Review of Dunkirk (2017) by Gleefulness — 29 Jul 2017

Terrible script, unsympathetic characters, confusing plot sequences and corny story lines. Silliest bit is when soldiers try to stop their boat sinking by covering up the bullet holes with their hands; they only abandon ship when the hull is completely inundated with water.

This is just completely ridiculous. Everything gets blown up around the central characters, who get out of a lot of narrow scrapes in a series of sinking ships (I lost count in the end). They survive intact and unscathed, barring their blackened faces - a bit like Wile E Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons.

The flotilla coming to the rescue looked like it was a handful of boats, so one of the most remarkable incidents of the war, the rescue of the British Expeditionary Force from the Nazis, comes across as an anti-climax.

Trawler segment with Mark Rylance could have come straight out of the send-up in the recent comedy Their Finest (a much better film). I can only assume that the director has spent so much time making dumb action movies based on comic books he's completely lost his touch when it comes to creating engaging characters and plausible stories.

There wasn't much of a script and the little dialogue was hard to make out. No wonder (spoiler alert) nobody spotted the French soldier earlier - as hardly anyone was saying anything! I'm not a scholar but the film seemed to overdo conflict between Brits and French, overlooking the fact that (according to Wikipedia), 139,000 French troops were evacuated from Dunkirk.

I'd be interested in reading a historian's perspective.