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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?
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Aug 1, 2017 13:47
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Those fuel capacities always seem so low. I have to remind myself it's essentially a really large lawnmower engine that just needs to haul one pilot and an airframe.
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Aug 1, 2017 14:16
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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). coyo7e posted:You've got to keep in mind that Dunkirk was literally, a massive loss for the British and allied forces, but the British claim it was a major victory for themselves because a few folks with pleasure or fishing boats came out and picked up a few troops (nowhere near the majority of those who were rescued, though). The role of that small fleet of private boats has become basically mythologized as a paean to the strength of British nationalism. Ok I guess these answer my question from above: Steve Yun posted: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?
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Aug 1, 2017 20:12
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Personally I think it's nice that things worked out so that the run of the mill British troops didn't get publicly blamed for mistakes made by generals and politicians. In a case lke this "survival is enough" is the right sentiment.
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Aug 1, 2017 20:21
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I like that the film accurately portrayed the resentment that the army had towards the air force at Dunkirk. While the RAF was absolutely there and did a large part in suppressing the bombing runs, they usually did it pretty high up or offshore where they wouldn't be visible to the soldiers trapped on the beach. Hardy's amazing gliding kill and victory jaunt along the beach is about the most fantastical thing in the film.
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Aug 2, 2017 00:23
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Casimir Radon posted:Personally I think it's nice that things worked out so that the run of the mill British troops didn't get publicly blamed for mistakes made by generals and politicians. In a case lke this "survival is enough" is the right sentiment. For sure, losing all of those troops could've very possibly changed the course of the war to a massive extent - Britain would have essentially lost their entire standing military forces if they hadn't have been abel to rescue them, which would probably have meant they could've been invaded or at lest been forced to play turtle for the rest of the time.. The documentary I linked isn't too tough to find online and it's pretty interesting, they interview a few of the folks who piloted boats across the channel to try and pick up troops, and all of those guys were like, "the sea was black with destroyers etc, the beach had so many people standing in rows that they looked like ocean waves breaking on the shore from a distance", and that there were had nowhere near enough boats to pick folks up. The estimates are a bit weird as well, one boat captain said he thought he rescued like 300 people, but the official count says he picked up 900 or 1,000.. That's a really massive disparity for someone who you might think, would know the capacity of their own boat. I'm not necessarily saying that the numbers were made up, but there's a heck of a lot of disparity between the public image and what the people who were there, claim happened. Either way I am about due to watch a new WWII movie so I'm looking forward to this one. coyo7e fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Aug 2, 2017 |
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Aug 2, 2017 01:00
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[quote="“coyo7e”" post="“474946201”"] For sure, losing all of those troops could’ve very possibly changed the course of the war to a massive extent - Britain would have essentially lost their entire standing military forces if they hadn’t have been abel to rescue them, which would probably have meant they could’ve been invaded or at lest been forced to play turtle for the rest of the time.. [/quote] Most stuff I’ve read said losing the army at Dunkirk wouldn’t have made much of a difference. There’s even theories that Hitler let the army get away, knowing a defeat that bad could make England unwilling to negotiate. There’s a thin line between hurting your enemy so hard they give up (Japan) and hurting them so hard they never give up (Russia).
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Aug 2, 2017 01:16
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I really enjoyed this film. It felt pretty suspenseful with Zimmer's ticking score, the scenes going back and forth from the boats, to the spitfires, and soldiers reminded me of Momento, Harry's character was a dickhead though and it pissed me off that he didn't get killed off. On the whole, I'd love to check this out again.
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Aug 2, 2017 20:56
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Krispy Kareem posted:Most stuff I’ve read said losing the army at Dunkirk wouldn’t have made much of a difference. There’s even theories that Hitler let the army get away, knowing a defeat that bad could make England unwilling to negotiate. I think that line is basically where they run out of dudes.
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Aug 2, 2017 21:27
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Krispy Kareem posted:Most stuff I’ve read said losing the army at Dunkirk wouldn’t have made much of a difference. There’s even theories that Hitler let the army get away, knowing a defeat that bad could make England unwilling to negotiate. Uh, Russia and Japan faced adversaries with wildly different war goals. I don't think how hard they were hit has much to do with anything.
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Aug 2, 2017 22:36
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Pander posted:Uh, Russia and Japan faced adversaries with wildly different war goals. I don't think how hard they were hit has much to do with anything. There is a difference between beating someone so bad they just want out and beating them so bad they will never give up. Russia could have lost twice as many men and they still would've marched into Berlin. The US was ready to lose twice as many men invading Japan. But neither country had that kind of resolve fighting smaller countries later. Losing their whole expeditionary force could have broken England or it could have made it impossible for them to negotiate politically. Ends up it didn't matter either way, but I could see Hitler pulling his punch in hopes of negotiating a peace.
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Aug 2, 2017 23:48
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There's nothing worse than amateur war historians
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Aug 3, 2017 01:52
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I'd like to read the argument that losing a 300K army wouldn't have made much of a difference.
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Aug 3, 2017 03:05
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You know the more I hear about this Hitler guy the less I like him.
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Aug 3, 2017 03:13
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Vegetable posted:There's nothing worse than amateur war historians Eh. If you can't hypothesize what Hitler would've done if X was Y, then what's the point. monster on a stick posted:I'd like to read the argument that losing a 300K army wouldn't have made much of a difference. Maybe 20% of their total force (think that includes Commonwealth) and less than 10% of their final fighting numbers. It wouldn't have made a huge difference because Germany didn't invade. The loss of all that officer talent would've hurt, although if anyone was getting off that beach it was probably an officer.
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Aug 3, 2017 03:22
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Krispy Kareem posted:Eh. If you can't hypothesize what Hitler would've done if X was Y, then what's the point. Well you can see what Hitler did in other cases which was usually invade unless they surrendered (or went neutral like Sweden and Switzerland. Imagine not having Britain as a place to stage your forces for D-Day.) quote:Maybe 20% of their total force (think that includes Commonwealth) and less than 10% of their final fighting numbers. It wouldn't have made a huge difference because Germany didn't invade. The loss of all that officer talent would've hurt, although if anyone was getting off that beach it was probably an officer. The problem is that the BEF was also some of the best the British had to offer when they went to reinforce France, and by the end they had experience fighting not just battles but Germans; a lot of British troops were very, very fresh. Losing 20% of your army, and probably your best troops, would have been a serious blow. They also would have lost the lower-level officers (think corporals on up), which would mean the loss of a lot of experienced leadership. Germany may well have invaded if their home guard consisted of a bunch of fresh-faced kids; I mean, the size of their army grew by 50% between the end of 1939 and June 1940, so not only were they new but they were also running into supply shortages. Also I didn't realize Churchill was only PM for 16 days before they started the evacuation of Dunkirk.
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Aug 3, 2017 04:36
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Sebadoh Gigante posted:You know the more I hear about this Hitler guy the less I like him. As Norm MacDonald would say, he was a real jerk.
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Aug 3, 2017 07:51
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monster on a stick posted:I'd like to read the argument that losing a 300K army wouldn't have made much of a difference. While Germany prepared for a cross-channel invasion (who wouldn't?) it was a long shot at best. The necessary prerequisites would have been the Luftwaffe destroying the RAF, then destroying the Royal Navy, and still having enough planes left over to support the invasion and subsequent ground campaign. Meanwhile, the time between the loss of the British Army at Dunkirk and the actual German invasion would have been more than enough to train up and equip a replacement army, at least to defend the beaches. In the long-term it would be a real problem for Britain, but in terms of defending the British isles from invasion, the Germans were never even able to establish air superiority.
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Aug 3, 2017 08:00
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Cacator posted:As Norm MacDonald would say, he was a real jerk. Actually Norm MacDonald said the first thing too
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Aug 3, 2017 16:00
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Would 300k less mouths to feed have impacted england much? Dis they have plenty of food to go around while waiting to re-invade france?
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Aug 3, 2017 17:02
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got any sevens posted:Would 300k less mouths to feed have impacted england much? Dis they have plenty of food to go around while waiting to re-invade france? England engaged in food rationing up until 1954. They did not have plenty of food to go around, and that's why the Battle of the Atlantic was so significant. The population was over 40 million, though. So 300k fewer mouths to feed doesn't make much difference.
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Aug 3, 2017 17:10
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got any sevens posted:Would 300k less mouths to feed have impacted england much? Dis they have plenty of food to go around while waiting to re-invade france? I'm pretty sure England was fighting against a country that asked questions like that.
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Aug 3, 2017 17:57
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Krispy Kareem posted:Eh. If you can't hypothesize what Hitler would've done if X was Y, then what's the point. By the end of the War the British were being unfairly lambasted by American officers as overly cautious or lazy (see Caen). Because by the end of that point the British army had been bled white and while they were still dedicated to fighting, the officers abhorred the idea of wasting lives. Without the BEF survivors forming the backbone of the British army in the preceding years (especially the NCOs), there is no way the British army would have done as well as it did through the war, or been operating at the level it was during the push towards Germany. Armies are institutions, and you cannot just conscript hundreds of years of institutional knowledge.
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Aug 3, 2017 18:05
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Lovely Joe Stalin posted:By the end of the War the British were being unfairly lambasted by American officers as overly cautious or lazy (see Caen). Because by the end of that point the British army had been bled white and while they were still dedicated to fighting, the officers abhorred the idea of wasting lives. Without the BEF survivors forming the backbone of the British army in the preceding years (especially the NCOs), there is no way the British army would have done as well as it did through the war, or been operating at the level it was during the push towards Germany. There's a lot of room between 'not doing as well' and failing. If it looked like I was arguing losing a whole expeditionary force was not a big deal, then that's not what I was getting at. It just wouldn't have been as big a deal as it may have seemed. Britain would still have won the war. You can lose almost your whole force and still come back. I think the RAF was pretty close to that. But sure, if Dunkirk had failed the Brits wouldn't have fought as well later on and would have lost even more men because of inexperience.
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Aug 3, 2017 18:24
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Lovely Joe Stalin posted:By the end of the War the British were being unfairly lambasted by American officers as overly cautious or lazy (see Caen). Because by the end of that point the British army had been bled white and while they were still dedicated to fighting, the officers abhorred the idea of wasting lives. Without the BEF survivors forming the backbone of the British army in the preceding years (especially the NCOs), there is no way the British army would have done as well as it did through the war, or been operating at the level it was during the push towards Germany. *constructs additional pylons* Dunno why you're making it so complicated. *constructs barracks* Maybe you're just not as good at this war thing as me. (seriously, the fate of 300,000 soldiers may or may not have markedly affected the probability of an invasion of Britain, and depending on how the US responded may not have even changed the fate of the war. But the psychological and morale effects of rescuing 300,000 sons, brothers, and fathers versus letting them be captured or killed are incalculable. There is no easy comparison between such outcomes and Russia's response to Barbarossa, or Japan's response to the nukes. There's much more to it than just "well that's more mouths to feed at home, innit?")
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Aug 3, 2017 18:26
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So I got to see this for a 2nd time in 70mm in LA and, uh, wow. If this movie doesn't absolutely sweep every category even tangentially related to sound at every awards show in existence then the fix was in. The two people I went with went to the bathroom about 30 seconds in and got wads of toilet paper and put in their ears because it was "way too loud." The guy sitting next to me put his fingers in his ears at the beginning and left the theater and didn't return about 15 minutes into the movie. What the gently caress guys. This is why you go.
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Aug 4, 2017 14:31
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At the theater I saw it at, they played a bunch of trailers that all had explosions and violence. It ended up being numbing before the movie even started. It's a good argument for IMAX since the films I've seen in the format go right into the movie.
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Aug 4, 2017 14:54
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The XTREME theater I went to's speakers couldn't keep up with the bass and it was just a thudding noise that was uncomfortable. Maybe IMAX would have been better (this was more IMAX Lite).
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Aug 4, 2017 14:56
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Krispy Kareem posted:The XTREME theater I went to's speakers couldn't keep up with the bass and it was just a thudding noise that was uncomfortable. Maybe IMAX would have been better (this was more IMAX Lite). True 70mm IMAX at SF Bay Area Metreon had the same problem. It was like listening to lowrider speaker rattle, even in quite scenes. I got two free tickets and the manager admitted their system was not tuned for this movie.
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Aug 4, 2017 19:26
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Krispy Kareem posted:The XTREME theater I went to's speakers couldn't keep up with the bass and it was just a thudding noise that was uncomfortable. Maybe IMAX would have been better (this was more IMAX Lite). I got the thudding noise at the "Real Imax" at the Minnesota Zoo which shocked me.
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Aug 4, 2017 19:59
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There was absolutely nothing wrong with the mixing or volume at the UK Imax I saw it in. Your cinemas are poo poo.
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Aug 4, 2017 23:59
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Krispy Kareem posted:There is a difference between beating someone so bad they just want out and beating them so bad they will never give up. Russia could have lost twice as many men and they still would've marched into Berlin. The US was ready to lose twice as many men invading Japan. But neither country had that kind of resolve fighting smaller countries later. The Nazis were pretty unequivocal on the point that a Russian surrender would have ended in the loss of 100% of its men; they had already set to work making good on their lebensraum promises in the territory they'd occupied. The Red Army pushed clean back to Berlin for the same reason they partitioned the city for 44 years after the end of the war, they'd reasonably concluded that Germany ever regaining a position to threaten them again was an existential threat to be avoided at any cost. It takes an incredibly comic-book reading of the war to conclude that the Germans had given Russia a bloody nose and got them reeeeal mad and that's why they fought so hard. Stalin was indifferent to losses because there was nothing to be gained by not fighting; nothing the Russian people could possibly lose that would be worse than the cost of defeat. This was not the case with America and Japan, who at the time the bombs dropped were dickering over points like officially denying the divinity of the Emperor. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Aug 5, 2017 |
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Aug 5, 2017 00:12
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the thudding noise is called "the soundtrack".
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Aug 5, 2017 03:23
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SolarFire2 posted:Why was the minesweeper that got bombed at anchor instead of maneuvering? I'm actually pretty surprised that it took until the second-last page of this thread for anyone to bring up the minesweeper's anchor. I loved the film but that was the first thing I saw during that scene. That said, I'm willing to bet good money that she was at anchor to take what would have been pretty difficult shots with a ship floating or under power. Strange that he didn't CGI it out, but then, maybe it wasn't so noticeable as I thought. Speaking of that ship, a friend of mine has been volunteering for the Dutch Sea Cadets for years now, and he linked me to some photos of some training exercise or something they did in their cadet's ship - some old minesweeper or something: http://dunkirk-the-movie.com/en/f34-hr-ms-sittard/
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Aug 5, 2017 12:46
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You remember Henry the 5th? There's that scoundrel character, Pistol, who has a soliloquy: Of a malady of France, And there my rendezvous is quite cut off. Old I do wax, and from my weary limbs Honor is cudgeled. Well, bawd I’ll turn, And something lean to cutpurse of quick hand. To England will I steal, and there I’ll steal. And patches will I get unto these cudgeled scars, And swear I got them in the Gallia wars. And then he deserts and goes back to England. I cannot fathom why Christopher Nolan decided to make a movie about a small group of guys like Pistol. The fact that these guys have apparently abandoned their units and aren't reporting to any CO's mean they are effectively deserters. The amazing thing about Dunkirk was that it must have actually been a pretty orderly evacuation with the rank and file maintaining some level of discipline. I have no idea why Nolan decided to focus the movie on a group of undisciplined assholes who tried to cut in line and/or murder each other to get on a boat out of there. I'm also not sure if the cutesy nonlinear narrative really added anything to the story, other than potential for confusion and a murky sense of distance and time. What it did to was take time away from character dialogue that could have potentially injected a little more humanity and interest into the movie.
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Aug 6, 2017 04:58
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gfarrell80 posted:You remember Henry the 5th? There's that scoundrel character, Pistol, who has a soliloquy: The main character's entire unit went down, he was barely past teenage years, and he had some form of ptsd. He just wanted to live, didn't care about winning the war or good order and discipline and stiff upper lip and all that poo poo. His friend is a French man of uncertain background. The only verified lovely deserters are the guys in the boat, and who knows their story. There's not a very exciting movie here if you stick with one guy just sitting in a queue on the beach for a week straight waiting for his eventual ride out without several life or death escapes. The people we follow are tangential to just showing a kinda crazy week in war. I don't think their flawed decision-making or lack of dialogue was a bad thing. This wasn't trying to be a melodrama like every bit of Saving Private Ryan past the beach. It didn't need drama. And the nonlinear time scales were the only reasonable way to let us focus on a single enthralling dogfight and sortie without the pace being wonky. Integrating the three storylines together was a neat quirk, but probably not necessary I agree.
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Aug 6, 2017 05:07
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I imagine that from the ground it looked like the war was already lost and the only real question was whether you'd get to die at home in the invasion or die in somebody else's country. They don't know that Germany will gently caress up and try to fight a war on two fronts. They don't know if the sleeping giant will wake up and join the war. Even if they did know they'd know that after Dunkirk there are still five years left of the war and things will get worse for Britain before they get better and that the Blitz is just around the corner. FreudianSlippers fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Aug 6, 2017 |
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Aug 6, 2017 05:30
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Pander posted:There's not a very exciting movie here if you stick with one guy just sitting in a queue on the beach for a week straight waiting for his eventual ride out without several life or death escapes. There's a ton of absolutely incredible Eastern Front war movies that are, effectively, entirely about people sitting around in the mud and snow waiting to die. There's a pretty famous WW1 flick entirely about an armless legless blind, deaf and mute man rotting in a hospital bed. It does limit the ways in which your film can resemble Saving Private Ryan, but has not remotely ever been an obstacle to better directors. Unfortunately, most of the drama and tension in those kinds of stories comes from vividly conveying the emotional state of the characters, so making a story like that exciting wasn't a realistic option for Nolan gfarrell80 posted:I'm also not sure if the cutesy nonlinear narrative really added anything to the story, other than potential for confusion and a murky sense of distance and time. What it did to was take time away from character dialogue that could have potentially injected a little more humanity and interest into the movie. Nolan has gotten typecast as the Time Gimmick Guy, he gets a fair bit of latitude in choosing the nominal subjects of his movies but forgoing some kind of time gimmick and BWOOOOOOOONG would be like M. Night Shyamalan trying to release a film without a twist ending. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 05:56 on Aug 6, 2017 |
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Aug 6, 2017 05:43
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I mean, his last three (non-Batman) movies used the same time trick: screen time = vastly different amounts of time for the various layers of the story. Dream depth in Inception, relativity in Interstellar, and historical time lines in Dunkirk. I wouldn't even call it a gimmick in this film, just a clever way of having three timelines intersect at the climax while starting them at different points in the overall timeline.
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Aug 6, 2017 06:02
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Bottom Liner posted:I mean, his last three (non-Batman) movies used the same time trick: screen time = vastly different amounts of time for the various layers of the story. Dream depth in Inception, relativity in Interstellar, and historical time lines in Dunkirk. Except the big climax where all the timelines meet is the bombing of the minesweeper which: A) is basically a repeat of a scene we already saw (the hospital ship getting bombed) B) almost tensionless since none of the characters we'd been following are even on that ship It was so baffling to me when watching it that he went to all that trouble to set up three timelines and the big payoff is all the characters watching a repeat of something we saw earlier happen again to someone else.
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Aug 6, 2017 11:37
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