War films have always been fairly popular genre. Looks like there are several ore WWII films in development with at least 2 set on D-Day. Pegasus Bridge Atlantic Wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_films_since_1990#In_development
“I never thought I would see that again. It was just like I was there again.” You can't get a more ringing endorsement than this one: Ken Sturdy, a 97-year old veteran of Dunkirk who viewed the film in his uniform with full medals, was moved to tears by the film...and I was moved to tears by his review.
I've seen a lot of people calling this a two hour action movie. Its not. Do not go into this film expecting that. The movie is tense as hell but is not action packed. Most of the fighting occurs off screen or far away in the background. This is not a criticism, merely a statement so people don't go in expecting to see the wrong movie and leave disappointed. I saw it today. Like all of Nolan's films, the direction is incredible. The whole movie ticked away like the pocket watch which was the basis of the films score. Three different stories over three different time periods, cutting in and out - amazing. The glory shots of the flags were out of place - like a toned down Micheal Bay - but I guess you can't have a war movie without them. I loved the lack of dialogue. There were a couple moments at the end that were kinda laughable and really took me out of the reality of the film, but that may just be me. Spoiler When Tom Hardy, who has already become an ace in the last 45 minutes in three seperate engagements, somehow shoots down another plane after he has run out of gas and is gliding around, then flys over the British and French held beach and lands in German territory, instead of landing earlier. Also, that kid on the peir slept through the evacuation?!
I saw this over the weekend and it gets my endorsement. It's good to see that a movie about WWII where the US isn't even mentioned (although one could stretch it with that one quote of Churchill's I suppose). We can watch someone else be the hero for a change and the box office won't implode. All the actors did a good job, even the pop singer that people were so skeptical about.
I can thing of a few examples where the hero doesn't hail from the USA that have done well at the Box Office, the Bond films for example.
Saw the film today---wow. It's absolutely riveting. It's incredibly engaging, tense, quietly tragic and still uplifting. It's masterfully put together.
Saw it tonight, magnificent, just utterly magnificent. I could barely take my eyes off the screen. Looked fantastic and it sounded fantastic. Seriously I'm expecting nightmares about Stukas tonight. @wayoung fair points but I'd counter that Spoiler Stukas weren't especially fast or maneuverable, and frankly by that point I was too in love with Tom Hardy and his Spitfire to care. As for the landing, guess the trouble was the Allied section of the beach was too full of soldiers to risk a landing! He had to go where there was space and that's where the Germans were waiting.
It's strange. I didn't realize until halfway into the movie that Nolan had broken the story into three different segments that featured three different periods of time. And yet, I'm still amazed at how he managed to blend those different segments into one by the movie's end. Very unusual war movie. And probably one of the best I have ever seen so far.
I think quite a few people missed these. I enjoyed the film, but I'm still irked by the fact that they screened it improperly at my cinema. It was a 35mm 2.35 print, but they didn't adjust the screen masking and hence played it on a 1.85 screen. The ex-projectionist in me constantly fumed during the screening. Everything was hence that much smaller and from all accounts, the bigger the format you see this film in, the more impact it has. T'was gutting. I only made complaint after the film as the screening was sold out and most other people wouldn't have cared a jot, but would have kicked up a fuss if the screening got interrupted for a ratio change. Hugo - may go back for a rewatch if it's still on in a few weeks
Yeah, I didn't miss it, but I wasn't really paying attention at the time. My sister had to point it out to me in the middle of the film. Once she did, I quickly understood what Nolan was doing.
I knew going in. I can see the logic. Told chronologically the Spitfires probably wouldn't have shown up until about 30 minutes from the end. I have some very minor quibbles that relate to scale. The beach seemed relatively empty, certainly not packed with 400,000 soldiers, but I appreciate that the emptiness was there to heighten the sense of isolation so I understand why Nolan did it (similarly we saw only a handful of little boats, and while I know Nolan was showing a snapshot, I did kinda want to see a big huge flotilla, even if only briefly) Also whilst the timelines converged well Cillian Murphy's seemed odd, he must have got on another boat almost immediately for it to make sense. Though I wanted him to survive I'm guessing Spoiler the Frenchman drowning plugging the bullet holes whilst the Brits escaped was something of a metaphor.
Going to go see it this week. Dad broached the subject with my grandfather, to see if he wanted to see it. He said "Can't see why I'd want to live through it again". Fair point, I suppose.
You know, I might actually even be interested in seeing this were it not for the fact that I absolutely refuse to watch anything that worthless pile of idiot crap Nolan is involved with, after the way he turned Batman to *another word for solid bodily waste*. Oh man! I will NEVER for the life of me be able to begin to understand why so many people actually liked his version of Batman - by far the worst version ever!!!!!!!
Well I did indeed see it this week, it was... not what I was expecting. I went in expecting a Saving Private Ryan style war movie, and the first scene made me think that's exactly what I was getting. But what the film turned out to be was something quite different, just set in a war. Arty, complex, short on dialogue, equally short on jingoism, sometimes brutal, other times almost quaintly squeamish (this is a nearly bloodless war) and, eschewing the simple chronological tension building of the traditional war film, instead messed with timeframes and focused heavily not on fighting but on survival. What lengths you would go to in order to survive, when it's pretty clear that it's unlikely many will. I enjoyed it rather a lot despite the flipping of my expectations, but I think it is a movie where you have to be ready to accept it on the director's terms - if you are hopeful for an historical reenactment of Dunkirk, you'll probably be disappointed. Ditto if you're hoping for a post Brexit British Platoon, gushing patriotism and heroism from every pore. This is the movie that Nolan wanted to make, and on those criteria, it is excellent.
I did not miss the title cards but I did not understand them until some scenes were night, some day, I think I was maybe 40 minutes in before the lightbulb went off that time was moving at different speeds on land, sea, and air. When the timelines converge finally it was really cool I think.
I mostly liked the movie. But I do think that while Nolan might tell others, and perhaps even himself, that there was a thematic point to the nonlinear storytelling as well as serving a means of constructing a maximum-tension ride, there really wasn't. As fraught as the Dunkirk evacuation was, it seems to me (and I'm no expert on it) that despite the odds, it went pretty smoothly over the course of nearly a week. This naturally lends itself to meditative tone, such as the bravura single-shot sequence of Atonement, but not so much one of Nolan's mind-screw puzzle-plots - so he cheats, somewhat, by throwing the whole thing in a blender. Several parts did feel pretty phony. The opening scene guy's whole squad gets wasted, each cleanly and silently dying from a single hit, and he just walks it off? And the PG-13 rating absolutely does stand out at times, with practically zero screams of agony, a whole lot of one-shot deaths, and aerial bombs that kill several soldiers completely dead, but leave absolutely no one wounded or (box office receipts forbid!) bloodied. And then we have Nolan's cherished eye-rollingly stupid dialogue once again: "You can almost see it from here." "See what?" He's looking straight towards Britain, dumbass; what the f*** else would he mean? Santa's f****** North Pole?! Also sorely apparent: Nolan's fetish-level hate for CG. Apparently 30 or so boats evacuated those 300,000 troops, but it never looked like more than 3,000 to moi. Some choice bits from David Cox, in the Guardian: Nolan’s film chooses to ignore tales such as that of the Medway Queen, a paddle steamer that brought home 7,000 troops in seven round trips and shot down three German planes, or the Royal Daffodil, which returned 9,500 soldiers after blocking a hole below the waterline with a mattress. Instead, we encounter just one boat, skippered by a saintly Mark Rylance, comically attired in his Sunday best. [...] Another flaunted absence is CGI. Scale is the essence of the Dunkirk myth. There were more than 330,000 soldiers on the beach, and 933 British vessels, naval and private, plying the waves. It is for this kind of situation that computers were invented, but according to Nolan CGI counts as giving up. So, in spite of his film’s $150m budget, the Royal Air Force seems to consist of three Spitfires, although real-life pilots flew 3,500 sorties at Dunkirk. The Luftwaffe, which Hitler made solely responsible for wiping out the beached Brits, seems able to summon up little more than a couple of Messerschmitts, three Stukas and one bomber. The Royal Navy appears to comprise just two destroyers; in fact, it deployed 39 destroyers and 309 other craft. Women are excluded from the action by being confined to stereotypical roles, such as providing tea for the homecoming menfolk. In real life, female Auxiliary Territorial Service telephonists – who received two-thirds of a male soldier’s pay – were some of the last military personnel to leave the beach. The evacuees also included female civilians, including girls, caught up in the turmoil. Anyhow, the movie is too gripping and skillfully made for me to dismiss it, but I'd definitely like to see a more epic, comprehensive take on the matter (with fewer brain-dead morons that think a steel tugboat cares about one more or less human sitting in its hull), one that takes us from the strategy rooms to the beaches' groups of those gross, cootie-filled women that Nolan's evidently so repelled by. (He's made ten feature films, all of which star white men. If you're not part of the solution, Chris, you're part of the problem.) A job for Aaron Sorkin plus Kathryn Bigelow, maybe?