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Comstar posted:I have to mark the movie down a lot, did they ever mention each others names? There was guy with black hair, 2nd guy with black hair, 3rd guy with black hair, pilot 1, pilot 2, Colonel (who got more character development than anyone else) and British Naval officer. I didn't work out till the end that the guy on the torpedoed ship was different from the 2 (near identical) guys on the Dutch boat (one of whom said 4 words total. In French! A simple difference in their battledress would have helped. I read somewhere Nolan intentionally went against clarity in favor of realism a lot of the time. They begrudgingly put some yellow paint on the german fighters that wouldn't have been there in real life, to make them look distinct from the spitfires. (I still couldn't really tell them apart) Along the same lines, they don't just not say each other's names, there's very little expository dialogue at all; the scene's mostly set in text at the very beginning.
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Jul 28, 2017 19:41
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The lack of characterization doesn't bother me since they only exist to have a face to recognize for each situation. But I do agree that the execution of the three timelines and making it coherent as to how they line up was poorly executed. I'm not gonna lie, it didn't even dawn on me that the timelines were not simultaneous until nightfall in The Mole and even then it felt like that story was two days, not a week.
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Jul 28, 2017 20:55
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Considering the small ships were evacuating people nonstop, the "week" at the Mole may as well have been two days. The only moment where you could feasibly put the timeskip in would be when the scottish soldiers headed off for the dutch boat.
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Jul 29, 2017 02:13
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Just saw it. I thought it was pretty good. There's a good sense of urgency to everything, and I thought it was interesting the way the three stories ended up meeting each other. From what I've been hearing, people who hated it seemed to be confused by the timeline, which I honestly thought was very straight forward, and they wanted a main hero character who delivered monologues, which is kind of missing the entire point.
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Jul 29, 2017 03:33
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I just want the Moonstone timeline for 2 hours, but without Scarecrow. Ironically the 1 hour timeline was the most dull.
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Jul 29, 2017 03:35
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Except the one hour timeline also had the best cinematography. That is some of the best aerial combat ever filmed since Battle of Britain.
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Jul 29, 2017 03:47
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sweetmercifulcrap posted:But I do agree that the execution of the three timelines and making it coherent as to how they line up was poorly executed. I'm not gonna lie, it didn't even dawn on me that the timelines were not simultaneous until nightfall in The Mole and even then it felt like that story was two days, not a week. They literally spell it out that the timelines are not simultaneous.
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Jul 29, 2017 04:42
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Fantastic, the sound and aerial dogfight filming was really great. I enjoyed how little exposition and dialogue there was, it was just insanity the whole time.
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Jul 29, 2017 05:04
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an adult beverage posted:They literally spell it out that the timelines are not simultaneous. I know... I honestly have no idea why it didn't dawn on me what the captions at the beginning meant.
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Jul 29, 2017 06:06
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I didn't see much of the publicity for this so this is pretty much my own fault, but I was definitely expecting a different sort of movie, i.e. one about the entire battle as a whole with probably a bunch of speeches and a precise account of what exactly went on everywhere. (And was about to skip it for pretty much that reason until I heard some reviews that sounded like it was actually good.) So when I watched it I got the same feeling as a bunch of other people that it looked like the whole event consisted of two ships and three planes and about a thousand or so men, but yeah like I think others have also said thinking about it after I guess that was kind of the point? It wasn't about the battle but about the experience of being a person somewhere within it. You're in the middle of the channel, how many ships are there in any direction? No idea. You're in the sky, how many planes are there in the miles around you? No idea. You're some guy on a beach, how long down the beach do these endless lines of soldiers actually go on for? How many are elsewhere? Where are those people shooting at you? How many planes are there nearby waiting to bomb you? How far from shore even is this boat you're hiding in the lower deck of? Not a clue. You manage to hide under a pier for narrative convenience and overhear someone saying there are however many hundreds of thousands of men, but what does that mean to you? Can you even imagine that number? Wherever you are, there's just the place you're in and whatever you can see or hear when you're there, you're not going to get any swooping shots of the surroundings to figure out what the hell's going on or whether there's twenty planes over the horizon about to murder you. I can't tell whether it was a Great Movie or whatever but it seemed to do what it tried to do at least. I do agree about the week not feeling at all like a week, even despite knowing going in that it was. And when the boats get to Dunkirk the "what's that?" "HOPE" bit seemed like a line from the type of movie I had been expecting that had snuck in without realising what movie it was actually in. Like I guess you could call that a deliberate subversion or something in that it was so out of place but it didn't land that way for me at least. Also in the screening I went to, just before the actual movie there was an actual tie-in advert for, of all things, a battleship simulator game, which uh seemed a little out of place. Like, there are many mindsets that film put me in but I don't think one of them was excitement and interest in the fact we live in a world where there exist boats that can shoot other boats and drown people and/or an eagerness to simulate said drownings myself. But then I'm a pinko peacenik so maybe the more bloodthirsty viewers would be more in the mood.
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Jul 29, 2017 12:39
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Angepain posted:I do agree about the week not feeling at all like a week, even despite knowing going in that it was. And when the boats get to Dunkirk the "what's that?" "HOPE" bit seemed like a line from the type of movie I had been expecting that had snuck in without realising what movie it was actually in. Like I guess you could call that a deliberate subversion or something in that it was so out of place but it didn't land that way for me at least. Did he say 'hope' or 'home'? I thought he said 'home', it would fit in with him saying earlier on the movie "it so close you can almost see it", "see what?", "home".
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Jul 29, 2017 14:04
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Yeah, he said "home"
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Jul 29, 2017 17:08
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I like how Churchill's famous speech was relegated to being read from the paper, not making it sound grand or anything. Kept it all grounded. Also lol at the typical Nolanesque non-chronological order.
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Jul 29, 2017 19:08
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Yeah I quite liked that. Even if my ears are still ringing a bit. War's so bloody loud. It felt very much like a documentary recreation at times. I definitely didn't follow the narratives (such as they are) as much as I could've, mostly because the 'week, day, hour' conceit didn't click until embarrassingly close to the end. What was the intention of the last shot? I read it as scepticism over British patriotism, that Churchill was twisting a humiliating defeat into a flag waving 'God save the King' moment. Also not sure if it was just my screening but quite a lot of the dialogue was hard to make out. And given how little dialogue there was that was an issue. e: Mark Rylance was not good. stev fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Jul 29, 2017 |
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Jul 29, 2017 19:15
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Steve2911 posted:
You best watch your back son
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Jul 29, 2017 19:51
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Steve2911 posted:What was the intention of the last shot? I read it as scepticism over British patriotism, that Churchill was twisting a humiliating defeat into a flag waving 'God save the King' moment. I think this is what makes Dunkirk a pretty fascinating subject for a film, especially if you wanted to make an anti-war film. The modern, American public perception of Churchill is of this great wartime leader, but I don't really think that squares with the historical record. He decisively lost an election before the war was even over. Pre-war Churchill was known as an ardent British imperialist and was a staunch anti-Communist. The cost of British "victory" in the war though was the communist takeover of Eastern Europe and the collapse of the British Empire. I think there is the same kind of dichotomy with the evacuation at Dunkirk. It's a successful military operation, set against the backdrop of a crushing military defeat. It's a morale boosting speech, meant to inspire the people to keep fighting, but it's filled with a bunch of empty promises.
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Jul 29, 2017 21:02
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The Churchill speech was intentionally juxtaposed as military patriotic crap against the nightmare the soldiers just lived through. Apart from Rylance, all the civilians in the movie have this cheery attitude about the soldiers as heroes just for surviving, and it directly contrasts their idealism with the pants making GBS threads reality of the situation. Tommy never did get to take a dump the whole film.
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Jul 29, 2017 23:24
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Arcsquad12 posted:Tommy never did get to take a dump the whole film. I mean I'm against wild fan theories that go outside the text and all but I have to admit in my own personal headcanon the guy probably did do a poo at some point during the week
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Jul 30, 2017 00:25
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Just do it directly into the sea.
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Jul 30, 2017 00:26
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Angepain posted:I mean I'm against wild fan theories that go outside the text and all but I have to admit in my own personal headcanon the guy probably did do a poo at some point during the week He probably did it when his ship got torpedoed while he was trying to eat some toast.
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Jul 30, 2017 03:07
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Saw it today, good stuff. My favorite segment was the Moonstone civilian rescue boat. I didn't know about the time shift until late in the movie when it became clear. At the start when they showed the planes (one hour) and the boat (one day) I thought that referenced how long it took that mode of transport to cross the Channel. I wish we would have gotten more scenes with the French soldiers. WWII British and Germans are common in film, and it would have been neat to see then doing more. I wouldn't have minded the entire land perspective to be a French soldier, with maybe some scenes from the Battle of France. Dang now that I think about it, having the first hour of this movie be the Battle of France would have been super. Maginot Line, Ardennes Forest, French planes and tanks in action, Paris being captured (hmm guess that was post Dunkirk). It would also have helped put the film into context for those who don't know a lot of history. Highlights: -Tensest part was the rescue ship being torpedoed. I didn't see that coming, and it was freaky to see the ship go from jam and tea to under the sea. -The aerial flights were great and well shot. -It didn't drag and had good pacing. Quibbles: -Weakest part was the British soldier wandering around. It was confusing when he and the Highlanders were on the boat, they were hard to tell apart and I wasn't sure what their plan was. -The beach did seem underpopulated. Why not CGI in vast hordes of soldiers waiting for a few long shots? Overall I liked it, but I think Their Finest was a more enjoyable Dunkirk film.
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Jul 30, 2017 04:27
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Thanks OP my favorite tank is the Coralife Biocube 29.
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Jul 30, 2017 04:29
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Krispy Kareem posted:Planes mostly. I know Hitler told the army to hold back, but I we saw a handful of enemy planes and most of those were in the 1 hour timeline. If you read up on the Luftwaffe during the time period of Dunkirk you'll see it's based around reality.
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Jul 30, 2017 06:27
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It's the small things that bug the hell out of me. The destroyers have some of their modern features removed, but still have huge towed sonar arrays at the stern. There are AA guns on the beach and on the warships, but there's never a single puff of flak at a Luftwaffe fighter or bomber. Why was the minesweeper that got bombed at anchor instead of maneuvering? Why was the evacuation ship not blacked out at night? Of course it's going to get torpedoed! All in all I enjoyed the movie, I thought it was well paced and very suspenseful, but there were some things that stuck out to me.
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Jul 30, 2017 07:17
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In keeping with Nolan tradition, there was a character with a destructive obsession fueled by the memory of dead people, although in this case it wasn't the main character. But then again, there wasn't a main character in this film Cillian Murphy's character wanting to get the gently caress away from Dunkirk Also in keeping with Nolan tradition, he's exploring how you can never really know anything about what the gently caress is going on in the world around you. The newspapers making up bullshit propaganda about the war, Tom Hardy misinterpreting his wingman friend's wave for a signal that he was okay, Cillian Murphy being told that George was okay by the blond son, Harry Styles thinking the old man was just avoiding eye contact, etc Of all his movies though, this theme of "you don't know poo poo" is the most muted in this film. edit: It seems like in all his previous films, not knowing the truth is integral to the plot. A person is lying to themselves, or they lie to/misunderstand another character, or they're lying to/misunderstood by the public. Misinformation is typically at the center of a Nolan movie or moves the plot in a critical way. For Dunkirk it doesn't seem to be the case, unless I'm missing something? Steve Yun fucked around with this message at 10:17 on Jul 30, 2017 |
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Jul 30, 2017 08:36
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Simplex posted:I think this is what makes Dunkirk a pretty fascinating subject for a film, especially if you wanted to make an anti-war film. The modern, American public perception of Churchill is of this great wartime leader, but I don't really think that squares with the historical record. He decisively lost an election before the war was even over. Pre-war Churchill was known as an ardent British imperialist and was a staunch anti-Communist. The cost of British "victory" in the war though was the communist takeover of Eastern Europe and the collapse of the British Empire. I think there is the same kind of dichotomy with the evacuation at Dunkirk. It's a successful military operation, set against the backdrop of a crushing military defeat. It's a morale boosting speech, meant to inspire the people to keep fighting, but it's filled with a bunch of empty promises. That's not just the "American" perception, the mainstream British perception is that he was one of the greatest leaders of the country. The widely-held view is that he was a brilliant wartime leader but not so in peacetime, which excuses his defeat to Attlee. (This also allowed Churchill, at the time, to deflect the blame for the loss of India & the breakup of the Empire onto Attlee). Churchill's handling of Dunkirk was a brilliant propaganda coup. The film shows that; the soldiers are baffled by being received by a cheering civilian population, who view their return as a victory rather than an ignominious defeat. There is indeed a dichotomy, but I'm not sure it's so straightforwardly anti-war.
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Jul 30, 2017 14:10
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Steve2911 posted:
I don't think it was twisting anything, since it directly quotes Churchill as describing the events as a colossal disaster, and his quote that 'Wars are not won through evacuations.'
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Jul 30, 2017 15:15
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This movie struck a more personal tone with me. My maternal grandfather was in the navy during the war and was topeadoed multiple times. He survived because he couldn't swim, and so instead of jumping ship he clung on to the very last and I guess the time he bought himself and sheer luck afforded him rescue. I never once really gave much thought beyond thinking 'woah, cool' when I heard the stories of his near escapes. Mum kind of told us offhand, and we being dumb kids didn't ask for more details. He died whenI was very young. As I was watching this film I finally got an idea of how loving horrifying and desperate it must have been for him, and that he went through it more than once was just really hard to imagine. My paternal grandfather was an officer in the Navy, and when he died we got all these photographs he had taken of those big ship guns going off. Seeing those big black officer coats with the gold trim really reminded me of him, and made me feel a bit sad.
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Jul 30, 2017 16:54
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Angepain posted:I didn't see much of the publicity for this so this is pretty much my own fault, but I was definitely expecting a different sort of movie, i.e. one about the entire battle as a whole with probably a bunch of speeches and a precise account of what exactly went on everywhere. (And was about to skip it for pretty much that reason until I heard some reviews that sounded like it was actually good.) So when I watched it I got the same feeling as a bunch of other people that it looked like the whole event consisted of two ships and three planes and about a thousand or so men, but yeah like I think others have also said thinking about it after I guess that was kind of the point? It wasn't about the battle but about the experience of being a person somewhere within it. You're in the middle of the channel, how many ships are there in any direction? No idea. You're in the sky, how many planes are there in the miles around you? No idea. You're some guy on a beach, how long down the beach do these endless lines of soldiers actually go on for? How many are elsewhere? Where are those people shooting at you? How many planes are there nearby waiting to bomb you? How far from shore even is this boat you're hiding in the lower deck of? Not a clue. You manage to hide under a pier for narrative convenience and overhear someone saying there are however many hundreds of thousands of men, but what does that mean to you? Can you even imagine that number? Wherever you are, there's just the place you're in and whatever you can see or hear when you're there, you're not going to get any swooping shots of the surroundings to figure out what the hell's going on or whether there's twenty planes over the horizon about to murder you. I can't tell whether it was a Great Movie or whatever but it seemed to do what it tried to do at least. There's a documentary on Dunkirk from the 60s or 70s, which is pretty educational on just how much of a clusterfuck it actually was, and how the allies picked up that turd and polished it to a blinding sheen over the last 70 years. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00snp3v
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Jul 30, 2017 20:12
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oxford_town posted:That's not just the "American" perception, the mainstream British perception is that he was one of the greatest leaders of the country. The widely-held view is that he was a brilliant wartime leader but not so in peacetime, which excuses his defeat to Attlee. (This also allowed Churchill, at the time, to deflect the blame for the loss of India & the breakup of the Empire onto Attlee). I think the interesting thing about that view is that there was a widely ignored Gallup poll in 1943 that showed the liberals with a 10 point advantage. That was a time period before we had weekly tracking polls or anything, but that is an interesting snapshot, and partly why I think the post-war mythology doesn't really reflect what people thought at the time. As far as the anti-war message, I think the movie presents war as this thing that you just try to survive. And then narrowly defines bravery not as how many people you kill, but how many other people you help survive by your actions. So to the people it is a great victory. You survived and that's enough. The lofty idealism of the speech doesn't jibe at all with the basic motivations of the people.
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Jul 31, 2017 02:54
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How long does it take for a motororized ship to cross the English channel? How long to row?
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Jul 31, 2017 03:05
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It's a fifty mile trip. If anything the most inaccurate thing in the movie is how little fuel Tom hardy had. He could have flown over Dunkirk and back easily on a full tank without going into his reserve. I like to think when he got hit he did actually lose most of his fuel.
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Jul 31, 2017 03:32
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Arcsquad12 posted:It's a fifty mile trip. If anything the most inaccurate thing in the movie is how little fuel Tom hardy had. He could have flown over Dunkirk and back easily on a full tank without going into his reserve. I like to think when he got hit he did actually lose most of his fuel. His plane was a Mark Ia . It had an 85-gallon fuel tank, which would be good for several hundred miles of cruising, but actually being in air combat would eat into that fast, and he spent a good amount of time in combat.
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Jul 31, 2017 03:57
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Was it historical that HE-111 were used to bomb ships? I always assumed they mostly used JU-87 and they would go out in larger groups, not 1 bomber escorted by 2 fighters.
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Jul 31, 2017 16:41
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Popete posted:Was it historical that HE-111 were used to bomb ships? Yep. It was pretty much the Luftwaffe's main torpedo bomber. quote:I always assumed they mostly used JU-87 and they would go out in larger groups, not 1 bomber escorted by 2 fighters. That's my major problem with this film: the laser-focus on the few individual cases involved understates the scale of the whole action. Yes, they'd go out in larger groups. Thousands of sorties per day were being flown. The RAF and Luftwaffe both lost about 150 aircraft during the evacuation period.
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Jul 31, 2017 16:59
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Good film. Someone else mentioned this but it felt closer in style to a horror film than a war film due to the unseen threat, attempts to escape and ongoing peril. Also felt a strong urge to replay Silent Hunter 3....
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Jul 31, 2017 23:24
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Phanatic posted:His plane was a Mark Ia . It had an 85-gallon fuel tank, which would be good for several hundred miles of cruising, but actually being in air combat would eat into that fast, and he spent a good amount of time in combat. I think there's a line at the beginning about how Tom Hardy's squadron is dumping fuel to the minimum required for a return trip to aid their manoeuvrability when dogfighting.
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Jul 31, 2017 23:47
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oxford_town posted:I think there's a line at the beginning about how Tom Hardy's squadron is dumping fuel to the minimum required for a return trip to aid their manoeuvrability when dogfighting. I do remember them flying low to target to save on fuel. Was this to take advantage of ground effect?
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Aug 1, 2017 07:01
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mrlego posted:I do remember them flying low to target to save on fuel. Was this to take advantage of ground effect? More to do with how much fuel it takes to climb. You really have to gun the engine to get a good altitude going, and they're providing cover for the ground forces, since the enemy are strafing them. They don't need to fly so high, though not flying high enough is what gets Fortis Leader shot down.
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Aug 1, 2017 07:10
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oxford_town posted:I think there's a line at the beginning about how Tom Hardy's squadron is dumping fuel to the minimum required for a return trip to aid their manoeuvrability when dogfighting. But they also confirm that they have 68 and 70 gallons in the main tank when they're presumably getting close to the action so they can't have been that low.
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Aug 1, 2017 07:33
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