you are absolutely correct about appearing contrived, almost to a point of meaninglessness. Kenneth Branagh and Tom Hardy, along with most of the other actors played their roles with a deserved dignity, but overall, this is not a movie I will ever watch again.

BTW 4 regiments of British Indian troops also helped defend the British on the beach, at the side of French Troops, Colonial Moroccan and Algerian Troops, along with Senegalese French Foreign Legion Troops. Yet all I saw was one black face.
 
Last edited:
Jetboogieman said:
Anyway that's just my thoughts and opinions, do you think I have a point or am I being overly critical?
Click to expand...

No, I think your points are fair, but a lot of it comes down to personal preference.

The whole splitting up the story bit was clearly just Nolan's typical time scrambling. It was confusing at times for me during the movie but it never really bothered me.

The scale of the movie certainly didn't capture the actual scale, but I still found the end scenes rather poignant. I especially loved the bit where the old man handing out blankets reaches up to touch Alex's face, implying he was blinded in the first world war and is now doing what he can to help the veterans of the second.

To be honest, a big reason I enjoyed the film so much because of how much of a radical departure it was from typical Hollywood bull****. Over sensationalized action scenes, cliche characters, the archetypal squad; I hate all that about so many modern military movies.

Dunkirk was an absolute disaster. An entire French Army destroyed, the whole of the French ground forces thrown into disarray, the collapse of the BEF and the abandonment of thousands of tons of equipment. And the movie I feel does a good job portraying it; the characters are mostly just focused on survival; there is no bad ass stand, the commanders aren't steel jawed grizzled old men handing down one liners like "hold the line" and "make 'em pay for every inch". They're all very well aware of the fact that they are on the brink of being absolutely ****ed over and are just trying to do their best to snatch some kind of moral victory from the grips of what otherwise seems like an inevitable impending German victory.

Just my 2 cents.
 
theliq said:
Maybe Hitler was pro British
Click to expand...

The German Panzers were stopped on orders from their commanders. They were overstretched and vulnerable to counterattack.
 

Spitfires were capable of gliding upwards of 15 miles, and then landing. They were very small, light, and as a result more maneuverable and faster than the Messerschmidt's. However, fuel capacity limited fighting after crossing the channel to about an hour at best. The British lost 145 planes defending the destroyers and the men on the beaches. The Germans lost about 240 planes. One spitfire over the beaches was observed taking out a Messerschmidt 109 about to strafe the beach. He came out of the sun from behind the Messerschmidt with no fuel left, and gliding. The pilot was not Tom Hardy, and the real pilot died in a crash landing he could likely have avoided if he hadn't made the choice to take down one more enemy plane to save British lives.
 

Youre going to have to give me a link to that story because Ive read a lot of WW2 books, and I never heard of a British pilot shooting down a German plane while gliding. He did a 180 turn when he ran out of fuel in the movie, and that would have cost him a lot of altitude. Also the guns on his spitfire seemed to have unlimited ammo, when in reality the total firing time would have been 16 seconds- Tom Hardy would have run out of ammo way before that with all the other German fighters he was shooting down.
 
I had no interest in seeing this movie because Hollywood war films are usually pretty awful in their accuracy and choice of narration, but my partner played it so I just tuned in.

Non-linear story telling is very popular in the TV scene right now and it usually works well because it can be played out and pieced together over many episodes. When adapted to a movie it needs to be done very carefully in order to respect time constraints while also honoring the essence of the plot. I feel that Dunkirk failed to do this. They did the non-linear thing to add nuance but it just seemed like trivial fluff in order to make the movie more appealing to the awards committees.

In a nutshell, it was Hollywood trying to be atypical and failing, which they do a lot. At least they tried, I guess?

I too noticed the lack of scale. There were hundreds of thousands on that beach plus over 70,000 killed IIRC, which was not represented at all.

The scene with Tom Hardy gliding... *eye roll* Way to take the story of an honorable fallen soldier and twist it for some glory shot.
 

I'm not saying it was anything like Tom Hardy's feat. I read about it more than 40 years ago in Stilt Kurgel's "True Stories of Self Sacrifice During War." Stilt was one of the Polish RAF fighter pilots. There have been moments I've witnessed, nothing like this one, where there is a perfect alignment of events that are otherwise inexplicable. Sometimes logic and rationality don't give us answers that are present. We see some on the net when people post photograph's with perfect timing. I can't swear to the veritas of Stilt's stories, tho some I've read about elsewhere. This one no. But Stilt had no reason to lie, and his goal was expressing gratitude for self sacrifice. I'll suggest someone involved with this movie heard the story however long ago, and it was embellished for the movie.
 

Of course it was not Tom Hardy... he is an actor...
 
Strange stories happen in real life, and Ive read plenty on WW2 (like the guy who fought the Germans using a longbow and sword, or the ace Russian sniper who was a woman) stuff, but I've never come across it, nor have I seen anything online about it either.
 

Quite some time back I remember reading or hearing of a fellow who participated with British troops during the Normandy invasion, who carried a claymore and used it in various engagements. Also never read about him online. My father claimed he witnessed a German officer and an American officer fight it out with sabers while mounted on horses, mortar fire forced them to disengage and they saluted each other before heading back behind their own lines. Never came across that story anywhere else.

A number of Russian women served as snipers, some with incredible records that were proved accurate. One was honored by Eleanor Roosevelt, and was a guest at the Whitehouse. She and Eleanor kept up a correspondence after the war, and Eleanor visited her in Russia. I also once read of a Corsican woman from Marseilles, who's husband had been executed by the Germans for smuggling, who had killed more than 200 German soldiers using knives as her only weapons. Her mark, the removal of their testicles. She was not part of the French resistance, only out for vengeance. The Germans caught her and executed her with an officer's pistol at the back of her head. After her death, over the next year, a few hundred more Germans were found dead, by knife attacks, the bodies emasculated, causing rumors of her resurrection, leading to a morale problem for the Germans.

When I was in SE Asia, I encountered two different men who used double recurve hunting bows to hunt Charlie at night. Both from different outfits, both separated by long different times of engagement, different regional deployments and both with bounties on their heads.

I had one of those inexplicable moments this morning. Walked the dog, and he didn't confuse me with a fire hydrant, one of his favored trees or a car wheel. I showered anyway, when we returned.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register
Cookies are required to use this site. You must accept them to continue using the site. Learn more…