so, i watched
Dunkirk -
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Human_Feces_(cropped).jpg
this must be one of the worst films i have ever watched. i'm not joking.
let's look at the why and how. the first, most common critique is that the film has no story. in cinematography, the dunkirk evacuation would be considered the backdrop of the story, *not* the story itself. if you want to do something like that, you put some voiceover on your film and you call it a documentary. Seeing a bunch of people pretending to drown does not make this a film, watching people sitting or standing on a boat is not interesting. I KNOW what a boat looks like, if i have to watch something without any explanation, i'd rather watch some weird animal i have never seen, than some mundane object with some nondescript people on it doing nothing.
the soundtrack. oh man. the soundtrack is by far the worst soundtrack i have ever heard, no hyperbole, i genuinely think dunkirk had the worst soundtrack ever added to a film. the constant pounding pulse, randomly accelerating as if to mean that something is about to happen, and then just dying down when nothing happens. was this supposed to make me feel uneasy? sure, listening to a constant, overly-loud, barely rhythmic bass made me think several times "what the fuck is this sound". in NO way this connected me to the action onscreen. it is way too loud, and it's desperately dull and boring.
there is no dialogue. dialogue is where two characters express the nature of their character, they diversity or similarities, the relationship between those two characters, in the dialogue. words like "has the ship arrived? not yet" do not constitute dialogue, unless you tell me why character A wants to know if the ship has arrived and what are the implications of the answer. We already know they are evacuating, we know in a way that they are allegedly in danger, even though the danger is never seen, if not in the very first seconds of the film.
Mind you, i know full well that dialogue does not have to be verbal, so i will take that the nod the yacht captain gives to his older son qualifies, and so does the last speech in the film (thank you Mr Churchill) but what about everything else? The other sections with words are when the french kid is found out, which just sums up to "we are angry with this kid" .. and that's it. Some minor stuff with the shellshocked soldier.
The production is big and expensive and just so poorly used. The one feeble attempt at filmmaking is when the messerschit falls conveniently on the oil patch to ignite it, which is obviously announced earlier "oh look a flammable oil slick that must somehow be lit on fire for dramatic effect". Nolan has somehow managed to make even dogfights boring; even Baa Baa Black Sheep has better air combat than this film.
Dunkirk is the worst film i have seen in many years. It fails completely in the very basic aspects of filmmaking, explaining characters, creating connection with the viewer, exposition, story, emotions, character arcs. In just not a film, and the horrid soundtrack makes sitting through it a pain rather than a pleasure. I was genuinely pissed off at the last scene "we shall fight them on the beeches" because they had to rip off Winston Churchill and otherwise could not come up with a decent original piece of writing - and this film's implication that we are somehow feeling a sense of victory together with the characters onscreen.
my vote:
4/10 - almost as bad as the prequels.
i also want to say something about Tom Hardy; was it really necessary to pay THIS actor to do NO acting in the whole film? Anyone else, i mean *anyone* could have played his part, professional actor or not, AND for some reason in his final scene, he runs out of fuel and lands on the dunkirk beach, MAYBE a mile down the road, but he is immediately captured by the germans? He couldn't run for 3 minutes, to the army who could have taken him home?
It makes sense to have the german army inside the town, where they can fight building to building, but not on a beach where there is nothing to prevent you from being shot by, you know, the three-hundred-thousand soldiers with guns waiting there.
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