Anyone planning to see the movie "Dunkirk"?

[daveinprague]

http://www.distractify.com/entertai...2&tse_id=INF_675394c0739d11e784dd0bde21677fc8

 

[studio150]

I think some people are viewing this movie with the wrong expectations. This is a movie about being there, putting you in the position of being there, the fear and tension that you would feel..

In which case I still think the film was disappointing and for me failed to achieve this. With the focus being on a queue jumper I never really got any sense of being on the beach and the frustration and fear when having stood for hours waiting to be told no more boats today. No real anxiety was brought into the film by the increasing sound of the advancing Germans just a vague reference to the silent tanks due to the better use of aircraft.

However people always see films differently and there are many blockbusters that I just don't get.

 

[GOM]

http://www.distractify.com/entertai...2&tse_id=INF_675394c0739d11e784dd0bde21677fc8

Good interview

 

[curly69]

Learn some grammar.

Sorry got the d word that's why i never post.Can't spell the d word see what i mean.

 

[Dougie]

Me and mrs dougie saw it on Wednesday and we both were totally absorbed by it . I like war films but she doesn't so I was a bit wary about taking her but she liked it . The film just flew by but the gliding part was a bit far fetched

 

[essbee1]

Sorry got the d word that's why i never post.Can't spell the d word see what i mean.

Happy to make critical baseless observations though aren't we? See what I mean.

 

[Lady Whistledown]

I thought I was going to love it, and it started out well. After that, I found it a bit confusing to be honest.

It wasn't what I was expecting. Rightly or wrongly, I think I'd anticipated some sort of impressive armada of boats coming across (yes, I get that this would have required a lot of CGI), when it looked like there was only about twelve.

 

[SIMMO SAYS]

Me and mrs dougie

 

[sussex_guy2k2]

Saw it today. It's the first Chris Nolan film I haven't thoroughly enjoyed. In fact, I'd go as far as to say it's one of the most disappointing cinema experiences I've had in a long time - it lacked clarity of story telling, heart, and depth of character. They're three pretty crucial things in a film.

 

[JC Footy Genius]

Me and mrs dougie

?

 

[jakarta]

1958 version with John Mills and Dickie Attenborough just started on ITV4 just in case you want to make a comparison...

 

[whitelion]

1958 version with John Mills and Dickie Attenborough just started on ITV4 just in case you want to make a comparison...

Was just about to post the same.

Just discovered it on - missed first 50 minutes so hopefully I can get it on catch up.

 

[jakarta]

Thought it was actually grittier and more realistic than the 2017, certainly gave you a better feel of what the BEF had to go through before the evacuation. But obviously not as noisy or in IMAX so clearly can't be as good...

 

[Brightonfan1983]

I heard a critic say last week that what sets Nolan apart from most directors is that he assumes the audience are intelligent enough to not need spoon feeding the plot.

Nice try, but who's not up for a bit of clever story-telling? Using 3 timelines for Dunkirk was a clever way of telling that story; Inception has dreams within dreams within dreams; Memento was backwards; Insomnia was always in daylight. That's not the issue for me - it's me not being allowed to *care* about the characters. His films have become more and more about how 'cleverly' they're told - and this guy from the Guardian puts it better than I ever could...

https://www.theguardian.com/film/fi...-empty-christopher-nolan-dunkirk-left-me-cold

"Is it just me? Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk has bowled over critics and taken $100m (£77m) at the global box office in barely a week, but it left me cold.

The subject sounds enticing: the legend of Dunkirk tells of an array of unprepared civilians assembling an armada of fishing boats, pleasure craft, yachts, motor launches, paddle steamers, barges and lifeboats to rescue an army from a battle-swept beach. What might cinema reveal of the logistical skills, resourcefulness, courage, doubts, arguments and fears of the citizenry involved?

Yet 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 travails such a figure might have endured were apparently not dramatic enough. Instead, Rylance’s character is subjected to a bizarre set of events garnished with grating sentimentality.

For it is not the dynamics of the people’s armada that interest Nolan. He is more concerned with what is happening on and above Dunkirk’s beaches. What’s mainly happening, however, is that lots of soldiers are waiting around. Escapades, not altogether convincing, are therefore contrived for a few of them. Some bombs fall, some ships are sunk. Commanders mutter briefly but sagely to each other. In the skies, fighter pilots conduct what seems like an endlessly repeated dogfight. One plane runs out of fuel, although not as quickly as audiences might have hoped. And that’s sort of it.

Film-makers usually instil interest in their protagonists by giving them backstories and meaningful dialogue, thereby creating characters who can be engaged in drama. In Dunkirk, these things don’t happen.

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. We don’t even get the customary three sentences of text at the end, explaining the outcome. This is deliberate: Nolan has said he didn’t want to get “bogged down” in politics.

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.

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. The evacuees also included female civilians, including girls, caught up in the turmoil.

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?

Well, Dunkirk isn’t actually a war film at all – Nolan tells us so. That is why it doesn’t concern itself with “the bloody aspects of combat”. Instead, it is “a survival story, and first and foremost a suspense film”, according to the director.

A survival story, like Gravity, perhaps? But Dunkirk’s soldiers are denied the means of effecting their own survival, and it is in this that their pathos resides. Their unheroic fate is to mill around on a beach and get ferried home by non-combatants. Signaller Alfred Baldwin, who was at Dunkirk in 1940, recalled: “You had the impression of people standing waiting for a bus. There was no pushing or shoving.”

Or is it a suspense film, like Rear Window? We all know the outcome of the event, and know that nothing terribly bad was ever going to happen to Harry Styles, Captain Rylance or our plucky pilots. Even Hans Zimmer’s manipulative score can’t make that brick out of this straw.

But at least I now understand why I didn’t get it: there was nothing to get. Nolan trades on a mystique fuelled by affectations such as mangled timeframes and Imax cameras. In the film, the complications of chronology seem silly, and the naturalistic environment exposes this. I trekked to Leicester Square in London to get the full benefit of the 70mm picture, but I didn’t notice any. Indeed, I thought the subject would have been better suited to the cold, TV-news glare of digital than the lushness of film.

Still, Warner Brothers and the world seem happy to indulge Nolan. Good luck to him, not that he seems to need it."

 

[LA1972]

Thought it was actually grittier and more realistic than the 2017, certainly gave you a better feel of what the BEF had to go through before the evacuation. But obviously not as noisy or in IMAX so clearly can't be as good...

I watched both Dunkirk films this weekend. I liked the old one better

 

[Easy 10]

Saw this yesterday and on the whole I enjoyed it. The action scenes were well shot, convincing and immersive, the score helped to ratchet up the tension, and the chaos and fear of the whole event came across well.

On the downside, I don't think it portrayed the sheer scale of Operation Dynamo at all. 340,000 troops were rescued by some 700-800 vessels crossing the Channel, and yet no more than about a dozen boats were ever on screen at once, which made it look a bit two-bob. The RAF flew over 3,500 sorties in support of OD, yet all we saw ever saw was the 3 Spitfires, so again, simply no sense of the scale of the battles in the skies overhead with the Luftwaffe. I gather there was a conscious decision by Nolan to eschew all CGI from the film, and whilst that's commendable to an extent, it has resulted in a $150m movie looking a bit....low budget. If used with subtlety there's no reason why some limited CGI could not have been used to better convey the scale of it.

And finally *spoiler alert*
Could Tom Hardy's Spitfire really continue "gliding" for what seemed about 20-odd minutes on no fuel AND take out another enemy aircraft at the same time ? Would the hydraulics have even enabled any manoeuvring with no engine power ?? That seemed a bit silly.

But overall, twas good. I'd give it 74%.

 

[Weststander]

We finally got round to watching this today.

It's fairly unique in style and it took some time to get used to the flitting back and forth in time. It's certainly not for those looking for unabated happiness!

But IMO this is a fantastic movie. Contains some goosebumps scenes, such as the first time three Spitfires appear and the finale of the famous Churchill speech against a backdrop of Elgar's Nimrod Variation. Great cinematography of dogfights.

Most people in the cinema sat quietly for ages after it had finished, something Mark Kermode just mentioned on his BBCNews film review.

If you haven't watched it yet, see it soon whilst it's still available on the big screen.

 

[Hugo Rune]

We finally got round to watching this today.

Most people in the cinema sat quietly for ages after it had finished, something Mark Kermode just mentioned on his BBCNews film review.

Me too!

Very difficult to watch but beautifully made and put's your life firmly into perspective.

We were last out.

 

[Brighton Mod]

Nice try, but who's not up for a bit of clever story-telling? Using 3 timelines for Dunkirk was a clever way of telling that story; Inception has dreams within dreams within dreams; Memento was backwards; Insomnia was always in daylight. That's not the issue for me - it's me not being allowed to *care* about the characters. His films have become more and more about how 'cleverly' they're told - and this guy from the Guardian puts it better than I ever could...

https://www.theguardian.com/film/fi...-empty-christopher-nolan-dunkirk-left-me-cold

"Is it just me? Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk has bowled over critics and taken $100m (£77m) at the global box office in barely a week, but it left me cold.

The subject sounds enticing: the legend of Dunkirk tells of an array of unprepared civilians assembling an armada of fishing boats, pleasure craft, yachts, motor launches, paddle steamers, barges and lifeboats to rescue an army from a battle-swept beach. What might cinema reveal of the logistical skills, resourcefulness, courage, doubts, arguments and fears of the citizenry involved?

Yet 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 travails such a figure might have endured were apparently not dramatic enough. Instead, Rylance’s character is subjected to a bizarre set of events garnished with grating sentimentality.

For it is not the dynamics of the people’s armada that interest Nolan. He is more concerned with what is happening on and above Dunkirk’s beaches. What’s mainly happening, however, is that lots of soldiers are waiting around. Escapades, not altogether convincing, are therefore contrived for a few of them. Some bombs fall, some ships are sunk. Commanders mutter briefly but sagely to each other. In the skies, fighter pilots conduct what seems like an endlessly repeated dogfight. One plane runs out of fuel, although not as quickly as audiences might have hoped. And that’s sort of it.

Film-makers usually instil interest in their protagonists by giving them backstories and meaningful dialogue, thereby creating characters who can be engaged in drama. In Dunkirk, these things don’t happen.

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. We don’t even get the customary three sentences of text at the end, explaining the outcome. This is deliberate: Nolan has said he didn’t want to get “bogged down” in politics.

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.

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. The evacuees also included female civilians, including girls, caught up in the turmoil.

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?

Well, Dunkirk isn’t actually a war film at all – Nolan tells us so. That is why it doesn’t concern itself with “the bloody aspects of combat”. Instead, it is “a survival story, and first and foremost a suspense film”, according to the director.

A survival story, like Gravity, perhaps? But Dunkirk’s soldiers are denied the means of effecting their own survival, and it is in this that their pathos resides. Their unheroic fate is to mill around on a beach and get ferried home by non-combatants. Signaller Alfred Baldwin, who was at Dunkirk in 1940, recalled: “You had the impression of people standing waiting for a bus. There was no pushing or shoving.”

Or is it a suspense film, like Rear Window? We all know the outcome of the event, and know that nothing terribly bad was ever going to happen to Harry Styles, Captain Rylance or our plucky pilots. Even Hans Zimmer’s manipulative score can’t make that brick out of this straw.

But at least I now understand why I didn’t get it: there was nothing to get. Nolan trades on a mystique fuelled by affectations such as mangled timeframes and Imax cameras. In the film, the complications of chronology seem silly, and the naturalistic environment exposes this. I trekked to Leicester Square in London to get the full benefit of the 70mm picture, but I didn’t notice any. Indeed, I thought the subject would have been better suited to the cold, TV-news glare of digital than the lushness of film.

Still, Warner Brothers and the world seem happy to indulge Nolan. Good luck to him, not that he seems to need it."

Well, I've read the post and forgive me if I am unable to recount some of the points that are highlighted. Having seen the film last week I would like to point out that it was a film and not a history lesson. Despite the infinite detail that is apparently craved the story personified for me the struggles which beset young British soldiers and showed me certain aspects of how it would have been in Dunkirk. Has the author of the article ever been to war, struggled to out of a location other than missing a bus and ever had to make decisions on his personal survival. Has the author considered how the film has brought the attention of a middle generation to what actually happened. Three of my daughters asked what Dunkirk was about, where was it and why was it so important. We,ve all seen it and their understanding on the subject has been awakened and their awareness of events in general has been heightened. So the aspects of the film and the storylines it followed resonate with me as it unwound on the screen and I suspect the Guardian Film Critic had never considered these minor but very important facets of the film, because he's never been to war.

1. The opening of the film follows a section of young random British soldiers from various Battalions making their way through Dunkirk and
highlights their hunger and thirst as they raided kitchens in empty houses.
2. Confusion on the streets of the evacuated Dunkirk as these soldiers came under fire from French troops manning a road block.
3. As some of the section were hit by French fire it became every man for himself.
4. Arrival on the beach of one young detached British soldier showed how he was disowned by different Battalions and Regiments as he was
not one of them.
5. Overseas soldiers were seen as not welcome on the evacuating ships, the RAF were portrayed as having let the Army down, in the eyes of
the Army.
6. The RAF pilots were depicted as young men, which a great majority were, middle aged John Mills or kenneth Moore playing the roles of
teenagers and young twenty year olds.
7. Fear panic was evident, turning on a weaker member of the group and making irrational decisions, great signs of massive stress.
8. The civilian boat captain portrayed as a man of the time who knew a lot about the planes in the sky had lost his own son early in the war,
had a real connection with those he was rescuing. His actions at the end of the film demonstrate why he acted as he did and what it meant
to him.
9. There was no easy escape from the beaches, time and time again young soldiers were thwarted in their attempts to escapethe horrors.
10. Tiredness, hunger, ptsd, confusion and personal tragedy were all highlighted.

Sorry to disagree with the film critic, stay in your make believe world inside a cinema, try going to war, be held against your will, be hungry, tired, thirsty and stop criticing for the sake of it. I have personal experience of many of the emotions displayed within the film, all but in a micro scale and a personal connection with Dunkirk.

It is a good film and highlights the age of those who were involved. No story line, no star and no explanation needed, this film has brought the events of Dunkirk back to the consciousness of a new generation.

 

[Weststander]

Nice try, but who's not up for a bit of clever story-telling? Using 3 timelines for Dunkirk was a clever way of telling that story; Inception has dreams within dreams within dreams; Memento was backwards; Insomnia was always in daylight. That's not the issue for me - it's me not being allowed to *care* about the characters. His films have become more and more about how 'cleverly' they're told - and this guy from the Guardian puts it better than I ever could...



Well, I've read the post and forgive me if I am unable to recount some of the points that are highlighted. Having seen the film last week I would like to point out that it was a film and not a history lesson. Despite the infinite detail that is apparently craved the story personified for me the struggles which beset young British soldiers and showed me certain aspects of how it would have been in Dunkirk. Has the author of the article ever been to war, struggled to out of a location other than missing a bus and ever had to make decisions on his personal survival. Has the author considered how the film has brought the attention of a middle generation to what actually happened. Three of my daughters asked what Dunkirk was about, where was it and why was it so important. We,ve all seen it and their understanding on the subject has been awakened and their awareness of events in general has been heightened. So the aspects of the film and the storylines it followed resonate with me as it unwound on the screen and I suspect the Guardian Film Critic had never considered these minor but very important facets of the film, because he's never been to war.

1. The opening of the film follows a section of young random British soldiers from various Battalions making their way through Dunkirk and
highlights their hunger and thirst as they raided kitchens in empty houses.
2. Confusion on the streets of the evacuated Dunkirk as these soldiers came under fire from French troops manning a road block.
3. As some of the section were hit by French fire it became every man for himself.
4. Arrival on the beach of one young detached British soldier showed how he was disowned by different Battalions and Regiments as he was
not one of them.
5. Overseas soldiers were seen as not welcome on the evacuating ships, the RAF were portrayed as having let the Army down, in the eyes of
the Army.
6. The RAF pilots were depicted as young men, which a great majority were, middle aged John Mills or kenneth Moore playing the roles of
teenagers and young twenty year olds.
7. Fear panic was evident, turning on a weaker member of the group and making irrational decisions, great signs of massive stress.
8. The civilian boat captain portrayed as a man of the time who knew a lot about the planes in the sky had lost his own son early in the war,
had a real connection with those he was rescuing. His actions at the end of the film demonstrate why he acted as he did and what it meant
to him.
9. There was no easy escape from the beaches, time and time again young soldiers were thwarted in their attempts to escapethe horrors.
10. Tiredness, hunger, ptsd, confusion and personal tragedy were all highlighted.

Sorry to disagree with the film critic, stay in your make believe world inside a cinema, try going to war, be held against your will, be hungry, tired, thirsty and stop criticing for the sake of it. I have personal experience of many of the emotions displayed within the film, all but in a micro scale and a personal connection with Dunkirk.

It is a good film and highlights the age of those who were involved. No story line, no star and no explanation needed, this film has brought the events of Dunkirk back to the consciousness of a new generation.

This.

The film critic's views are just their's.

I watched Dunkirk with a mix of age groups today, none of which had ever previously shown the slightest of interest in WW2 or in war films. They all came out saying what a stunning, memorable movie and chatted about it long afterwards. So glad that we got round to watching it on the big screen.