It was so bad.
And it’s a tragedy because it should have been great.
3 to 400,000 French and English troops caught between the sea and the Juggernaut of the German army.
They were rescued not by battleships, which couldn’t get to them but by small, private fishing and pleasure craft, piloted across the English Channel by civilians.
This is an epic tale of human courage and perseverance; audacity in the face of overwhelming force!
The movie is an incoherent mishmash of nameless characters doing nothing much. It’s as if the producer and director had no idea how to tell this story but started filming anyway, hoping something would come to them.
It didn’t.
400,000 troops on the beach? We never saw more than what looked like maybe 1000, lined up like schoolboys waiting to get on the bus. Even the shots of the RAF fighter coasting over the beach never gave us a look at what should have been an enormous, teeming mass of soldiers. Instead, we spent what felt like most of the movie trapped in the belly of a beached trawler with about a dozen anonymous soldiers as they went Lord of the Flies over whether or not the boat would float once the tide came in.
Who cares?
What about the other 399,988 guys trapped on the beach, getting strafed by Luftwaffe and picked off by German snipers?!
I’m a fan of Kenneth Branagh. I can just imagine how his agent pitched this role to him:
“Take it, Ken! It’ll be the easiest money you’ve ever made. They just need you to wear a navy hat, stand on a pier and gaze at the horizon. You’ll be done in time for tea!”
Cillian Murphy is actually billed as ‘shivering soldier’. He might have had four lines, totaling less than a hundred words. What a waste.
Adding to the confusion was the fact that scenes jumped, with no explanation at all, from day to night and back again, giving the impression that 18 miles across the channel is the other side of the world, or that the events we were watching took weeks.
Was there an accident in the cutting room, in which all the scenes were dumped onto the floor?
“Gee, how are we gonna get all these scenes back in order?”
“Ah, just stick ‘em together. No one will notice.”
Regarding the ‘Shivering Soldier’; we first see him in daylight, huddled on the hull of his sunken vessel, clearly in the throes of PTSD, being rescued by an old man in a sailboat. A few scenes later, there he is again, only it’s night time and he’s clearly in charge, ordering several young soldiers to await the next ship off the beach.
Oh, a flashback! Is it? Maybe. Well, wasn’t that Cillian Murphy? Was it? I don’t know. Maybe. It’s pretty dark. Isn’t it? Maybe. What’s this movie called again? I don’t know. Shut up.
If we ever saw the connecting scene in which his ship is torpedoed or bombed, it was not at all clear that that’s what we were watching.
I’d been told that people were disappointed by how the story wasn’t put in its proper context within the scope of the early years of WWII.
Why didn’t they also tell me that it was badly told, skimpily produced, stupid, boring and had the overall feeling that it had been made by first year film students who had only heard rumors that something big had happened at Dunkirk when their Grandpas were kids but didn’t have a firm enough grip on history to be able to describe it?
Nothing in the movie gives the viewer any idea of the size of the boatlift. We got no shots that conveyed an impression of hundreds of thousands of hopeless, desperate soldiers in retreat with nowhere to go. We weren’t allowed to get to know any of the characters, not even by name and we had absolutely no reason to care what happened to any of them.
Instead of dramatic scenes describing how the situation developed or how the information got to the civilians on the English side of the channel and how the decision was made to use their tiny, personal crafts to sail out and rescue the military, we got throw away lines and three ciphers in a solitary boat, seemingly guided by the gut feeling of the old guy at the helm. The old guy was the only character in the whole movie who seemed remotely like a real person, rather than a cardboard cutout with ‘shivering soldier’, ‘Admiral Bigshot’ or ‘terrified grunt’ scrawled across his chest in black marker.
His crew consisted of two cardboard cutouts marked ‘clean cut youngster’ and ‘possibly special’. The logistics of what happened, which are jaw dropping, are never touched upon.
The movie goes out of its way not to show us what happened at Dunkirk.
Think about it: Nearly 400,000 men on the beach. 18-20 miles of channel between them and home. How many men can you squeeze onto a fishing boat or a pleasure yacht? How many fishing boats and how many trips across the channel did it take to rescue 330,000 men? I have no idea. The movie gives no hint. There had to have been thousands of small water craft packed into the channel, all heading for the same place but during most of his trip across the water, ‘Old guy’s boat is alone between horizons.
Did all those other vessels take a different route from England to Dunkirk?
Near the end, we see at most, two dozen boats. I’ve seen heavier traffic on Lake Minnetonka on a random summer afternoon.
I guess I was supposed to get all choked up when ‘Possibly special’ dies in a mind bogglingly stupid accident before they get half way across the channel but afterwards, ‘Clean cut youngster’ and ‘Old guy’ lie to the press to get him written up as a hero. Yes, going to rescue soldiers at Dunkirk was heroic, no matter how one died but the movie gives the impression that ‘Possibly special’ had no idea what the hell he was doing at sea.
Mel Brooks said “tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall in a sewer and die.” He understood that to make you care about something, it has to be personal.
In the movie Dunkirk, heroism is when you fall in a sewer and die.
In fact, most of the movie is devoted to shots of guys dying in what may as well be a sewer. But we don’t know who they are, so who cares?
Not only is nothing made personal but the movie goes out of its way to obscure anything that might hint of what’s actually going on. I’m thinking in particular of the scene at the end, when the ‘Gutsy pilot’ successfully lands his out of fuel plane on the beach, then destroys it, so the Germans won’t get it? I’m assuming he was captured but the people taking him into custody are so blurry I’m not really sure if they were supposed to be Germans or just the craft service people telling him lunch is ready.
When it was over, we felt like we’d wasted 2 ½ hours of our lives. Imagine our surprise to find that it was only 1 ¾ hours long.
You can trim a lot of time by eliminating narrative and character development but I think that extra 15 minutes could have been well spent.
Considering what this movie should have been and what it actually is, Dunkirk gets a big fat, angry F.