Seconded. The lack of character development was a deliberate choice, as was the lack of exposition. These would be flaws in most movies, but they worked just fine given what Nolan was trying to do.

2001: A Space Odyssey though.

How much of the prominence of the civilian rescue was Hollywood drama and how much was based on real life? 300k stranded soldiers, right? That would take quite a few yachts carrying 20 at a time on 24 hr round trip voyages.

And the most talkative character in 2001 isn't even human.

Walter Hill's The Driver is a bit light on dialogue as well. Ryan O'Neal, as the lead, gets something like 40 lines. Or is it 40 words? And it's great.

The Driver was modelled on Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai, in which no word is spoken for the first ten minutes and it doesn't get much chattier after that. And Melville's masterpiece, L'Armee des Ombres (Army of the Shadows), about the Resistance (in which Melville himself served -- he was Alsace-Jewish, name of Grumbach, but in the Resistance he adopted the nom de guerre Melville after the author of Moby-Dick, and he kept that pseudonym in the film business) -- that's not really a soapy, soupy, talky Saving Private Ryan-type movie either.

Why does it matter what he was trying to do? A movie should stand on its own without having to understand the director.

The Little Ships went into the shallow water where the big ships couldn't go and carried the men out to the big ships.

It's the difference between criticizing his conception and criticizing his execution.

He was trying to capture the feeling of being a soldier in that situation -- the confusion, the violence, the uncertainty, the anonymity, etc., all juxtaposed against the beauty of the setting. I thought the goal was an interesting one, and that he did a good job of achieving it.

The civilian participation was real. I'm not sure how crucial it was.

The real license was in making it seem like the evacuation occurred in a matter of hours. In fact, I think it was over 8-10 days.

I'll take consensus opinion of professional movie critics over the whims of the unwashed masses.

What if his concept was stupid (not saying this one was)?

Just like any other work of art - photography, literature, painting... - it can be as technically perfect as possible but if it doesn't engage the audience it is a failure. To say, "but the artist achieved what they wanted so your criticism is invalid" (and that is exactly what is implied in this thread by some) is wrong and condescending. That is not to say that some might not enjoy that kind of art or even seek out it because that's what they like, but telling someone they didn't like a movie because they "didn't understand" seems a little off-putting. Yes?

Heading out to see this, should I bring earplugs?

I'm not telling anyone anything. If the concept was stupid, then sure, we would be justified in calling Dunkirk a bad movie. And the concept might be stupid if applied to a movie with a different subject. But imo it was a good concept as applied to this subject.

And I maintain that it is overly simplistic to say that character development is a 100% necessary condition for a movie to be good.

Saw it. Fantastic

It does engage the audience tho.

Isn't that a matter of personal preference?

Also, here's the rest of what I said that you left out.

Saying I did not like DK because their was no character development is clear signal that viewer could not parse the film.

No film engages every member of the audience, but this film offers an experience that breaks from standard formula of hollywood conveyer belt and thus for some the experience is a bit whooooosh as the way they see and interpret film is so conditioned by said conveyor belt.

However it seems enough people like the film to judge it a success overall in viewer engagement and experience.

Obviously that does not mean every single person who saw the film liked it.

Whenever a cultural artifact like this breaks into the mainstream but is not formulated along the standard mainstream blueprints, their is always a buthurt section of viewers/readers/listners etc who are offended by the suggestion they did not like the films due to limited powers of interpretation.

This is a little bit like the argument a 9th grader makes when his English teacher gives him a C on his short story project.

As you go down the artistic spectrum from the very serious (literary novel) to the trivial (graphic design on your iPhone case), the more it becomes a matter of preference and the less it becomes a matter of objective judgment. This is high enough on the spectrum to where we can make judgments based on criteria other than whether you personally enjoyed the movie.

I'll put it this way: I am comfortable saying that anyone who thinks that The Emoji movie is better than Dunkirk is objectively wrong.

And we're back to condescending.

Also, O - *there

But no one is saying that. For me, I didn't like Dunkirk partly because I didn't care what happened to any of the characters. I didn't care about any of the characters because I didn't know anything about them. Seems like a fair criticism...

I thought the movie was pretty good, but felt it was definitely lacking. I didn't really feel the overall tension like others have said, just sort of specific moments, like when the ships were bombed or being shot at in the trawler. I guess I felt like more should have happened, more enemy planes over the beach, more people being loaded onto boats, etc. and I'm not sure why we needed to see the same events over and over again from different perspectives.

You guys just have limited powers of interpretation.

It's a reality that people with poor taste will often complain of others being condescending.

Why do you think it is you have to care about the characters to like a film?

Not caring about the characters is a legit criticism in a lot of films, tv etc, because they are character based drama's etc. It's a device of that presentation. If you dont care about the characters, then most likely the presentation will suck.

However Dunkirk is in no way a character based drama.

Its pretty simple.

Dunkirk has almost no dialogue, no arcs and no character development.

Do you think they wanted to achieve the above but just did a really **** job of it?

Of course not, the director wanted to achieve "engagement" via other means.

Whilst not universally popular, it seems to me that enough people enjoyed this film to call it a success.

If you ask for tomato salad and it has no tomatoes, you can say wtf, if you ask for a green salad and it has no tomatoes, you cant say wtf where are the tomatoes? However you can say I dont like salad without tomatoes in it.

So much output is based on character development and arcs that people walk into a cinema naturally expecting to get some, as 99.9% of the other times they walked in, they did.

My main criticism of the film is that artistic decisions failed quite hard in the air element of the film.

Its pretty obvious that they wanted to avoid cliched "I cant pull up arghghghghg" cockpit banter dogfight tropes, but in avoiding this the end result seems pretty unreal, a kind of opposite unreality to the one normally found in Hollywood films e.g. where hero's somehow are able to not get hit by multiple rounds of automatic rifle fire etc.

So instead of pilots pulling loop the loops or last second battle winning aerial wizardry whilst the camera picks up the beads of sweat on the pilots face, we get planes flying in straight lines pulling very simple turns. I am pretty sure its possible to depict something as visceral as aerial combat and escape hollywood tropes but still avoid ending up being bland.

It's weird that people get caught up in characters and character development when 90 min- 2 hrs is a pretty horrible character development trip when people are used to things like GOT. Where it's bascally like 80 hours of a movie. At this point I don't even give a crap about character development if it's gonna be like a premature baby next to what you get with tv shows.


I guess you it's standard to have all this bitching and moaining over an awesome movie here tho. You 2+2ers sure can be some negative nellies. This movie was off the hook.