Review of Dunkirk (2017) by Bruce G — 08 Jan 2018

After listening to all the hype surrounding this movie, I was expecting to see the most amazing war movie ever made. In the end, I was very disappointed. In fact, I felt a lot like Elaine watching The English Patient in an episode of Seinfeld.

The actual evacuation at Dunkirk involved 400,000 men and hundreds of small boats. In this movie, it looked more like the evacuation of 400 people with about 30 boats. The movie did a terrible job of capturing the immensity of the task at hand. Everyone was lolling about like they were waiting for an Uber to pick them up. Dunkirk really didn't look that scary.

The aerial combat scenes were pretty lackluster too. There's the odd plane here and there, a lone bomber sinks every ship it attacks. A Spitfire runs out of fuel and the pilot glides up and down the beach for what seems like 15 minutes and even manages to shoot down a Stuka before landing on the beach. The director seemed to really love scenes of aircraft ditching in the drink. "That looked great, let's do it again (and again)!

I suspect that an awful lot of the hype around this movie can be attributed to Harry what's his name from what's that band being in the cast. None of the acting roles in this movie were particularly challenging and there were some pretty bland performances by the stars. There weren't any DeNiros and the script didn't really call for any.

The scenes of ships sinking were pretty harrowing and that was the best thing about this movie. However, they weren't enough to make me enjoy this movie.