Saw Dunkirk last night. I would NOT recommend it. Perhaps it was the fault of the theatre. It was so loud that it was painful. Plus the dialogue (what little there was) was obscured by gunfire, explosions, rushing sea water, etc. It was hard to follow. Plus, for whatever reason, the filmmakers never identified the enemy (and hardly anybody else). When they covered Churchill’s stirring address at the end, they glossed over it.
This retreat was a turning point in WWII and deserved a more comprehensive coverage. Certainly anybody seeing this movie who isn’t British would hardly understand what happened. I say “who isn’t British” because the British seem to take better care of their history than others and also because they lost so many men.
I did get the message from the film — 400,000 awaiting evacuation on the beach; 30,000 made it to Dover. War is Hell.
30,000? Is that a typo or was the movie that wrong? The numbers I’ve seen were over 300,000 evacuated.
Over 300,00 werer captured or wounded? Are you sure about that? I though the evacuation was successful.
300,000 English were rescued, 26,000 French troops as the lines collapsed.
“Plus the dialogue (what little there was) was obscured by gunfire, explosions, rushing sea water, etc. It was hard to follow”
I agree, but “the dialogue (what little there was).....was hard to follow” because they mumbled their lines and the volume of their dialog was WAY to LOW. It was mostly not understandable.
“I did get the message from the film — 400,000 awaiting evacuation on the beach; 30,000 made it to Dover.”
“The War Office made the decision to evacuate British forces on 25 May. In the nine days from 27 May–4 June, 338,226 men escaped, including 139,997 French, Polish, and Belgian troops, together with a small number of Dutch soldiers, aboard 861 vessels (of which 243 were sunk during the operation). The historian Basil Liddell Hart says British Fighter Command lost 106 aircraft dogfighting over Dunkirk, and the Luftwaffe lost about 135, some of which were shot down by the French Navy and the Royal Navy, but MacDonald says the British lost 177 aircraft and the Germans lost 240”
“between 30,000 and 40,000 more were left behind and forced to surrender to the Germans”
I pulled out my old DVD copy of DUNKIRK from the 1950s last night. It has women, French, Englishmen, Richard Attenborough and John Mills in it. Sorry, no minorities.
You can hear them talk! The sound effects do not swamp the movie. There is actually a story line!
I noticed a years ago that modern movies are swamped by LOUD sound effects and LOUD music, and I can’t hear the dialog. It is so bad I have to use the Closed Captions. Unfortunately, the white captioning does not show up well against lighter scenes and they do not keep the captions on screen long enough to read it.
Thanks for the warning about the loudness. I was planning to take my earplugs, as I have a problem with the cranked-up speakers on the rare occasions that we go to a movie theater.
I thought the handling of Churchill’s address was amazing. Hardly glossed over, having one of the survivors read it from the paper gave weight to the words themselves. And also reminded was a massive human toll caused those words, and the toll to come.
This movie was not a documentary. Is was not intended to historically educate people about the war.
I saw it as a vehicle for showing those who have never been in battle or in a war, just how horrible, violent, chaotic and hellish war can be. It was loud because war is loud. War is not something for the faint of heart.
War is all about "gunfire, explosions, rushing sea water, etc". What did you expect from a war movie?
Great reviews except from the Left who criticized it for not being diverse enough. For not including any blacks, hispanics, asians, LGBTs or muslims in it. Ever the social justice warriors those liberals are. They can't help themselves.
This was an excellent film. Fifty million dollar box office hit the first weekend. But apparently not everybody's cup of tea, as they say.