Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk.

[buzby]

Saw it tonight, in glorious 70mm IMAX at the Printworks (slightly spoiled by what appeared to be the shadow of a fly walking round the projection room window for the first half of the film).

Really enjoyed it, the method of telling the story from 3 viewpoints (land, sea and air) over 3 time periods  that all climax at the same point was very well done, tied together by a ticking motif in Zimmer's score (and somewhat reminiscent of the dream layers and the use of Je Ne Regret Rein in Inception). It is a visual spectacle though, especially in a full size IMAX screen with a sound system that shakes your seat (and guts) on each bomb and shell explosion.

The film conveys brilliantly the tension and terror of the troops waiting to be evacuated, under attack from all sides (even getting on an evacuation ship is no guarantee of safety) from an unseen enemy and the the bravery of the civilian boat crews who sailed into a battle zone as there was no other option to get the troops out. The scale of the action sequences is breathtaking, with ships being sunk and dogfights using real WW2-era aircraft (most of which are veterans of the Battle Of Britain film). The there are some excellent performances (as you may expect given the strength of the cast) but the young unknowns (and even Harry Styles) all acquit  themselves admirably.

4 tins of bully beef and a mug of tea (and try and see it on the biggest screen with the best sound system  possible)

[Repeater]

Dunkirk? Dun no bad tbh if ye ask me honestly

[touchingcloth]

Well, that was relentless. I don't think I can recall a war film that has been so full of tension and confusion from start to finish, and as such it was a brilliant evocation of what it must have been like to be there in the thick of it, though of course not even close to the full reality. I commented when coming out of the cinema that it was "like Gravity, but real and not shit", and I think that was a fairly accurate summation - just nonstop hopping from one horror to the next.

The score was great. I thought I could hear the opening chord from Nimrod quite early on in the film, so it was nice when it properly kicked in when the flotilla first arrived on the scene.

One thing that confused me slightly - and I don't know if it was just my ignorance - was that the "The Mole" caption appeared on screen before it was explained that the mole in question was part of the pier. Until Brannagh clarified things, I spent a few minutes trying to work out who Tommy was spying for.

Also, where does the week timeline of The Mole story begin and end? What we see on screen feels like two days, tops.

[Wet Blanket]

Thought it was great. Never bothered with IMAX before but this really was fantastic in that format. You do emerge feeling battered and bruised.

I did find the chopped around timeline confusing at times, and it was also sometimes difficult to tell the young soldiers in the 'beach' segments apart*. There was a scene where soldiers in the water were rebuffed by the crew of a lifeboat, and the captain looked just like Cillian Murphy, but I don't think it was him. Or was it? It seemed to act as a flashback but I'm not sure it was. There were a couple of moments like that.

Thought Harry Styles was a bit ropey, but not embarrassingly so.



Spoiler SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER







*Was it the French guy who got burnt up in the oil fire at the end?

[MoonDust]

SPOILERS FURTHER DOWN THIS POST.


Saw it on Saturday. Hadn't pre-booked so the next two showings after we arrived only had seats available at the very front, so, not wanting to break my neck, waited for the later showing. The foyer was packed with old folks for the earlier viewings.

Anyway, loved it. Fantastic piece of cinema. Was gripped from start to end. Even noticed my shoulder and neck started to hurt as I was physically tensing up watching it.

Spoiler ALERT! Spoiler ALERT! THAT BLACK OUT THING DOESN'T WORK ANYMORE. Spoiler ALERT!





I was confused at the end though as to why Tom Hardy decided not to bail from his Spitfire and instead chose to land and get captured. Maybe he was too low to bail out so his parachute would have been useless? Maybe they'll make a sequel about what happened to him after being captured called "Saving Private Hardy" which will cause all manner of innuendous porno titles, more so than "Saving Private Ryan".

[touchingcloth]

Spoiler Spoiler Spoiler Spoiler Spoiler







*Was it the French guy who got burnt up in the oil fire at the end?

I thought it was the nasty piece of work who was trying to get other people to risk their lives when they were on crowded inside that beached ship. That would be the audience-pleasing way to do it at least. Was that actor the same one who played the leader of one of the gangs that invaded the Millennium Falcon in The Force Awakens?

I was confused at the end though as to why Tom Hardy decided not to bail from his Spitfire and instead chose to land and get captured. Maybe he was too low to bail out so his parachute would have been useless? Maybe they'll make a sequel about what happened to him after being captured called "Saving Private Hardy" which will cause all manner of innuendous porno titles, more so than "Saving Private Ryan".

I think he was too low to parachute after using the last of his gliding abilities to take down some more Luftwaffe, and probably chose landing and being captured as less risky than attempting to ditch.

[MoonDust]

I think he was too low to parachute after using the last of his gliding abilities to take down some more Luftwaffe, and probably chose landing and being captured as less risky than attempting to ditch.

Yeah that makes sense.

It was also bugging me throughout the whole film where I'd seen that blonde pilot before. I only realised later he played some posh cavalry man in the BBC adaptation of War & Peace.

[touchingcloth]

SPOILERS






One thing that really confused me was that I was convinced there were three separate Spitfires going into the water - the leader who disappeared during the first dog fight and whose tail we saw bobbing after the others circled round, the guy who ran out of fuel then ditched, then the guy who ran out of fuel, ditched and had to be smashed out of his cockpit. What confused me is that I was convinced the first ditcher had got out and stood on the nose of his plane before giving Tom Hardy a wave, so I had to torrent a cam version to work it out, and what I thought was someone standing on the nose was really just a propellor blade. Humph.

[surreal]

A lot of the confusion comes from the 3 time splits - the beach is over a week, the sea a day and the air an hour.  The three come together at times but you don't always make the connection


SPOILERS FOR QUESTIONS ASKED ABOVE

Blond pilot was the one who ditched flat and couldn't get the lid open.  Cillian Murphy is indeed seen earlier before his ship gets hit

END SPOILERS


Thought it was a great piece of work, but it is unforgiving and there is no humour at all.  Something like Saving Private Ryan has at least some "bonding" conversations to establish character and give an escape valve but this is relentlessly bleak.  It does however make sense of the lines later on where they are worrying about being seen as cowards I think, as my mate said he didn't like it as he felt it was almost portraying them as such, but if you look at it from a realism point of view what the hell would you do?

Anyone know if the story of the 17 year old which ended up in the paper was true?

[MoonDust]

Thought it was a great piece of work, but it is unforgiving and there is no humour at all.  Something like Saving Private Ryan has at least some "bonding" conversations to establish character and give an escape valve but this is relentlessly bleak.  It does however make sense of the lines later on where they are worrying about being seen as cowards I think, as my mate said he didn't like it as he felt it was almost portraying them as such, but if you look at it from a realism point of view what the hell would you do?

I agree. I felt characterisation wasn't important. It was a film about Dunkirk, not about people who were at Dunkirk. I think the portrayal of the British was fair as well. Like you said, what the hell would you do in that situation? And from what I've read about Dunkirk it was pretty realistic. Most soldiers on the beach assumed they were done for, and didn't think deliverance was possible. At that point you're most likely just going to give up and wait rather than have fighting spirit.

I get the sense from some of characters in the film, particularly the navy officers on the pier, that people at Dunkirk assumed that was the end for Britain in the war. And the next thing to come was an inevitable surrender and either a peace treaty with Germany or get invaded by them.

Scarily enough that would almost certainly have happened if the rescue attempt failed as well. Also if Goerring hadn't convinced Hitler to halt the tanks outside Dunkirk, they'd have had German troops and tanks, as well as the Luftwaffe, descending on the beach. If that happened we'd have lost the war for sure. Most of our army was on that beach, and we'd have had no time to rebuild it before Hitler seized on the opportunity to either invade Britain or force us to surrender.

[touchingcloth]

Anyone know if the story of the 17 year old which ended up in the paper was true?

I think none of the events that happen to the individual characters are true. Wiki says:

It was written with a precise mathematical structure, requiring the basis of the characters to be fictional rather than taken from actual eyewitnesses.

Which I think is a fancy way of saying "we made it up".

[Bleeding Kansas]

SPOILERS

Spoiler Spoiler Spoiler Spoiler Spoiler

*Was it the French guy who got burnt up in the oil fire at the end?

I though he awoke from under the blankets on the Mole at the end of the film and then got a ride with the officers. However, according to Wikipedia, he got tangled in the some chains and drowned when the Dutch ship sank.

Wikipedia also confirmed it was Michael Caine speaking to the pilots on the radio which I suspected.

and the captain looked just like Cillian Murphy, but I don't think it was him. Or was it?

I thought that but then he's found on the wreck of a big metal boat.

Man, non-linear Films are confusing.

[Wet Blanket]

SPOILERS





I though he awoke from under the blankets on the Mole at the end of the film and then got a ride with the officers. However, according to Wikipedia, he got tangled in the some chains and drowned when the Dutch ship sank.

Wikipedia also confirmed it was Michael Caine speaking to the pilots on the radio which I suspected.

I thought that but then he's found on the wreck of a big metal boat.

Man, non-linear Films are confusing.

Yeah I wasn't sure if it was him on the Mole at the end either.

I didn't realise Murphy was on the wreck of a boat, I thought it was the nose of a plane. D'oh!

Because it's three different time periods all cut together it wasn't clear that this was specifically a flashback. It was the main kid being refused from the lifeboat anyway wasn't it? There wasn't really any sense of it being a week's load of action for the people on the beach compared to a single hour's dogfight in the sky either.

[MojoJojo]

Scarily enough that would almost certainly have happened if the rescue attempt failed as well. Also if Goerring hadn't convinced Hitler to halt the tanks outside Dunkirk, they'd have had German troops and tanks, as well as the Luftwaffe, descending on the beach. If that happened we'd have lost the war for sure. Most of our army was on that beach, and we'd have had no time to rebuild it before Hitler seized on the opportunity to either invade Britain or force us to surrender.

Nah. The biggest obstacle to invading Britain was the Royal Navy.

[buzby]

SPOILERS


However, according to Wikipedia, he got tangled in the some chains and drowned when the Dutch ship sank.

Yes, he and Tommy have to swim to the ladder at the hatch as the ship is filling with water. Tommy just makes it but the French boy ('Gibson') becomes entangled in the wreckage and is unable to free himself. Some filmmakers would probably have had Alex drown instead in that scene, as he was the one being a bastard and trying to get Gibson off the boat.

I thought that but then he's found on the wreck of a big metal boat.

Man, non-linear Films are confusing.

Yes, Murphy says he was on a tanker that had been torpedoed mid-Channel.

Nah. The biggest obstacle to invading Britain was the Royal Navy.

Branagh's Commander Bolton explains this to D'Arcy's Colonel Winnant on The Mole - he says most of the Navy's warships are being kept back home in preparation to defend against the expected invasion

[MoonDust]

Nah. The biggest obstacle to invading Britain was the Royal Navy.

True, I think that's why Germany hoped for a peace treaty of some sorts instead.

In fact before we declared war, Hitler fully expected Britain to join his side, as he knew the British Empire were as against the Soviet Union and communism as Hitler was, so he took a gamble with invading Poland, believing that once Poland was conquered he'd declare war on Russia and Britain would ally itself with Germany in the fight against the USSR and communism.

Didn't quite go to plan, though, of course.

[asids]

Just back from seeing this. Pretty good. I echo the sentiments that the whole film is really bleak and doesn't let up - the sound of those bombs coming down are rather chilling. It's certainly a film that likes to portray the hells of war to the full extent.

With that being said, I found the non-linear structure of the film a bit too confusing. I'm sure there's no way there could have been a week between the initial events on the beach and Rylance's boat coming in/the dogfights in the air. It just doesn't really click up naturally like it should. There wasn't much character building, but I guess that was the point - it's just faceless soldiers trying their best to survive the unsurvivable.

All in all, it's a very good film but it still feels like it's missing something that stops it from being truly great. I'm not quite sure what.

[Custard]

Heath Ledger's Joker?

Least it had Scarecrow and Bane. Hardy was even actually dressed as Bane

[AnthonyJ]

If you see in a Dorset cinema then you get the added bonus of the audience shifting in their seats and commenting on the appearance of the Weymouth Pavilion (Opened 1958) and the Jurassic Skyline tower (2012) during one of Mark Rylance's scenes.

[buzby]

If you see in a Dorset cinema then you get the added bonus of the audience shifting in their seats and commenting on the appearance of the Weymouth Pavilion (Opened 1958) and the Jurassic Skyline tower (2012) during one of Mark Rylance's scenes.

Similarly, when the troops are sat on the dunes at the edge of the beach, the 1970s container cranes of the Port Of Dunkirk are visible behind them.

Nolan apparently chose not to digitally alter the shots to remove modern background anachronisms like these.

[touchingcloth]

Spoilers

With that being said, I found the non-linear structure of the film a bit too confusing. I'm sure there's no way there could have been a week between the initial events on the beach and Rylance's boat coming in/the dogfights in the air.

The beach/mole segment really didn't feel like it covered a week - isn't there only a single nighttime depicted on screen? I didn't actually twig that the narrative was nonlinear until that nighttime torpedoing scene when it became obvious that the Moonstone must have set off the day after what we see on the beach. Could have done with more anchoring points really, like having "40 gallons left" repeated to show that the time depicted had jumped, or some distinguishing features to show that planes we see crashing and boats we see sank multiple times are one and the same - drab gray ships on dark water all tend to look pretty much the same. Actually, now I think about it I think that might be what they were doing when they referred to one of the ships specifically as a minesweeper on a couple of different occasions.

[lipsink]

Thought this was a bit shit to be honest. Was expecting more on the beach. Maybe just them like sitting ducks on the beach being attacked with unbearable tension but things seemed to just move along quite quickly.

SLIGHT Spoiler BELOW



See when the two soldiers carried the injured guy on the stretcher at the start. Were they just doing that to sneak on to the boat or where they genuinely trying to help him?

[MoonDust]

Thought this was a bit shit to be honest. Was expecting more on the beach. Maybe just them like sitting ducks on the beach being attacked with unbearable tension but things seemed to just move along quite quickly.

Perhaps, but given the lack of character-driven plot, and merely showing it how it was, I suppose they only needed to show relentless bombing on the beach once or twice. There'd be no need to keep showing bombing over and over again as it'd just get repetitive and boring.

I think the first time the Stukkas bomb the beach and then again on the mole was enough to show they were sitting ducks.

[touchingcloth]

A review in the Guardian's film blog is very cutting about this film, calling it bloodless, boring and empty:

Nolan's film chooses to ignore tales such as that of the Medway Queen, a paddle steamer that brought home 7,000 troops in seven round trips and shot down three German planes, or the Royal Daffodil, which returned 9,500 soldiers after blocking a hole below the waterline with a mattress. Instead, we encounter just one boat, skippered by a saintly Mark Rylance, comically attired in his Sunday best.
...
The film also denies filmgoers any context. We're told little about how the army has come to be beached or the threat it faces. We never see a German soldier, let alone the generals and politicians of either side who are masterminding events.
...
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.

Good points, especially about the unnecessary shunning of CGI leading to the scale being all out of whack, but I thin they're approaching it a bit too much from the historical realism perspective, when to me it felt more like a film that was trying to evoke the atmosphere on land, in the sea and in the skies than it was about giving a blow-by-blow account of the evacuation.

I don't agree with his points that the lack of gore somehow made the film a sanitised version of history, and I don't think the film would have benefitted much at all for showing limbs and intestines flying all over the place. Saving Private Ryan had much more in the way of on-screen blood and guts, yet Dunkirk was far, far more of an intense experience than any part of that film. You end up properly rooting for the lads to get the fuck off the beach, and that feeling never really lets up.

Speaking of the lads, one interesting piece from that review is this bit:

Women are excluded from the action by being confined to stereotypical roles, such as providing tea for the homecoming menfolk. In real life, female Auxiliary Territorial Service telephonists – who received two-thirds of a male soldier's pay – were some of the last military personnel to leave the beach.

That's a story I would quite like to know more about, so it's a bit of a shame that more of that sort of thing wasn't included in the film.

[Bad Ambassador]

A review in the Guardian's film blog is very cutting about this film, calling it bloodless, boring and empty:

And he appears to know nothing about which he speaks. His chief complaint is that it doesn't match the film he has in his head, and as the comments rightly point out, the article is basically clickbait contrarianism.

[Custard]

Anyone who thinks this film is boring needs shooting. Or doesn't understand the meaning of the word

But still needs shooting

[Bad Ambassador]

I had a look at Rotten Tomatoes' negative reviews, and most of them were people with blogs and Armond White, but Leonard Maltin was also in there.

Dunkirk may be the most understated World War Two movie ever made. That doesn't mean it's anemic in depicting the horror of combat; quite the contrary. But in his effort to avoid the clichés and rah-rah patriotism of war movies past, writer-director Christopher Nolan has swung his pendulum to the other extreme. Dunkirk is based on one of the most remarkable episodes of the 20th century, when thousands of soldiers were evacuated from the French coastline by a flotilla of small sailing vessels. Nolan has chosen to tell this saga through a series of parallel incidents, focusing on individuals and downplaying the Big Picture. What's missing, for me, is that macro-view of this extraordinary event.

I didn't expect a conventional history lesson from Nolan, but given the enormity of the Dunkirk story I did anticipate at least an overview, not just a series of vignettes. What little exposition we get is voiced by Kenneth Branagh, as a Naval officer, but having him say how close they are to "home," across the English Channel, isn't the same as seeing it for ourselves—any more than having him sum up the operation at its conclusion is a worthy substitute for witnessing it first-hand.

There are no shortcomings in the visual presentation, which I saw on a giant IMAX screen. Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hotema shot their epic tale on 65mm film and provide a vivid experience for the viewer, capturing the perspective of a desperate soldier on the ground, a determined pilot in the air, and an amateur navigator who is piloting his boat toward Dunkirk.

As Nolan revealed in Interstellar, he doesn't care if some of his actors' dialogue is unintelligible, and he's up to his old tricks again. Spitfire pilot Tom Hardy may be speaking English into his face mask-radio but he was easier to understand as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.

Nolan is a skillful filmmaker, to be sure, but he remains cold and humorless. His actors, led by Branagh, Hardy, newcomer Fionn Whitehead, James D'Arcy, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy, and pop star Harry Styles, bring much-needed humanity to their roles, emphasizing the terrible toll that war exacts on men of all stripes. But I left Dunkirk feeling vaguely dissatisfied, with too many unanswered questions. If that means I'm swimming against the tide, so be it.

His only criticism, again, is that it isn't the film he has in his head. Otherwise, he actually pretty positive about it.

[touchingcloth]

Is it silly-ann, or killy-ann?

[Bad Ambassador]

Killian. I remember this because I read he was teased at school with the wrong pronunciation as "silly 'un", which is of course as untrue as anyone who saw TRON Legacy will attest.

[MoonDust]

Yeah Killian. His name is the Irish spelling, and so "C" is pronounced like "K", like with Ciarán being Kieran/Kieron etc in the anglicised version.