Awful

Rating: 2/10 (20 April 2008)

This movie fails because of 1. Slow pacing. There were many unnecessary shots, and some of the more beautiful shots that were meant to give objective correlatives to the emotion the actors and audience are supposed to feel were overlong by seconds (the slow zoom from inside a door frame to James McAvoy outside) to to minutes (the painfully long Dunkirk beach scene). 2. Weak narrative structure. Almost every scene we see given to us en media res, in the middle of things, forcing the audience to patiently wait for explanation of circumstance, and without such explanation these circumstances hold no apparent significance. If these explanations were not so slow in coming, and if every scene didn't feel so excruciatingly overshot and protracted, then perhaps the narrative structure would have given me a sense of movement. Instead I often felt like the story was going nowhere, holding me down in a tepid bath of inconsequential detail. 3. The replacement of story with objects, scenes, vistas. While slow coming, the beginning of the movie does have a story to tell--there is both action and consequence and characters we start to care about. After Robbie is arrested and sent to fight in the war, the story is incredibly insipid: The English are retreating and Robbie misses his lover. In order to pad this--the worst part of the film--we are given utterly unnecessary scenes of Robbie's fellow soldiers delaying the story with inconsequential dialog. These are meant to give the story character, color and realism, but they fail ultimately because we could care less about these other soldiers--they are flat; in fact, everything in the film from arrest to imaginary return to England is flat in terms of the story--it is all visuals. These images instead of being a succession of pictures each worth a thousand words become a tedious one note melodrama: War is ugly and boy does it suck that Robbie and Cee were unjustly separated. Ugh, boring!
With some judicious editing and the inclusion of an engaging subplot in France, this could have been a much better film.