Dunkirk (film): It's good, but I think gets more praise than it deserves

World War 2 films are some of my favorite in existence. This has a lot to do with how when I was a kid I was fascinated with making WW2 model airplanes which adorned my ceiling - I spend weeks on some of these things getting very precise with the detailing. I feel as though it was a pretty healthy hobby and I learned a lot. I have seen most of the WW2 movies, even the bad ones or low-budget ones.

I'm not saying that Dunkirk is bad, but I also don't think it deserves the 93% Rotten Tomatoes rating, or the fact that most professional reviewers gave the movie... and I have my reasons.

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The movie is kept tense and the action moves along as you would expect from a Christopher Nolan film, who wrote, directed, and produced the film. However, it downplays the historical significance of this event and makes it seem a great deal smaller than it actually was.

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For one thing, we are only shown a small amount of the ships that were involved in the evacuation of Dunkirk, which numbered near 1000. Instead we are shown a couple dozen vessels and while I realize it would be impractical to have hundreds of ships actually in the scene, this is exactly what CGI is for and Nolan is no stranger to this notion.

We are also treated to the might of the R.A.F. and all 3 of the planes they had involved in the evacuation of Dunkirk when in reality there were over 3,000 aerial missions to the area. The German Air Force is also very light on air power, as their combined force is 6 planes or so.

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We are also given almost no background as to how it is that hundreds of thousands of English soldiers ended up in this position to begin with, nor are we given any cinematic interaction with the Nazi invaders. For people like me that are already familiar with what happened here this is fine, but for someone with less background in WW2 knowledge this kind of comes across as "what the heck is going on?"

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Also, in an effort, presumably, to pursue a PG-13 rating, Nolan made the battle sequences comically bloodless. When bombs hit the beach it almost doesn't even seem that terrible - just something that makes soldiers perform involuntary, bloodless acrobatics. There is no "war is hell" feeling in this film at all. For me, I much preferred the extremely graphic and likely more realistic depiction of warfare that we are treated to in the legendary opening sequences of Saving Private Ryan.

According to Christopher Nolan, this wasn't meant to be a "war story" it is supposed to be a "survival story." Since these comments were made after the film had already been released and he received criticism similar to what I am saying now, I think this was more of an excuse than anything else.

_{from the official Warner Brothers channel}

This movie has been around since 2017 and of course, made a ton of money in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It was only recently added to the Asian Netflix library but has been available in other markets since January of 2020. I'm not suggesting that you don't see it because even though I personally am a bit unimpressed it is still much better than 90% of other films. I was just a bit disappointed in the scale and lack of historical accuracy.

My overall rating! 7 / 10

What did you think?