As I Hoped It Would Be

Rating: 8/10 (31 January 2018)

I grew up hearing stories of the Dunkirk evacuation, my Great Uncle Fred having piloted his boat across from Ramsgate in Kent twice to help bring back stranded and wounded soldiers. He witnessed many harrowing moments, but never thought of turning back.
One thing threaded its way in and out of his recollections: how ordered everything seemed to be. He did not witness the chaos and deadly scramble that so many reviewers here wish they had seen in this movie.
I wasn't there of course, but I was not surprised by the look and overall tone of this film. This has led me to wonder why so many people were bored by it. Could it be the age of the moviegoer? is it the lack of CG special effects giving us huge explosions with digital blood and gore? Is there simply not enough death and destruction for minds anaesthetised by almost constant bombardment of the senses?
Much of the telling of this story in the movie does fit with what I was told by those who were there; if I had a carp it would be that there were not nearly enough small ships to indicate the scale of what happened.
There is tension here; it is an escape story. Will the ships come, and when they do will the Stukas allow them to leave? The effects here are mostly visual; created in the camera, not on a computer and the film benefits greatly because of this. You see what the pilots and shipboard crews see. You hear the Rolls Royce Merlin engines in the Spitfires and you can feel the visceral response, albeit a fraction of what they felt.
To paraphrase Mark Rylance's character: "Old men start wars and send boys off to fight them." So many young men were left dead in the waters off Dunkirk, so many young men had to return to Normandy's beaches in 1944 to push the enemy back.
If Hitler had pressed on he may have had the German satellite nation he wanted in Britain, but his plans were foiled when the RAF, "the few," held the Luftwaffe at bay.
This film is a tribute to bravery and perseverance. I'm sorry it didn't have the guile, artistry and jump-up-and-down thrills of some robotic super-hero monster movie. Perhaps the remake will be Guy Ritchie's swan song and he can do for Dunkirk what he did for poor old Sherlock Holmes.
I enjoyed this film immensely and it's exactly what I would hope for in a Christopher Nolan work. I'm going to watch it again.