Review of Dunkirk (2017) by Saeed K — 01 Sep 2018

I just watched it and I didn't like it so much.

The beach which should've been packed with 400,000 men, women and children, was instead filled with 70 soldiers on a lovely clean beach.

Soldiers were waiting in lines for boats, so far down the beach that the water was up to their necks. Here they're standing in an orderly fashion without a speck of dirt on their clothes.

What should've been constant bombing and harassment by the luftwaffe consisted of 3 stukas and 1 bomber. Making 2-3 bombing runs on a nearly empty beach and one repeated bombing on a small military vessel.

Dogfights around Dunkirk with over 3000 sorties. 1 dogfight, 3 spitfires.

39 destroyers and hundreds of civilian vessels boiled down to a couple of boats.

You get the idea, the scale isn't right and the movie doesn't manage to represent the sheer brutality of what occurred at Dunkirk as a consequence of this.

Because of this the thousands of men trying their very best to survive the living hell that was Dunkirk felt more like small bands of cowards running away from a little skirmish with the Germans.

The dogfights were cool, as inaccurate as they were (Where do these pilots store all of that ammunition they fire?).

The naval side of things didn't do so badly. While it didn't represent the number of ships present, it did show the fear and risk that ALL of the ships and boats present faced. U-boats, bombers, strafing runs and even gunfire from the ground. Dunkirk wasn't only fought on the beach.

The officers that we jumped to didn't really give us a good description of the perilous scenario unfolding. Their lines were so few and meaningless that it didn't bring much value to the movie. All they really did was tell us that nobody expected as many people to get out as they did as well as informing us why there weren't any more ships around.

While I enjoyed the naval side, the acting was off for the civilians. Your brother/son dies and you don't care? Okay.

You've just stepped onto a warzone for the first time of your life, facing the dangers of becoming a target for the enemy aircraft. On the way here you'd probably seen ships full of demoralized troops fearful of the place that you're headed to. You get there to witness thousands of troops sitting on a beach with empty eyes and you begin letting on dozens of wounded and dying soldiers onto your boat. How do you act?

Well all sunshine and roses of course. Smiles and cupcakes. We're here to save them after all! It's not like we're in a hurry or anything.

Time wasn't represented very well on this movie either. Dunkirk lasted from 26 May to 4 June 1940.

This movie shows us a night scene or two, however the same scenes kept repeating themselves and we ended up going back in time more than a few times during this movie. As such, we don't get a real grasp on how long everything is taking. It's rather disorientating as you wonder how long they've been there for and when you come to that conclusion you realise that there's only been a handful of action scenes within that long period of time, so it once again contributes towards that "Why are they running again?" feeling.

After the characters stories have finished we skip straight towards the end of the British evacuation and we show that there are all of a sudden no soldiers left. Again, confusing us as to the time frame we're in.

The desperation of Dunkirk was probably the only thing that I found to like in this movie. It definitely accurately represents the desperation of individual soldiers as well as the extremely low morale and mindset of these broken troops. On this front, the movie does extraordinarily well. Another worthy mention is the display of duty and responsibility the RAF pilots held for themselves, this movie places a lot of praises on the RAF and it does credit to their contribution.

Overall I felt like this movie does not portray the terror or the devastating defeat that the evacuation of Dunkirk was and in that sense, this movie was a total disappointment. However the points that it did well in, it did a spectacular job at pulling off.

4/10 for me. But I'd recommend watching it once, just for those few moments of pure brilliance.?