When "computer generated imagery" can teach you a lesson in history

Rating: 1/10 (16 September 2017)

For sure, many and many viewers went to the cinema with great expectations for the movie Dunkirk. Most of them thinking it would be like the "New Saving Private Ryan". Unfortunately it is not so, and not in the sense that it is not an action packed block-buster. First of all, Dunkirk is not a bad movie, but it is not the movie it was expected to be and was so anticipated. The decision taken by the film director Christopher Nolan, not to use computer graphic, or to use it as less as possible, was in this case, in my opinion, the wrong choice. I speak as a history buff, so obviously, I had great expectation in seeing huge scenes and pictures, that only movies can give from past events, like bringing a history book or memories of veterans alive. Dunkirk isn't that, and that is, in my opinion its greatest flaw. It is important, for such a movie, to let you learn something, to get an impression, to perceive a past event, something maybe you have read about, but you never could really imagine. This is were Saving Private Ryan, speaking about WW2, (pardon me this comparison, it is the first that comes to mind, I could cite countless others Stalingrad, U-96 or for example Platoon for Vietnam War), really shines and where Dunkirk completely fails. Transmitting you an impression, a feeling for such true immense and tragic events. In Dunkirk, you have to imagine what is happening around the focus of the camera, you have to know the context, you don't get it served, transmitted. Before you go for this movie, to really appreciate it, you have to document yourself, or most of what Dunkirk was, a true gigantic episode in history, will simply don't emerge or even reach you. In my opinion a war movie, or maybe a movie with a historical background has to literally take you to its time, transport you in its century and let you leave the movie hall with a feeling of astonishment, curiosity and desire to learn more about what you just saw, maybe even kindle a passion in in the specific subject. With Dunkirk this is not the case, it is a good drama, but for sure it is not a history lesson and even less a historical movie. At the most, it will leave you some impressions, that you get from the different points of view from the protagonists, but all them without a real and remaining contextualization. Nothing that will make you think about it on your way back home, nothing that will stick in our memories and maybe would have helped to fill a gap in the common knowledge, of so many of us.