Dunkirk

[Chuck to Chuck]

So I finally saw this in IMAX, and honestly, I have to admit to some confusion as to what the fuss is all about.  I thought it was poor at best, and parts of it were absolutely bloody awful.  The whole thing stands or falls on whether you give a shit about the characters and with the exception of the two young lads on the civilian boat, and maybe Tom Hardy's Spitfire pilot, I simply didn't care about any of them.  You're not given any back story and there's essentially no dialogue which means that the characters never develop at all, and so what you're left with is just moving, speaking mannequins.  The parts that are obviously supposed to be deep and meaningful [SPOILERS] - Cilian Murphy's shell shock; the head injury to and death of the kid on the boat; Ken Branagh's decision to stay behind - end up as little more than sketches or anecdotes because the outcome just doesn't matter to you.

The cinematography is weird - the weather and state of the sea jump around so much (even in scenes nominally set in the same time and place) that you have to wonder if they cared at all about that kind of continuity, or if it just got too difficult and they gave up.  The timeline isn't nearly as fucking clever as it thinks it is and when you break it down it's an extremely simple story which is being given a veneer of complexity by all the jumping around.  The scale is all wrong - for an evacuation of three hundred thousand men, it's just not convincing at all.  All the supposedly "packed" ships are visibly just one person deep on deck, and if there are five hundred people waiting on the beach and another five hundred on the jetty, that's all there is.  The urban stuff was absolutely full of anachronisms and the whole thing failed to immerse me in any way.

As for the soundtrack?  Christ on a bike.  I love Elgar's Enigma variations as much as the next man - hearing "Nimrod" played by a miltary band is guaranteed to turn me into a snotty, snivelling mess - but Zimmer has got it badly, badly wrong here.  His score doesn't so much support the film as SHOUT OVER IT.  Horrible.

Christopher Nolan?  Christopher Noshitsgiven, more like.

Whoa... I couldn't figure out what I thought of this film, but you've nailed it. I would've preferred an entire movie about the Spitfire pilots, honestly.

If you came looking for a plot then you came to the wrong movie.  This is a depiction of an event in history.   The English, and some French, got their asses kicked in Europe and were potentially in for worse unless they could escape.  You can't tell hundreds of thousands of stories in 2 1/2 hours, so the filmmakers had to design episodes to give us civilians a taste of what they thought it was like.  It is an action movie.  I thought that it gave a sense of the desperation and urgency.  War movies in my youth were unreal and mostly propaganda for the home folk.  There was the hero, probably named Steve, a guy from Brooklyn played either by William Bendix or that guy with the moustache,  a country boy, he usually got killed, and the gruff sergeant with the heart of gold.  Saving Private Ryan was a great movie in my opinion, and it too had more than its share of clichés.  This is a very good action movie.  Don't go expecting Henry the sixth, Part One.

It's another visually good looking movie. Practical effects over CGI every. Damn. Time.

But it took me an hour to figure out what was going on with the time jumps. The One week, One day, On Hour thing didn't click until 2/3rds of the way through the film.  Too clever for its own good. The lack of dialogue means you can't track the characters. I didn't realize until after it was over that the Frenchman on the boat at the end was the same guy who was burying a soldier on the beach.

But there was tension in the scenes. You never knew if/when a torpedo or a dive bomber would appear.

It's fine. But, like Tonks said, "I have to admit to some confusion as to what the fuss is all about."

[Canadouche]

So I finally saw this in IMAX, and honestly, I have to admit to some confusion as to what the fuss is all about.  I thought it was poor at best, and parts of it were absolutely bloody awful.  The whole thing stands or falls on whether you give a shit about the characters and with the exception of the two young lads on the civilian boat, and maybe Tom Hardy's Spitfire pilot, I simply didn't care about any of them.  You're not given any back story and there's essentially no dialogue which means that the characters never develop at all, and so what you're left with is just moving, speaking mannequins.  The parts that are obviously supposed to be deep and meaningful [SPOILERS] - Cilian Murphy's shell shock; the head injury to and death of the kid on the boat; Ken Branagh's decision to stay behind - end up as little more than sketches or anecdotes because the outcome just doesn't matter to you.

The cinematography is weird - the weather and state of the sea jump around so much (even in scenes nominally set in the same time and place) that you have to wonder if they cared at all about that kind of continuity, or if it just got too difficult and they gave up.  The timeline isn't nearly as fucking clever as it thinks it is and when you break it down it's an extremely simple story which is being given a veneer of complexity by all the jumping around.  The scale is all wrong - for an evacuation of three hundred thousand men, it's just not convincing at all.  All the supposedly "packed" ships are visibly just one person deep on deck, and if there are five hundred people waiting on the beach and another five hundred on the jetty, that's all there is.  The urban stuff was absolutely full of anachronisms and the whole thing failed to immerse me in any way.

As for the soundtrack?  Christ on a bike.  I love Elgar's Enigma variations as much as the next man - hearing "Nimrod" played by a miltary band is guaranteed to turn me into a snotty, snivelling mess - but Zimmer has got it badly, badly wrong here.  His score doesn't so much support the film as SHOUT OVER IT.  Horrible.

Christopher Nolan?  Christopher Noshitsgiven, more like.

Hans Zimmer is so hit or miss with me. Look everyone knows I fuck a box set of Nolan's Batman movies before I go to bed every night but I'd still take Danny Elfman's Batman score over Zimmer every time. I like his main theme for Man of Steel but the rest was, as you said, shouting over the movie, and it got even worse in Batman v Superman. Every time I considered maybe actually giving a shit about one of the convoluted scenes in that movie Zimmer was there to scream BWAAAANG BWONG BWONG BWONG BWAAAAANG so loud you'd check back out.

Also his famous Pirates of the Caribbean thing is basically exactly the same as the one he used for Gladiator.

I thought Zimmer nailed Dark Knight, particularly Joker's music. It's like, if schizophrenia had a sound, that would be it. Every time that music started playing the first time I watched it, it stressed me out because I knew some bad shit was about to happen.