Disappointment

Rating: 5/10 (1 March 2018)

I am a complete politics and history buff and eat up documentaries and historical films very willingly, especially those having to do with WWII. Unfortunately this one was quite disappointing. We follow the footsteps of three characters/groups of characters. A young British soldier stuck at Dunkirk, pilots trying to defend the skies above the English channel to allow vessels safe passage, and a father along with his son and son's friend trying to save the soldiers at Dunkirk with the use of their boat. What could have been a phenomenal movie falls short. On the one hand, it is a little boring, with not as much action as one might expect. In my opinion this is caused by the division of the story between three characters as you don't really develop a connection to any of them. Furthermore, there is very little dialogue in the movie, what typically doesn't increase the excitement level. We are humans and human interaction is typically what interests us most. Granted this is WWII and not a time for deep dialogues, but the lack of thereof decreases audience engagement. Finally, and this is the most confusing/annoying part, the scenes are presented as simultaneous events on the one hand, as they are intertwined and the pilot ends up on the father's boat, but the scenes do not take place at the same time. At one point the scenes jump around between broad daylight and the night, which is rather annoying since we don't really know what has taken place first. A final disappointment was the lack of proper presentation of the amount of soldiers stranded at Dunkirk, over 300,000. On the beach at one time we might see 1000 or 2000. So where have the rest gone? Obviously you're not gonna place actors in giant scenes, but make areal shots and add thousands of people stranded on the beach. That actually shows the reality of the situation. If we didn't know what really happened, we might think that the Brits are saving some 2000 of their men. And then there is the question of the civilian fleet, which was (maybe still is) the largest civilian fleet of vessels ever assembled. Unfortunately we do not see the amount of ships (which in reality was over 800). I feel like the movie is just slightly oversimplified. The story isn't could be more concise and a clear time frame like the time of the day or how many days had passed would have been helpful. Also, the evacuation of Dunkirk took a couple of days, with more soldiers being rescued every day. This could have been exemplified by the following of a second soldier's attempt at being rescued.