Brexit

Rating: 2/10 (26 August 2017)

Ever since its release, Dunkirk has garnered more than the usual share of column inches granted a movie in the UK press. I can only assume that it has a special resonance for the English audience. Maybe it's all tied into Brexit, and other things that many Americans don't understand.
I for one don't understand how British GIs, who'd been serially defeated by their adversaries, and had been on the run for over a month, could maintain their schoolboy haircuts and find time to shave every day. The English equivalent of Hollywood's Central Casting must have been pressed into service: The BEF appears to have been an army of heartthrobs, so much so that halfway through I figured the movie was produced with a gay audience in mind.
The retreating Brits must have had an extraordinary quartermaster, because the Tommies sport uniforms with nary a tear or a smudge. Although I can't claim any combat experience, my overall impression is that people bleed when they're shot, and that battlefields resemble smelly junkyards littered with body parts. In Christopher Nolan's vision of war, even the dead are well-groomed. One might think that following media coverage of terrorist attacks, audiences would be bemused at the sight of cadavers that looked like the undertakers had just finished getting them ready for the viewing. That PG-13 rating must require an awful lot of sanitizing.
And who, may I ask, kept the Germans at bay so the BEF could evacuate? You'd never guess it from the movie. It was the much-maligned French army; maybe even worse led than that of their ally's. Casualties were heavy among those left behind. After a particularly brutal march to Trier, Germany, survivors spent the next five years as POWs or forced laborers.
The genuine heroism of the little guys who piloted their boats across the channel is sadly rendered mawkish by wooden performances and painful clichés. And the CGI that several reviewers rave about looked to me like cartoons; in fact, the whole feature has an animated feel. Toward the end of the movie, my mind wandered, and a rogue thought conjured up memories of Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap, in particular the bit where narrator "Marty DiBergi" describes the faux heavy metal group as one of England's loudest bands. If there's an Oscar for decibels, then Dunkirk is a shoo-in.