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Dunkirk |OT| You can practically see it from here...home.

there was a ton of old people in my showing. I hope they liked it. it was cute, they were all standing together and talking about it afterwards. remember that?
 
Here's my one probably dumb question that was bothering me at the end.
When the navy are requisitioning small boats, we see them put their own sailors and captains on them and so the one we follow has to run off on its own so that he can captain his own boat. So, why when the small boats show up at Dunkirk are every single one of the people captaining the boats civilians?
Also yeah this made no sense to me either, and I couldn't even tell what Mr. Something (thanks dialog mixing) said to the boys when they left thanks to the dialog mixing.
 

Dopus

Banned
Just got back from an imax showing. Man, nolan's 3 most recent movies are his worst

A big step up from tdkr and better than interstellar by default just for not having that ending though

Nolan rectified one of his biggest recent problems of having cold, distant characters you don't care about by having like 5 minutes of dialog in the entire movie! And what was there was horribly mixed so it was hard to hear even during peacetime.

Also the trailer didn't "spoil" it because it was a real historical event but the trailer also gave away almost all of the dialog and pretty much every single setpiece so it was weird watching it.

The time line also jumps around a bit and it was done kind of poorly honestly. That aspect combined with a lot of repeat stuff from the trailers made the 94 runtime seem very stretched out. The dogfighting scene was also done kind of poorly imo. Don't get me wrong, it felt real and all that, but it was hard to follow. The time skipping amplified it

That being said, sound design was good and some shots were really beautiful. In terms of recent critically acclaimed war movies though I definitely preferred Hacksaw Ridge.

Spoiler questions
did Tom Hardy not have a chute or was his window defective like his copilot? Also when the main guy's boat is getting shot up, how did it keep getting shot at from well in the water? Who the hell was shooting at them from that range? Or was it just weird editing and they plugged up the holes pretty early on and then later had to abandon ship

Edit: legitimately surprised to see this much praise for it.

My favorite drama/thriller of the year so far is still easily It Comes At Night.


And seeing the second blade runner 2049 trailer for the first time (in imax!) was almost as rewarding as Dunkirk. Villeneueve gonna put in work

tumblr_ngjxxiumoh1u3w4uoo1_400.gif
 
I don't care if you disagree with me but you could at least say why instead of quoting my wall of text and postint a low effort reaction gif.

I never even said I didn't like the movie, I just think it's not as good as it could have been, especially from the guy who brought us Memento (which was a much better example of time-altering editing) and The Prestige. It is his best movie since Inception though.
 
Spoiler questions
did Tom Hardy not have a chute or was his window defective like his copilot? Also when the main guy's boat is getting shot up, how did it keep getting shot at from well in the water? Who the hell was shooting at them from that range? Or was it just weird editing and they plugged up the holes pretty early on and then later had to abandon ship

Yeah, I was wondering about this, too. I thought the Germans didn't even know that there were people hiding in there? I get that it was target practice at first, but after awhile they were clearly trying to shoot the soldiers inside.
 
Yeah, I was wondering about this, too. I thought the Germans didn't even know that there were people hiding in there? I get that it was target practice at first, but after awhile they were clearly trying to shoot the soldiers inside.

I guess the screaming and shouting and banging from inside the boat kinda gave them away.
 
I have tons of dumb questions I could ask. Here's a couple

When
they're pulling up the people covered in oil onto the Moon-something boat, one kid lands on his back and says a quick line - what is it? Take me home or something? IDK

When
Rylance tells the blonde pilot that "they knew where you were," who was "they?" Who was he pointing to?

lmao
 
I guess the screaming and shouting and banging from inside the boat kinda gave them away.
Yeah the shouting gave it away and I wasn't confused about that, I was confused at how the Germans were shooting at them for as long as they were.

Oh also I couldn't hear a fucking word the ginger guy said before the shooting even started because of the sound mixing. Christ. 3 movies in a row with the same issue.
 

Google

Member
I don't care if you disagree with me but you could at least say why instead of quoting my wall of text and postint a low effort reaction gif.

I never even said I didn't like the movie, I just think it's not as good as it could have been, especially from the guy who brought us Memento (which was a much better example of time-altering editing) and The Prestige. It is his best movie since Inception though.

You claim to have a good understanding of Memento (which is incredibly difficult to follow until you piece all the pieces together in the last 10 minutes) and Inception (which has it's own challenges) but you're troubled with three very simple stories, woven together a few times throughout a 90 minute war film?

Three stories.

Land. It takes place over 7 days.
Water. It takes place of 24 hours.
Air. It takes place over 60 minutes.

Like, it's so simplistic...I cant quite fathom why it was hard to follow. Everytime your saw Tom Hardy in a plane the story was picking up from the last time you saw Tom Hardy in a plane.

Every time you saw you Harry Styles you were picking up from where you left off with Harry Styles.
EXCEPT when he was aboard the boat for the 10 minutes of the film...

Land takes place over 7 days. Day 1 is the day they arrive in Dunkirk and Day 7 is the day they arrive in Woking.
 
I'm actually surprise people are having trouble with the time skips.

Nolan actually spelled it out for the audience this time at the beginning of the movie. Memento and The Prestige were much harder to follow considering it had tons of dialouge to keep up with.

Also, the critical praise isn't really hard to understand. Not gonna be everyone's cup of tea, but I think it has earned its praise
 
"they" are the soldiers whom were witnessing the dog-fighting in the sky before he got shot down.

Ah. Thanks.

----

Anybody got a favorite shot?
the plane gliding against the backdrop of the town
was pretty glorious in IMAX. That's like a North by Northwest plane chase "this is what film can do" type of shot.

----

I don't see how anyone could have trouble with the time of the sea / the air, but the mole I can absolutely see. Where are those seven days? From when Tommy gets to the beach to when he gets to England it seems like at most two and a half days pass? Was Kenneth Branagh really standing on the pier for seven days?
 
Ah. Thanks.

----

Anybody got a favorite shot?
the plane gliding against the backdrop of the town
was pretty glorious in IMAX. That's like a North by Northwest plane chase "this is what film can do" type of shot.
Mine is
Hardy being taken away by the Germans. Beautiful shot and still can't see the enemies face was a nice touch
or
the shot of the single soldier trying to swim to home
 
Ah. Thanks.

----

Anybody got a favorite shot?
the plane gliding against the backdrop of the town
was pretty glorious in IMAX. That's like a North by Northwest plane chase "this is what film can do" type of shot.

Probably when the three soldiers were sitting on the beach all depressed and defeated about being back on the beach again, then watching that dude just strip off and walk into the surf. I think the music helped, but man that said so much without having to say anything.

I also loved that random moment early on when George calls out that British bomber fly over (I think it was a Bristol Blenheim).
 
My favorite shot was
Bane in the Gliding Plane. Goddamn what a good shot.

My most memorable shot/scene that i can't get out of my head is
the destroyer capsizing. That shot where everything turns sideways and everyone on board adjusting.


Yep, will be the best film the rest of the year, no doubt.

it's my favorite Nolan movie now too.

Jeez everything about this movie was top-tier.
 
Also yeah this made no sense to me either, and I couldn't even tell what Mr. Something (thanks dialog mixing) said to the boys when they left thanks to the dialog mixing.
The navy people were definitely in the civilian boats.

And Rylance said he didn't want to not be captain of his own ship, or something to that effect.
I have tons of dumb questions I could ask. Here's a couple

When
they're pulling up the people covered in oil onto the Moon-something boat, one kid lands on his back and says a quick line - what is it? Take me home or something? IDK

When
Rylance tells the blonde pilot that "they knew where you were," who was "they?" Who was he pointing to?

lmao
"Take me home"

The people on his boat who saw him in the dogfight against the fighters and bomber.
 
The people on his boat who saw him in the dogfight against the fighters and bomber.

Also a reference to
how the Royal Air Force was hated on for not being supporting soldiers at Dunkirk.

In reality, most of the dogfights were away from the shore where the stranded soldiers could not see.. Because of that the stranded soldiers were have said to have been angry at the RAF.

that line where they say something like "Where the hell is the air force?!"
 
this movie takes its time to sink into my mind long after I actually saw it :>

it's just very lovely to me :>

can't pick one single favourite scene, but there were very many pretty ones. many, many.
 
You claim to have a good understanding of Memento (which is incredibly difficult to follow until you piece all the pieces together in the last 10 minutes) and Inception (which has it's own challenges) but you're troubled with three very simple stories, woven together a few times throughout a 90 minute war film?

Three stories.

Land. It takes place over 7 days.
Water. It takes place of 24 hours.
Air. It takes place over 60 minutes.

Like, it's so simplistic...I cant quite fathom why it was hard to follow. Everytime your saw Tom Hardy in a plane the story was picking up from the last time you saw Tom Hardy in a plane.

Every time you saw you Harry Styles you were picking up from where you left off with Harry Styles.
EXCEPT when he was aboard the boat for the 10 minutes of the film...

Land takes place over 7 days. Day 1 is the day they arrive in Dunkirk and Day 7 is the day they arrive in Woking.
Huh? I never said it was hard to follow, I was referring to the dogfighting for that. I just think the time skipping was poorly done and jarring.
 
Saw this in 70MM IMAX yesterday and... I really have no idea what everyone is raving about.

For starters, it's far too clean to properly represent the realities and chaos of war. They say they're evacuating 400,000 men but everything seems so incredibly small scale you don't get a sense of that. The flotilla that comes you could be mistake for thinking there was just 20 boats. Because that's pretty much all you see on screen. A few hundred men and a few handles of boats.

Did the IMAX showing add anything extra? Not really. There wasn't any extra detail to be captured in the vast expanses of empty ocean or fairly empty beach. The soundtrack did it's best to be needlessly bombastic and tension building but the pace of the film is so slow the tension of small scenes gets dragged out for faaaaaar too long.

Quite honestly I was bored in a lot of moments, overwhelmed by the obnoxiously loud soundtrack (although they worked well for the gunfire and explosions at the start, towards the middle and the end it was just getting pointlessly loud for no reason).

The dogfights were all drawn out in my opinion, considering the lack of variety presented in them. Be forgiven for thinking they just repeated the same shots for all the variety they had.

Honestly it wasn't really what I was expecting from the trailers - and chaotic war film of evacuation. Instead it's a slower, much smaller scale film with far less action than one would assume with a lot more tension building - and a feel like if Nolan had headed more down a route of action he could have achieved something more special.

Plus, too many water shots that looked like obvious clean water tank shots, and the explosions on the beach at the start? No blood, no beach craters or scorching afterwards. Just some bodies randomly flying in the air (where no bombs actually were? unless I missed something. It made it look like landmines or something rather than stuff dropping from the sky).

It's not a bad film by any accounts, but I can't get on board with the critical acclaim it's getting. And I don't think it does the Dunkirk operations the greatest justice it could have. It was a very clean, Hollywood-ised interpretation to me.
 
I can't believe I'm gonna say this about the director that brought us The Prestige of all things, but I'm starting to think that Nolan really isn't all that meticulous or obsessive a filmmaker as some of his contemporaries.

I actually really enjoyed Dunkirk, but it often felt... bare for lack of a better word.

The beach segment in particular felt strangely bare-bones and simplistic, like there weren't enough elements or creative ways of showing the horrors of the situation. Like, soldiers in their line are all pretty clearly exhausted, and wanting to get out, but their individual emotions never really ebb and flow beyond that. Like how are these guys getting food? Were they running out of it? Were they starving? Was it cold there? It didn't seem like they had much shelter/warmth - were there soldiers freezing to death? The nazis were closing in, but it never really felt like they were surrounded. I understand Nolan wanted to show it from specific perspectives, which was absolutely the right choice, but he seemed to do it to an unnecessary degree, like he'd created a little rule for himself: "No ever seeing an actual nazi." Why? Wouldn't it be effective seeing these little dots of nazis off in the distance closing in slowly? At the start of the film they're much further away, and later on you can see their lines have drawn nearer? Like a tidal wave they can't outrun? This is a survival film. Adding layers of problems slowly choking these characters out with a vice grip seems vital to me.

What are these soldiers doing on a day to day basis to keep themselves busy/not go insane? Are some of them going insane? I wanted to see the starkly different experiences and reactions to how these people are dealing with the extreme situation they're thrust into. You compare it to Cameron's Titanic - some people are calm and collected, some are panicked messes, some are suicidal, some are content with just sitting and waiting for their fate, some push back against the structured order they're being bureaucratically forced into, knowing that order isn't going to save their lives now. Like why didn't anyone challenge Branagh at any point? "We have just as much right to be on this boat as anyone else! You could fit plenty more people on the boat!" When the bombs start dropping, why are they literally all just ducking? Surely a heap of them on the pier would have just jumped off into the ocean, preferring to freeze to death than wait to be blown to bits. The moment where the guy drops his equipment and strolls into the ocean, attempting to fucking swim back home was great, harrowing stuff. It's the kind of logical insanity these guys would be going through. The film needed more of this. This plethora of human reaction to an insane situation is, surely, the meat and potatoes of a film like this. Not the spectacle itself - the humans and their immediate struggles.

I'm reminded of the scene from Atonement set on Dunkirk, and while the two films aren't trying to do the same thing with the event, I can't help but compare the far more detailed and rich variety of human experience that Joe Wright manages to communicate in just one scene that Nolan can't quite match in his entire film. This is just a visual example and doesn't really speak to the heart of what I'm talking about, but it's a good entry point into what I'm saying:



Basically, if the beach soldiers were analogous to a character, that character was pretty one-note: tired, scared and uniform. That character should have been a gradient of tired, scared, petrified, insane, desperate, determined, defeated, ordered, chaotic, rebellious, devastated, miserable, optimistic etc.

I couldn't ever call Nolan lazy, but it seemed like he didn't have as strong a grasp on the minute details of what it would have been like on Dunkirk, only the macro large scale stuff.

His best film since at least Inception though.
This is a great analysis and I pretty much agree 100%. Outside of the scene with the flooding grounded ship and the french wanting to board, we never really see any range of emotions.
 
I can't believe I'm gonna say this about the director that brought us The Prestige of all things, but I'm starting to think that Nolan really isn't all that meticulous or obsessive a filmmaker as some of his contemporaries.

I actually really enjoyed Dunkirk, but it often felt... bare for lack of a better word.

The beach segment in particular felt strangely bare-bones and simplistic, like there weren't enough elements or creative ways of showing the horrors of the situation. Like, soldiers in their line are all pretty clearly exhausted, and wanting to get out, but their individual emotions never really ebb and flow beyond that. Like how are these guys getting food? Were they running out of it? Were they starving? Was it cold there? It didn't seem like they had much shelter/warmth - were there soldiers freezing to death? The nazis were closing in, but it never really felt like they were surrounded. I understand Nolan wanted to show it from specific perspectives, which was absolutely the right choice, but he seemed to do it to an unnecessary degree, like he'd created a little rule for himself: "No ever seeing an actual nazi." Why? Wouldn't it be effective seeing these little dots of nazis off in the distance closing in slowly? At the start of the film they're much further away, and later on you can see their lines have drawn nearer? Like a tidal wave they can't outrun? This is a survival film. Adding layers of problems slowly choking these characters out with a vice grip seems vital to me.

What are these soldiers doing on a day to day basis to keep themselves busy/not go insane? Are some of them going insane? I wanted to see the starkly different experiences and reactions to how these people are dealing with the extreme situation they're thrust into. You compare it to Cameron's Titanic - some people are calm and collected, some are panicked messes, some are suicidal, some are content with just sitting and waiting for their fate, some push back against the structured order they're being bureaucratically forced into, knowing that order isn't going to save their lives now. Like why didn't anyone challenge Branagh at any point? "We have just as much right to be on this boat as anyone else! You could fit plenty more people on the boat!" When the bombs start dropping, why are they literally all just ducking? Surely a heap of them on the pier would have just jumped off into the ocean, preferring to freeze to death than wait to be blown to bits. The moment where the guy drops his equipment and strolls into the ocean, attempting to fucking swim back home was great, harrowing stuff. It's the kind of logical insanity these guys would be going through. The film needed more of this. This plethora of human reaction to an insane situation is, surely, the meat and potatoes of a film like this. Not the spectacle itself - the humans and their immediate struggles.

I'm reminded of the scene from Atonement set on Dunkirk, and while the two films aren't trying to do the same thing with the event, I can't help but compare the far more detailed and rich variety of human experience that Joe Wright manages to communicate in just one scene that Nolan can't quite match in his entire film. This is just a visual example and doesn't really speak to the heart of what I'm talking about, but it's a good entry point into what I'm saying:



Basically, if the beach soldiers were analogous to a character, that character was pretty one-note: tired, scared and uniform. That character should have been a gradient of tired, scared, petrified, insane, desperate, determined, defeated, ordered, chaotic, rebellious, devastated, miserable, optimistic etc.

I couldn't ever call Nolan lazy, but it seemed like he didn't have as strong a grasp on the minute details of what it would have been like on Dunkirk, only the macro large scale stuff.

His best film since at least Inception though.

Took the words out of my mouth.
 

WriterGK

Member
Saw it for the second time last night. Liked it even better. For me this movie is more about what it not is then what it is/does. No real villains, no heroes, no main characters, non-lineair and not like any other movie what so ever, not even war movies.
 

Jyrii

Banned
Just saw it. Pretty intense film definately felt like a Nolan movie.

I liked it that the cast was pretty split on known actors and fresh faces, though for half of the movie I though Collins was played by Ewan McGregor.
 
Well, it has been a few days since I saw this in IMAX, and I was hoping it would sink in and I would love it more. However, I'm still left thinking "I'll probably never watch this again." I think my number one problem is that I feel absolutely no connection with anyone in the film, and therefore I really don't care about anything that is happening to them.
 
Saw this in 70MM IMAX yesterday and... I really have no idea what everyone is raving about.

For starters, it's far too clean to properly represent the realities and chaos of war. They say they're evacuating 400,000 men but everything seems so incredibly small scale you don't get a sense of that. The flotilla that comes you could be mistake for thinking there was just 20 boats. Because that's pretty much all you see on screen. A few hundred men and a few handles of boats.

Did the IMAX showing add anything extra? Not really. There wasn't any extra detail to be captured in the vast expanses of empty ocean or fairly empty beach. The soundtrack did it's best to be needlessly bombastic and tension building but the pace of the film is so slow the tension of small scenes gets dragged out for faaaaaar too long.

Quite honestly I was bored in a lot of moments, overwhelmed by the obnoxiously loud soundtrack (although they worked well for the gunfire and explosions at the start, towards the middle and the end it was just getting pointlessly loud for no reason).

The dogfights were all drawn out in my opinion, considering the lack of variety presented in them. Be forgiven for thinking they just repeated the same shots for all the variety they had.

Honestly it wasn't really what I was expecting from the trailers - and chaotic war film of evacuation. Instead it's a slower, much smaller scale film with far less action than one would assume with a lot more tension building - and a feel like if Nolan had headed more down a route of action he could have achieved something more special.

Plus, too many water shots that looked like obvious clean water tank shots, and the explosions on the beach at the start? No blood, no beach craters or scorching afterwards. Just some bodies randomly flying in the air (where no bombs actually were? unless I missed something. It made it look like landmines or something rather than stuff dropping from the sky).

It's not a bad film by any accounts, but I can't get on board with the critical acclaim it's getting. And I don't think it does the Dunkirk operations the greatest justice it could have. It was a very clean, Hollywood-ised interpretation to me.

agreed.
 

jtb

Banned
I can't believe I'm gonna say this about the director that brought us The Prestige of all things, but I'm starting to think that Nolan really isn't all that meticulous or obsessive a filmmaker as some of his contemporaries.

I actually really enjoyed Dunkirk, but it often felt... bare for lack of a better word.

The beach segment in particular felt strangely bare-bones and simplistic, like there weren't enough elements or creative ways of showing the horrors of the situation. Like, soldiers in their line are all pretty clearly exhausted, and wanting to get out, but their individual emotions never really ebb and flow beyond that. Like how are these guys getting food? Were they running out of it? Were they starving? Was it cold there? It didn't seem like they had much shelter/warmth - were there soldiers freezing to death? The nazis were closing in, but it never really felt like they were surrounded. I understand Nolan wanted to show it from specific perspectives, which was absolutely the right choice, but he seemed to do it to an unnecessary degree, like he'd created a little rule for himself: "No ever seeing an actual nazi." Why? Wouldn't it be effective seeing these little dots of nazis off in the distance closing in slowly? At the start of the film they're much further away, and later on you can see their lines have drawn nearer? Like a tidal wave they can't outrun? This is a survival film. Adding layers of problems slowly choking these characters out with a vice grip seems vital to me.

What are these soldiers doing on a day to day basis to keep themselves busy/not go insane? Are some of them going insane? I wanted to see the starkly different experiences and reactions to how these people are dealing with the extreme situation they're thrust into. You compare it to Cameron's Titanic - some people are calm and collected, some are panicked messes, some are suicidal, some are content with just sitting and waiting for their fate, some push back against the structured order they're being bureaucratically forced into, knowing that order isn't going to save their lives now. Like why didn't anyone challenge Branagh at any point? "We have just as much right to be on this boat as anyone else! You could fit plenty more people on the boat!" When the bombs start dropping, why are they literally all just ducking? Surely a heap of them on the pier would have just jumped off into the ocean, preferring to freeze to death than wait to be blown to bits. The moment where the guy drops his equipment and strolls into the ocean, attempting to fucking swim back home was great, harrowing stuff. It's the kind of logical insanity these guys would be going through. The film needed more of this. This plethora of human reaction to an insane situation is, surely, the meat and potatoes of a film like this. Not the spectacle itself - the humans and their immediate struggles.

I'm reminded of the scene from Atonement set on Dunkirk, and while the two films aren't trying to do the same thing with the event, I can't help but compare the far more detailed and rich variety of human experience that Joe Wright manages to communicate in just one scene that Nolan can't quite match in his entire film. This is just a visual example and doesn't really speak to the heart of what I'm talking about, but it's a good entry point into what I'm saying:



Basically, if the beach soldiers were analogous to a character, that character was pretty one-note: tired, scared and uniform. That character should have been a gradient of tired, scared, petrified, insane, desperate, determined, defeated, ordered, chaotic, rebellious, devastated, miserable, optimistic etc.

I couldn't ever call Nolan lazy, but it seemed like he didn't have as strong a grasp on the minute details of what it would have been like on Dunkirk, only the macro large scale stuff.

His best film since at least Inception though.

Nolan goes a bit too far out of his way to fetishize the 'British'-ness of all the soldiers. It borders on national parody. There's an air of romanticism and nostalgia to the whole film. Clearly, there's something about the idea of Britain as 'home' that Nolan is very drawn to.
 

golem

Member
Nolan goes a bit too far out of his way to fetishize the 'British'-ness of all the soldiers. It borders on national parody. There's an air of romanticism and nostalgia to the whole film. Clearly, there's something about the idea of Britain as 'home' that Nolan is very drawn to.

British Exceptionalism aka Stiff-upper-lipism
 

Moonkeis

Member
this movie takes its time to sink into my mind long after I actually saw it :>

it's just very lovely to me :>

can't pick one single favourite scene, but there were very many pretty ones. many, many.

I saw it on Sunday and I'm still thinking about different scenes, most movies I usually just forget about it the next day.
 

kosmologi

Member
Here's a good piece with some very valid critique: https://www.theguardian.com/film/fi...-empty-christopher-nolan-dunkirk-left-me-cold

Another flaunted absence is CGI. Scale is the essence of the Dunkirk myth. There were more than 330,000 soldiers on the beach, and 933 British vessels, naval and private, plying the waves. It is for this kind of situation that computers were invented, but according to Nolan CGI counts as giving up.

So, in spite of his film’s $150m budget, the Royal Air Force seems to consist of three Spitfires, although real-life pilots flew 3,500 sorties at Dunkirk. The Luftwaffe, which Hitler made solely responsible for wiping out the beached Brits, seems able to summon up little more than a couple of Messerschmitts, three Stukas and one bomber. The Royal Navy appears to comprise just two destroyers; in fact, it deployed 39 destroyers and 309 other craft.

The restrictions Nolan places on himself have been cited to demonstrate his brilliance as a director. Not for him the humdrum apparatus of lesser directors. His film must be pared back so it can home in on its true subject. Which is what, exactly? Don’t be silly, the reviewers groan: it is the horror of war as never before. OK, got that, another stab at war-is-hell. Except that Dunkirk is no such thing. It is a 12A effort that avoids blood and guts as thoroughly as it avoids so much else. In the film, people hit by bombs die discreetly, with no unseemly dismemberment. Even abandoning a torpedoed ship doesn’t seem too unpleasant. So the movie doesn’t, as claimed, make you feel the terror of those it depicts. Why not?
 

Lima

Member
Why not? Because it's a fucking movie mainly made for entertainment and not a historic period piece. My god I swear some people.
 

daviyoung

Banned
The lack of stuff on screen doesn't bother me. Time skips so much that I am quite comfortable thinking that the few seconds we saw a wave of 10 civilian ships was just a few seconds within a week of them being on the beach. Same as only having 3 spitfires flying was just for one hour during the week. We don't see the scale of the entire thing because it's presented as momentarily vignettes and flashes of info told from the three most important angles. We just see parts of the grander whole, there's no attempt to squeeze it all into one perfect photograph that represents the entire evacuation.
 
Yea it was personal stories among a bigger event. I'm surprised that ruined the movie for some people.

I just think a lot of people weren't fans of what the movie was. It wasn't really similar to anything else. Which is fine. But this was definitely exactly the movie Nolan was trying to make. And he pulled off what he was trying to do beautifully imo.
 

jtb

Banned
Great review, as always, from Richard Brody at the New Yorker. Really summed up my feelings on the film.

'A war movie about patriotic ciphers'

"The sensory overload of ”Dunkirk" is also an anti-intellectual barrage that effaces the actual differences that were overcome with difficulty in pursuing the war—not just personal ones but also skepticism of bureaucracy, resentment of military discipline and hierarchy, social and political conflicts—the full spectrum of public discord that may have been muted in the midst of the war but that were detailed afterward by journalists, historians, and artists. (George Orwell's wartime writings also give a sense of it.) ”Dunkirk" seems, rather, like one of the self-censoring exhortations of wartime itself. Nolan's sense of memory and of history is as flattened-out and untroubled as his sense of psychology and of character."

Why not? Because it's a fucking movie mainly made for entertainment and not a historic period piece. My god I swear some people.

I hate to break it to you....
 

daviyoung

Banned
Like that reviewer my fear going in was that it was an event movie like Gravity. That had to be watched in two specific formats for the true experience: IMAX 3D. This movie has a lot more going for it than Gravity in terms of stuff under the surface so I can't agree that it'll be "nothing at all" outside of the big screen. To me, that describes "best picture" winner Gravity.

The rest of that review is him telling us point-by-point what the film is. Then says it's not very good because of the things it isn't. Where are the Nazis? Where is the back story? Where are all the things that there aren't?

I don't get it.

Just for fun I looked up what he had to say on 13 Hours, the most absurdly patriotic movie I'd seen in recent years.

And while he didn't review it, he calls it "resolutely apolitical" and then tells us this one is full of bombast patriotism.

Nice one bruv.
 
After sleeping on it, I think my biggest issue with the movie by far isn't the movie itself but the godawful dialog volume. I should not have to use subtitles to understand peaceful conversations in a movie theater if I don't have hearing issues :/

Same issue with TDKR and Interstellar. What's going on?
 

jtb

Banned
Like that reviewer my fear going in was that it was an event movie like Gravity. That had to be watched in two specific formats for the true experience: IMAX 3D. This movie has a lot more going for it than Gravity in terms of stuff under the surface so I can't agree that it'll be "nothing at all" outside of the big screen. To me, that describes "best picture" winner Gravity.

The rest of that review is him telling us point-by-point what the film is. Then says it's not very good because of the things it isn't. Where are the Nazis? Where is the back story? Where are all the things that there aren't?

I don't get it.

Just for fun I looked up what he had to say on 13 Hours, the most absurdly patriotic movie I'd seen in recent years.

And while he didn't review it, he calls it "resolutely apolitical" and then tells us this one is full of bombast patriotism.

Nice one bruv.

13 Hours isn't patriotic. It's jingoistic nonsense.

Brody's argument is that 13 hours isn't 'about' anything, while Dunkirk is about the cultural British identity (as opposed to WW2, the actual events at Dunkirk, etc. etc.)

You disagree?
 
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