Review of Dunkirk (2017) by Debie K — 18 Aug 2017

It's not that Dunkirk is a bad movie, it's just not as amazing as the advertisements or Box Office gro$$ lead you to believe. Between the lack of character development, and the uneven, time switching perspectives this movie was hard to follow and hard to invest in.

Dunkirk has some interesting, moving scenes and historical info, but for the most part, it is slow and awkward. It took a while before I even realized that there were scenes being shown out of sequence.

There is little done visually to inform you that a different perspective or flashback is happening. You'll see a plane looking down on a sinking boat and then a scene or two later you see people on shore boarding what looks like the same boat, and a few scenes later you realize you jumped back a few hours in time.

I'm not sure why they chose to format the movie with all this time jumping when there was only a matter of hours between the flashback scenes, not days or years. It just made the film confusing. Your mind is so busy trying to work out the scene order and playing catch up, that you aren't concentrating fully on the details of the movie and you're not able to just enjoy it unfold.

There are definitely a few standout actors, but because there are so many characters and very little character development, along with the weird formatting, most of the scenes have you struggling to figure out who is who, and which actors match with each story's flashback.

Maybe if you read this before seeing the movie you'll go in more prepared and be able to follow the film better than I did. All in all, although it is worth a look, Dunkirk is not as awe-inspiring and impressive as other war movies, like Hacksaw Ridge, Saving Private Ryan, The Great Escape and Sergeant York, in My Humble Opinion.

8/2017.