Quote:
Originally Posted by Clovis8
Dunkirk
I loathed this film. It is really badly structured, the soundmix is oppressive, and the message is disgusting. It is beautiful to look at like, like if Dali was to arrange the bodies from Jonestown into an artwork.
First structure, it randomly and for no reason flashes from day to night and location to location making it impossible to understand where in the story you are or which location. There is no plot, which is fine. Most of my favorite films have little to no plot. However, here instead of character or plot you get endless repeats of the same narrow escape scene by a guy you don't care about at all. It's basically 3 scenes, repeated for two hours. It is like a cheap slasher film or action movie where the hero JUST escapes 100 times until the credits roll.
Nolan also thinks war was nothing but non-stop action. He really does a terrible job of showing the scale as well. We are told over and over that there are 400,000 people on the beach but are shown like 2,000. Did his CGI budget run out? Also, the big emotional payoff scene when the boats arrive again we are shown 10 boats which would hold like 500 people.
Nolan is hands down the single worst working director in terms of sound. I didn't think it could get worse than Interstellar but he tops himself here. In 70mm IMAX it is so loud it actually hurts. This isn't to say you can understand a word any of the actors say. All dialogue is barely audible. Everything else is tuned up to 11.
Finally the message is revolting. Here war is totally clean. Nobody is really hurt. No limbs lost or blood even. People just neatly fall to the ground and peacefully pass away. Furthermore, the film spends 9/10th of its time trying to show the futility of war but cant pass up an ending about the glory of war. It's really gross.
Apparently, the main guy is some pop star but he doesn't have to act all, just run away from explosions or swim to the surface so its pretty meaningless.
Did anyone care about the 17 year old kid and if so why?
Grade: D
Each story was prefaced with a title. From there, there was virtually zero confusion and after however many minutes in (I honestly think it was in the first 30 but I don't recall exactly), the stories interconnect. I think this is your most ridiculous quibble of all. I can't imagine running into another person who would say this was hard to follow. I don't know what to say if your train of thought is "we're in a plane, okay... WTF now we're on boat?????" and you don't think differently after the film is over.
The issue with scale seems pedantic to me. Some people have already mentioned some stats about the actual number of boats/evacuations and it's not like for the duration of evacuation 100% of troops were building sandcastles on the beach.
The action, I didn't think it was over the top. The majority of it is the dogfighting. I was also refreshed to not see lots of gore. I don't think this diminished the significance of war. Did you want tons of gore and death and screaming, and also no action?
The sound is definitely to each his own but I loved it, specifically the planes and the scene in the boat beached on the shore. For the score, people either love or hate Zimmer and I love him.
I agree that the one part of the film I liked the least was the ending. It was overdramatized and totally unnecessary with the extra bit of stuff from the plane too.
Most of your complaints seem to be for the sake of complaining. I mean if Harry Styles really irked you, okay.